A Brief History of Pizza: 2 is a travelogue by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, January 24, 2008. It is part of Appreciation.
The second part of a series tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest prepared foods.
From Italy to Athens
1. Brindisi was founded by Illyrians, then taken by the Romans, who made it the southern end-point of the Via Appia. It was the primary port for moving persons and goods between Rome and Greece during the Roman era.
2. Patras has been the Greek end of the Roman-Greek oversea shipping path since the Roman occupation of Greece.
My journey to the south of Italy had taken me from the capital of ancient Rome to a Greek colony on the southeastern tip of the Italic peninsula. It felt more like a trip back in time than one through space, a feeling that intensified as I sailed from Brindisi1, Italy, to Patras2, Greece, awaking at dawn to stand on deck and watch the Ionian Islands glide past.
We docked at Patras, after which I took a harrowing bus ride along the edge of the Peloponnese to reach Attica, and thus Athens. The air was calm and dry beneath a hot sun, white stone buildings stretched up the central hill neighborhood of Plaka, which is crowned — as it has been for 2,500 years — by the shining Periclean Acropolis.
The Erechtheum at the Acropolis in Athens, Ricardo André Frantz, 2005.
3. (πίτα)
4. (tyropita, τυρó + πιτα, cheese + pie)
5. (σπανάκι + πίτα, spinach + pie)
In Athens, I learned more about the Greek word pita3. It’s used for the bread of the same name, as well as pies and cakes. The most popular breakfast pastry in modern Greece is the cheese pie4, and most anglophones are already familiar with spanakopita5.
6. (σουβλάκι)
Athens is littered with shops specializing in souvlaki6, or skewered meat, which is served either on top of a pita, like a pizza, or rolled up in the pita, like many other Mediterranean wrap sandwiches.
7. Both terms enter the Greek language fairly late, the former of contested derivation, the latter from a Latin word for the skewer on which the meat is cooked.
The origins of pita bread and souvlaki are obscure7, but a group of gastronomically informed Greeks told me that the history of these dishes is almost certainly to be found farther east, somewhere in Turkey. They also said that the food was even better in Turkey than in Greece.
I bought a ticket for Istanbul.
From Istanbul to Anatolia
Modern Turkey contains the historic city of Troy, the ancient crossroads of Thrace, and more classical ruins than Greece. The larger part of Turkey — Anatolia, or Asia Minor — is also currently thought to be the ancient homeland of the Proto-Indo-European tribes who radiated out in all directions, spreading their language and culture from Northern India to Ireland around 5,000 years ago. My time machine had taken me even deeper into history.
8. (a word that’s originally either Armenian or Turkish, etymological dictionaries differ)
I found many kinds of decorated flat bread In Istanbul. The most obvious relatives of pizza were the pide, a boat-shaped open pie with toppings, lahmacun, a round pizza variant thought to have originated in Armenia, and various dishes served over a soft flat bread called lavash8.
A pide fresh from the wood-fired oven. This is a traditional variation made with minced lamb, sliced pastirma (the ancestor of pastrami), and a raw egg, which is spread over the pide before it goes in the fire.
My Turkish hosts told me that pide and flat bread come from Anatolia, where they have been eaten since before Turkic people rode in from the Central Asia to conquer that land.
9. Tandoor, like pita, is a word of contested origin. The word is the same in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, and Azeri. Persian etymological dictionaries trace the word to Avestan, Akkadian and Pahlavi, and suggest that the term may pre-date the arrival of Semitic and Indo-European people to the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia.
10. A “saç” in Turkish.
There are two traditional methods used to made flat bread in Anatolia. One, used in settled areas, is a wood-fired clay oven that resembles both the tandoor9 of Northern India and the Italian fornaio; the other, favored by mobile tribes, is a slightly convex metal plate10 that rests over a wood fire; the most primal version of a pancake griddle or a crêpe pan.
