The beginning of our country’s love affair with bread, cheese, and sauce
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.
Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.
In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:
The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice that size. Don’t imagine an American pie blown up to about two feet, however; a pizza is a nearer relation to a pancake. It is very flat, made of raised bread dough, with the filling spread on top.
Dodd’s story is the closest you’ll ever feel to an alien hearing about pizza for the first time. How does the pizzaiolo stretch the dough? “He places this large flat pancake on his closed fist, like a floppy hat, and twirls it round and round. The elastic dough becomes thinner and thinner. A skilled pizza-maker knows exactly when to stop twirling: when the cake is at its thinnest, just before it breaks through.” What do you put on top of a freshly cooked pie? “Garlic and chopped orégano (wild marjoram) are the seasonings, used as the customer may request.”
At that point, when President Joe Biden was in grade school and The Atlantic was almost a century old, pizza was completely unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. We began to evolve beyond the days of “orégano (wild marjoram)” only in the 1960s, when pizza became synonymous with takeout and delivery—a cheap, delicious, and customizable food for the masses. One pizza joint in Ypsilanti, Michigan, DomiNick’s, focused on delivering to nearby college students. In 1965, it changed its name to Domino’s, and within 24 years had ballooned into 5,000 locations. Now America’s love affair with the dish has reached such heights (some 3 billion pies are eaten each year) that imagining a time before pizza feels as unnerving as imagining New York without the subway or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. So much of the American diet has followed the same arc: Food we now eat all the time and take for granted probably wasn’t available even a few decades ago.
We all know that computer mainframes the size of rooms gave way to laptops and iPhones, but that same kind of “disruption” has also infiltrated our meals. Decades before the rise of pizza, spaghetti and meatballs—a dish that did not exist in Italy—became an American favorite. How that happened is one of the “few fundamental questions” that Corby Kummer explored in “Pasta,” an 11,000-word Atlantic cover story from 1986. (Bring back the one-word headlines!) In the early 1900s, new arrivals from Italy had limited access to some of the fruits and vegetables that went into dishes they’d slurped up back home. But they did have meat. So much meat. The meatball, born out of necessity, just made sense. Other American takes on Italian food from that era now sound revolting at best: Mushy pasta cooked in a sauce of canned tomato soup and Worcestershire sauce. One early recipe for baked ziti, Kummer writes, called for “one and a half pounds of meat, one pound of ricotta, a half pound of mozzarella, and two cups of white sauce for one pound of pasta.”
America’s changing tastes are because of immigration, yes, but also because of the grocery store. In the ’70s, the average supermarket stocked approximately 9,000 items. You might have found a few flavors of yogurt, if that. Now when you head to a supermarket, you can find 60,000 options and choose among blueberry, strawberry, and peach kefir. The modern grocery store is a triumph of science and technology. Why are brussels sprouts no longer a metaphor for stinky grossness? Partly because plant breeders figured out how to eliminate a compound that turned them bitter. Hear me out: American life is more delicious now that the Red Delicious apple has given way to the holy Honeycrisp.
Over the next 70 years, the food we eat will continue to change. Silicon Valley is on a quest to perfect the pizza robot, which could cook up a pie inside a truck while it’s on the way to your home. Maybe we will soon be eating more pawpaws, an enigmatic fruit native to the eastern United States and Canada that somehow tastes tropical, like a mix of mango, pineapple, and banana. Once an all-American favorite, the pawpaw disappeared from our diet because it’s hard to grow and ship—but now food scientists are working on a version that might survive a journey to Whole Foods. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, the fruit aisle is getting trippy—starting with yellow watermelon, pink pineapples, and white strawberries. In the future, we may eat more chickpeas. And MSG. And yerba mate. And … gluten-free pasta made of durian seeds.
Perhaps, actually, science has gone too far.
America Before Pizza
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21.12.2023
The beginning of our country’s love affair with bread, cheese, and sauce
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.
Consider—just for one terrible, stressful, bleak moment—if our forebearers in Naples had never invented pizza. No perfectly charred Margherita pies, no late-night Domino’s delivery, nothing. To the pizza-deprived, the world’s most beloved food probably wouldn’t sound all that special. What’s so great about the combo of bread, cheese, and sauce, after all? The alchemy among the three creates something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts—but I don’t have to tell you that, thankfully.
In 1949, the writer Ora Dodd had a much tougher challenge. In her story for The Atlantic, simply titled “Pizza,” Dodd sought to introduce Americans to a strange new food taking over Italian neighborhoods:
The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie. There is a plural, pizze, but no one ever uses it, for pizza is a sociable dish, always intended to be shared. Two people order a small pizza, about a foot in diameter. A large pizza is twice........
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