• Raltoid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The modern version of a pizza is sometimes said to have been invented in the late 1800s, since that is when the first “proper” recipe is from. But there are a few key points that might inform your question and other answers:

    • Flat bread baked with toppings already on it has been a thing for several thousand years across the world.

    • Among which was a type of street food referred to as pizza in Italy before the Tomato arrived in europe

    • Tomato is from the Americas, it wasn’t known and didn’t exist in europe until the mid 1500s.

    • On its own a fresh tomato is not very nurishing compared with other common fruits and vegetables, and since toxic versions exisited, it was mostly used as table decoration in places like Italy for a while.

    • The first mention of tomatoes as an ingredient in an Italian cookbook is from 1692. And it wasn’t widely adopted as a staple food until the 1700s.

    • There are descriptions from the mid 1800s talking about the wide variety of pizza toppings, as it was already an established food by that point.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#History

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pizza