Pizza pie…

CHRIS BENNETT tries a slice of humble pie…

SCARCELY a Sunday goes by without the newspapers telling me something has to be done to eradicate poverty. This, clearly has nothing to do with the poor, nor with the alleviation of their unfortunate circumstances, if in fact those circumstances are unfortunate.

It has a great deal to do with the empty rhetoric with which our parliamentarians and councillors jump at any chance to show themselves in a good light. Not that there is much chance of that happening.

The poor, as somebody once said, you will have with you always. More recently, in fact last week in the Travel section of the Telegraph, a lady of some note was holidaying at her favourite place, Kerala, in south India. She made this telling observation: don’t confuse poverty with squalor.

I bought a pizza the other day; in fact I bought two (the plural, as I am sure you know, is pizze), from the newly opened parlour in Port Edward. It is where the Kentucky used to be.

The price, of course, was ludicrous. Interesting, isn’t it, that the convenience of these fast foods in the minds of our less fortunate brethren seems heavily to outweigh the cost. Fair enough.

I pondered the pizze.

The origins of this interesting food are lost in antiquity. However, certain erudite food historians, especially that eloquent Welshwoman Elizabeth David, have left us food for thought on the matter.

In her travels before and after World War II, Mrs David, who was fluent in French and German, spent considerable time studying the food of that part of the Mediterranean coast that embraces both France and Italy, the provinces of Provence (the first of the Roman conquests, the Provincia Romana) and Liguria, an ancient land more Greek than Roman. This area is called the Blue Hills, or Cote d’Azure.

The civilisation here, and hence the food, is very, very old. Each side of the border has its styles for what we now call pizza, but both are essentially the same ingredients.

Mrs David has this to say:

“About the pizza tribe a whole book could be written. In its genuine and original form a primitive dish of bread dough spread with tomatoes and mozarrella cheese, baked in a very hot oven, the Neapolitian Pizza is a beautiful thing to look at, and extremely substantial to eat; coarse food, to accompany copious glasses of rough wine.

“There are pizza made with mussels, with mushrooms, with ham; the Ligurian pizza closely resembles the Provencal pissaladiera, with onions, black olives and anchovies.”

So it was originally food for the poor and the not so poor. Would that it were so today.

The origins of the word were not very clear. Google suggested a relationship to the Greek pitta, but I have a doubt about that.

Whatever the case enjoy your pizza and remember the poor, who were probably eating pizza in Liguria five thousand years ago, and still are, only more of it, will always be here to eat pizza. As far as I can make out the squalid are not pizzafisti.

Elizabeth David: Italian Food; Macdonald, London 1966; page 132.

Macmillan Encyclopedia Vol 7: Macmillan, London 1984; page 258.