The book along with its excellent predecessor Modernist Bread and the companion podcasts to both do a great job of both illustrating the history of bread and pizza but also debunking a lot of popular myths about their origin.
A lot of pizza (and bread for that matter) traditions and styles are much more recent than you might think. I'd highly recommend the volumes to anyone curious about the topic.
That's not too surprising, b/c you need massive amounts of cheese to make a pizza. This means a lot of milk and a lot of rennet. It just seems it'd be really extravagant in premodern times.
And I think that goes for a lot of cuisine. While in China I learned that actually a lot of Chinese cuisine is quite recent - and yet it's really central to regional identity and has a interesting timeless quality to it. For instance people will rarely get experimental or make significant modification to the original recipe (the idea of "fusion food" is mostly absent outside of bougie areas)
I've heard similar things about Korean food - a lot is very recent and meat heavy. Go not too far back in time and people rarely ate meat at all.
In Taiwan a lot of the "traditional food" is based around beef - but traditional/elderly Chinese would normally refuse to eat beef entirely - so it must be a product of the past few decades.
I'm skeptical anything deep-fried goes back too far as well since it's a colossal waste of oil
On the subject of food history... Taiwanese food is so recent as to be a study in nothing at all. Chinese did not invent steamed buns (they came from the Ottomans) and are the only civilization known to have lost the recipe for baklava. Ramen is Chinese and super modern and derives from US dumping wheat on postwar Japan as a staple. Pasta was exceptionally rare and reserved for the aristocrats in pre-modern Italy. Which begs the question: what did they eat? Probably meat, fish, bread, fruit and rice. Finally, rice noodles were popularised in Thailand by political machinations as a means to stave off hunger by preserving rice stocks.
On the subject of "massive amounts of cheese being really extravagant in premodern times", the Roman army ate a lot of "hard tack" cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecorino_Romano because it was durable and energy-dense. No doubt it was expensive in the way that the military often is, and did not make up all of the rations.
On the subject of "how much cheese do you need to make a pizza" - in traditional styles, not all that much really. And with even less, just a sprinkling, it would still be recognisably the same dish.
Super interesting! Thank you for sharing. I don't really know much about cheesemaking but I assume the rennet would be the limiting factor. So it'd be eaten rarely.. maybe as often as meat products? That'd be my completely uneducated guess
I have also never made cheese, just looked at the recipe, but my understanding is that with rennet, a little goes a long way. The ingredient that gave me pause was the milk: i.e. start with 10 litres whole milk for a small batch of cheese. That's a bulk quantity of milk! I don't' live on a diary farm. But if you do, I suppose that's everyday.
The book along with its excellent predecessor Modernist Bread and the companion podcasts to both do a great job of both illustrating the history of bread and pizza but also debunking a lot of popular myths about their origin.
A lot of pizza (and bread for that matter) traditions and styles are much more recent than you might think. I'd highly recommend the volumes to anyone curious about the topic.
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