An Anatolian woman in Istanbul using the modern version of a traditional saç to prepare flat bread. One lesson of this trip was that all forms of flat wheat bread are best eaten within minutes of coming off the griddle.
I continued into the interior of Turkey to taste some of these handmade culinary artifacts myself. Seeing these breads made by traditional means helped me to understand the way my ancestors have lived for the last 5,000 years.
Etymology
11. The word is first recorded in a Latin text from the southern Italian town of Gaeta in 997 AD, in which a certain tenant agrees to give the bishop of Gaeta duodecim pizze (“twelve pizzas”) every Christmas day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday.
12. Amusingly, the Langobards became the Lombards, of whose tribe Mr Lombardi, the first pizza maker in New York must have come.
13. Cognate with Old High German “bizzo,” “bite, morsel, lump, cake made of flour.”
14. Followers of this school postulate an unattested Gothic root, “*bita.”
15. פיתא, “pitta,” which is attested in the Aramaic and Babylonian Talmud. What’s not clear is whether it arrived in Hebrew from Akkadian, which could have lifted it from a neighboring IE language.
The word pizza11, which is a hotly debated item among linguists and philologists, is claimed by some to have come to Italy via the Langobard12 word “bizzo13,” meaning “bite14,” by others to be a version of the Greek word “pitta,” and by still others to be related to a Hebrew word for loaf15.
My suspicion is that they’re all partly right and partly wrong. The answer to this question probably pre-dates recorded history. There’s evidence in ancient Macedonia of the use of a flat loaf of bread as a plate for meat, much the way pides, pitas and pizzas function today, and the trencher served the same role in Western Europe until quite recently. There are also Alsatian pizzas, southern French pizzas, northern French and Irish crêpes, pancakes in every Germanic country, naan from Persia to North India, and on and on.
16. Those tempted to posit a connection with Persian/Indian “naan” should be aware that naan actually means “bare” or “naked,” and properly describes flat bread without toppings.
17. The particle “pad” is tantalizingly close to pide/pita, but there’s no clear evidence that it became the IE word for “morsel” or “bite of food.”
The oldest recorded Indo-European language, Hittite, was spoken in Anatolia. Around 1,800BCE they wrote the word “bread” using a Sumerian/Babylonian loan-word, “ninda16,” and morsel of bread using the Sumerian “ninda-pad-rá17.”
18. Many scholars believe Albanian to be the closest language in Europe to old Indo-European, a direct descendent of Illyrian and/or Thracian.
In Sanskrit, another of the oldest Indo-European languages, the word for a round mass or ball of dough, which became synonymous with “daily bread,” “sacred food offering” and “body” was “piNDa.” The same root underlies the English word “piece,” which came from French, which got it from Gaulic, which ultimately leads back to the Old Celtic base “*pett-,” which referred to pieces of dough, Middle Latin “pia” (pie, the root of that English word), Middle Greek’s “pitta,” Breton’s “pez” (piece), Friulian “peta,” Ladin (Ampezzano) “peta,” Romansh (Engadine) “petta,” all meaning “thin flat bread,” post-classical Latin “petta,” “a kind of bread or flat cake,” Albanian18 “petë,” “thin layer of dough or pastry crust,” Vlach “pit pie,” Romanian regional “pit” (bread), and so on.
19. These are probably all from the PIE root “bheid-” (bite, like the Langobard example above).
20. (and some Semitic)
There’s a cognate for pita19 — in the sense of bit or bite or bread — in almost every Indo-European20 language from Sanskrit to Old Irish to Friulian, and one finds flat, wheat-based griddle bread everywhere those tribes went. I believe that the success of the ancestors of modern Eurasians was largely due to their ability to supplement game, forage and dairy with the calories provided by quick wheat breads prepared on a metal plate over a camp fire. Meals either eaten in place on a platter of flat bread — pizza — or rolled up into wrap sandwiches and eaten while riding.
The history of pizza turns out to be the history of the sandwich, the history of bread, and — to a surprising extent — the history of Western Civilization. Let’s go get a pie.