Pizza Margherita

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza as Naples understands it took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as food for the working poor. It was cheap, sold by the slice from street ovens, and looked down on by respectable society for much of its early life.

The tomato was essential to that transformation. Brought to Europe from the Americas, it was treated with suspicion for generations before southern Italian cooks embraced it. Once tomatoes met flatbread, the modern pizza was close at hand.

The famous account holds that in the late nineteenth century a Neapolitan pizzaiolo prepared pizzas for the visiting Italian queen, and that she preferred one topped with tomato, mozzarella and basil — red, white and green, the colours of the newly unified nation's flag — after which it took her name.

It is a wonderful story and it is repeated everywhere, but historians treat it cautiously. Documentary evidence is thin, similar combinations were being eaten before the supposed royal visit, and the tale appears to have been polished considerably in the retelling. What is certain is that the name stuck and that the patriotic colour scheme helped a food of the poor become a national symbol.

The Margherita is defined by restraint: a soft, highly hydrated dough, San Marzano-style tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh basil, olive oil and salt. With so few components, flaws cannot hide, which is exactly why it is used as the benchmark for judging a pizzeria.

Neapolitan practice has been codified in remarkable detail by trade associations and protected status: dough proportions, hand shaping rather than rolling, and a wood-fired oven so hot that the pizza cooks in roughly sixty to ninety seconds. The result is a thin, soft base with a puffed, blistered, slightly charred rim, served soft enough that many Neapolitans eat it with a knife and fork.

That intensity of heat is the hardest part to reproduce at home, where domestic ovens rarely approach the required temperature. Enthusiasts compensate with pizza stones, steels and small dedicated ovens, all chasing the same goal: maximum heat for minimum time.