There are foods that are associated with specific seasons—foods and drinks too that we reach for traditionally when the weather turns warmer or colder by turn. What would the winter be without a nice bowl of steaming oatmeal to start the day? And how much nicer is it to look out the window at a snowstorm when you’ve got a nice hot cup of hot chocolate in your hands?
Then there are the old standbys for the summer months as well. What better way to cool off in the middle of a heat wave than with a cool Popsicle? Who hasn’t enjoyed a baseball game while munching on a hot dog? It seems there are foods and drinks for every season and most of them really add to our enjoyment of any particular time of year.
One of the all time favorite summer foods is one that we’ve been enjoying in North America for one hundred years. Ever since Gennaro Lombardi opened the first pizza place in New York in 1905, we’ve been enjoying the tasty treat that’s got a very interesting history. Of course it might be no surprise that pizza’s origins are claimed by the Italians, and as you munch a piece of Toronto pizza in the middle of little Italy, you might think that the food’s history only goes back to turn of the century Europe, but pizza has an even bigger past.
Although modern people munching Hamilton pizza might not have considered it on a hot July day, most historians agree that Italians have more than likely been eating the food since the Stone Age, perhaps as far back as the 6th century BC where soldiers baked a kind of flat bread and covered it afterward with cheese. The word itself has some interesting historical connotations.
‘Pizza’ is obviously Italian, but not many people know that the word means ‘a point’ and the earliest forms of this popular food were baked like a lot of other things beneath the stones of a fire. At first, this early form of the modern food that has been popularized as Mississauga pizza was used as a kind of plate to sop up the excess gravy that was left over from other meals. However, like all great ideas, it wasn’t long before pizza took off in its own right.
It seems that another great culture, The Greeks, helped bring what we now know as the modern day pizza along. Because their version of the flat bread was convenient for the working man and his family at the time, they decided that the flat round bread they were using for meals should have some kind of topping, and in this way the predecessor of the modern pizza pie was born.
It wasn’t until years later that the modern world caught up to this popular summer food and in 1957 frozen pizzas were introduced and soon became the most popular food that you could get from the freezer. |
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