Queen Margherita Takes A Trip Down South And Discovers Pizza

by Owen Lightly – As long as people have been pounding and grinding wheat into flour, there has been bread – and as long as there has been bread, people have been rolling it out and putting things on top of it.

Pizza as we know it today came to be with the addition of tomatoes to a yeast-based flat bread – similar breads to this, minus the tomatoes, had been being made for centuries up and down the Mediterranean coast, usually with simple toppings of oil, herbs and garlic. Tomatoes, which were thought to be poisonous when first brought to Europe in the 16^th century, found their way onto pizza sometime in the late 1700’s in Naples. This flavourful, filling street-food was cooked on stones in wood-burning ovens and was sold from open-air stands in poorer neighbourhoods. Because of the dish’s obvious charms, it gained popularity and eventually caught the attention of a certain member of the Italian royal family on a visit to Naples.

On a visit from the North in 1889, Queen Margherita learned of this new street food and summoned respected pizzaiolo (pizza chef) Rafaelle Esposito of Pizzeria Pietro e Basta Cosi. Rafaelle obliged the Queen’s request and was shortly at the palace preparing an array of different pizzas. The one that caught the attention of the Queen was the one that contained all the colors of the Italian flag, tomatoes (red), buffalo mozzarella (white) and basil (green). The country, having been a jumbled mess of fractured states for centuries, had been recently unified, and this pizza must have set off her nationalistic pride, for she sent the pizzaiolo a letter shortly after singling it out as her favourite. Raffaele soon named this pizza the “Margherita” and it has since remained a mainstay in Naples and around the world.

Though I don’t have a wood-fired oven that reaches 800 degrees (something the pizza police in Naples say is essential), I do try to make pizza at home every once in a while. I won’t give you a recipe, but will say this. Find a good dough recipe (I trust this man) and make it the day before you plan to have the pizza – resting the dough in the fridge overnight promotes better flavour. Crank your oven with the stone in there, and let it get nice and hot. If you don’t have a stone, an inverted baking sheet will suffice.

Roll the dough very thin (try stretching it by hand for fun) and place it on something you can slide it off of into the oven – use some semolina flour or cornmeal on the surface so it doesn’t stick.

For a tomato sauce I just crush some San Marzano tomatoes by hand right onto the pizza (pureeing adds too much air, and changes the flavour).

Then tear a ball of buffalo mozzarella into pieces and scatter randomly on the pie. Sprinkle some Grana Padano or Parmesan over and bake until bubbly and brown.

Finish with torn basil and olive oil. There you have it, the Margherita pizza, my favourite!

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Owen Lightly is a boy from a small island in the Gulf of Georgia. After attending cooking school, he moved to Vancouver in 2002 to start a career in the restaurant “biz”. His website, Butter On the Endive, was created for sharing and caring.

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