FabulousFusionFood's Pizza Recipes Home Page

Welcome to FabulousFusionFood's Pizza Recipes Page — Pizza[a] is a traditional Italian dish typically consisting of a flat base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomato, cheese, and other ingredients, baked at a high temperature, traditionally in a wood-fired oven. The oldest recorded usage of the word pizza is from a Latin text from the town of Gaeta, then still part of the Byzantine Empire, in 997 AD; the text states that a tenant of certain property is to give the bishop of Gaeta duodecim pizze (lit. 'twelve pizzas') every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday. A frieze uncovered in Pompeii in 2023 showed a pizza-like flatbread served on a silver platter. This recipe has been analysed and reconstructed on this site as Ancient Roman pizza. Modern pizza, of course, could not exist before the Columbian exchange, when tomatoes came to Europe.
Records of pizza-like foods can be found throughout ancient history. In the 6th century BC, the Persian soldiers of the Achaemenid Empire during the rule of Darius the Great baked flatbreads with cheese and dates on top of their battle shields[24][25] and the ancient Greeks supplemented their bread with oils, herbs, and cheese. An early reference to a pizza-like food occurs in the Aeneid, when Celaeno, queen of the Harpies, foretells that the Trojans would not find peace until they are forced by hunger to eat their tables (Book III). In Book VII, Aeneas and his men are served a meal that includes round cakes (such as pita bread) topped with cooked vegetables. When they eat the bread, they realize that these are the "tables" prophesied by Celaeno.
Modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century. Before that time, flatbread was often topped with ingredients such as garlic, salt, lard, and cheese. It is uncertain when tomatoes were first added and there are many conflicting claims, although it certainly could not have been before the 16th century and the Columbian Exchange. Pizza was sold from open-air stands and out of pizza bakeries until about 1830, when pizzerias in Naples started to have stanze with tables where clients could sit and eat their pizzas on the spot. A popular contemporary legend holds that the archetypal pizza, pizza Margherita, was invented in 1889, when the Royal Palace of Capodimonte commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo (pizza maker) Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honour of the visiting Queen Margherita. Of the three different pizzas he created, the Queen strongly preferred a pizza swathed in the colours of the Italian flag—red (tomato), green (basil), and white (mozzarella). Supposedly, this type of pizza was then named after the Queen, with an official letter of recognition from the Queen's "head of service" remaining to this day on display in Esposito's shop, now called the Pizzeria Brandi. Later research cast doubt on this legend, undermining the authenticity of the letter of recognition, pointing that no media of the period reported about the supposed visit and that both the story and name Margherita were first promoted in the 1930s–1940s.
Pizza was taken to the United States by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century and first appeared in areas where they concentrated. The country's first pizzeria, Lombardi's, opened in New York City in 1905.[40] Following World War II, veterans returning from the Italian Campaign, who were introduced to Italy's native cuisine, proved a ready market for pizza in particular. Today, great number of pizza varieties exist, defined by the choice of toppings and sometimes also crust. There are also several styles of pizza, defined by their preparation method. The most notable types are: Pizza Margherita; Pizza marinara; Pizza capricciosa; Pizza quattro formaggi, Pizza quattro stagioni; Pizza pugliese; Seafood pizza and Pizza blanca.
The alphabetical list of all the pizza recipes on this site follows, (limited to 100 recipes per page). There are 56 recipes in total:
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