Pizza History * Basic pizza most likely began in prehistoric times, with bread cooked on flat, hot stones.
* Roughly 1,000 years ago herb-and-spice-covered circles of baked dough grew exceptionally popular in Naples, Italy. Known as focaccia, these rounds were served as an appetizer or a snack. (Source: Smithsonian)
* Pizza developed in Italy in pre-refrigerator times. After focaccia, its most direct ancestor was "Casa de nanza," which means "take out before." Housewives would pound out dough into a thin crust and place leftovers on to bake. Pizza was a peasant food designed to be eaten without utensils and, like the French crepe and the Mexican taco, was a way to make use of fresh produce available locally and to get rid of leftovers.
* But pizza as we know it could not have evolved until the late 1600s when Old World Europeans overcame their fear of a New World discovery - tomatoes. Native to Peru and Ecuador, a plant which produced yellow or red fruit (later called tomatoes) was introduced to Europe in the early 1500s. Brought back by Conquistadors to Spain, the tomato was thought to be poisonous and was viewed with suspicion. It wasn't until the late 1600s that Europeans began to eat the tomato. (Source: Smithsonian and PIZZA TODAY)
* The peasants of Naples, Italy, who lived mostly off of bread and little else, were the first to add tomatoes to their focaccia bread rounds.
