I love to cook, even though someone wants to banish the kitchensand I love to see cooking videos. However, the algorithm sometimes gets confused and shows me videos of people putting raw pasta with tomato sauce into a container and baking everything, or a lot of fried things. They are videos of Americans cooking, of course, but when I see someone frying a pizza, it doesn’t offend me for one simple reason: it’s almost as old as the Neapolitan pizza and played a fundamental historical role in post-war Italy.
Feeding a city in which the ovens had been destroyed. Because Neapolitan pizza may be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but fried pizza is the lifeblood of the city of Naples.
The statutes of pizza. Italians are very particular about food. I have shared many trips with great Italian colleagues and they are very wonderful when they defend what is theirs. It’s great, but they are the first to burn the coffee (although we Spaniards are not here to give lessons on this, of course). Now, don’t let a Neapolitan get the pizza.
He ‘I will discipline‘is the bible, the table of commandments which includes everything you need to know to make a Napoletana pizza. What types of ingredients, quantities and heart that should be put inside and on top of the dough. On a recent trip, talking about pizza and after eating in a fairly competent Parisian pizzeria, the topic of fried pizza came up. What would clearly be an affront to the pride of that Neapolitan boy caused a smile to appear on his face.
And, as we say in Xataka, it makes sense.
Zeppole. Long before Disciplinare and baked pizza, in Naples there was already an important tradition of fried dough. In it freedom from coquina from the 13th century describe fermented doughs, fried in oil and served with honey, but if there is a predecessor of fried pizza, it is the zeppole. They are like fritters that date back to sometime between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century and have some variants, but a well-known one is filled with pastry cream and decorated with cherries in syrup.
Although this is a dessert, there are also salty varieties to which other ingredients such as anchovies are added. Although they were eaten in several Italian cities such as Rome or Calabria, in Naples they caught on well and, when the more formal pizza began to appear, they became popular. started to differentiate between the pizzaiuolo (the one who makes baked pizzas) and the zeppolaiolo (the one who makes the fried foods, including fried doughs).
Emergency. During the 19th century, texts began to appear that included recipes for stuffed and fried calzoncini as a more satiating product than the sweet variant and an explicit distinction began to be made between “pizza al forno” and “pizza fritta di cicoli.” Fried pizza was already establishing itself in the Neapolitan language before the 20th century as a street food to take advantage of leftover meat and fish, but then came the Second World War.
The conflict devastated Naples and the postwar period was no better. The situation of extreme poverty and the destruction of the kilns by Allied bombings combined with a lack of wood. The city had to be rebuilt or the furnaces fueled, and the priority was clear.
Furthermore, even if they wanted to make some pizzas, everything was missing and the ingredients were expensive due to the shortage. So, many Neapolitan families began to look at the zeppole and were occurred that they could make large disks of pizza dough, fill them with cheap ingredients like ricotta, vegetables and leftover meat if there were any, fry them and… that’s it.
Fried dough with the ingredients on top
“A ogge a otto“. Workers could take this as a filling lunch for breaks, it was economical and became a symbol. In the absence of “real” pizza, the new “pizza del popolo” was the one that helped in the reconstruction of the city and became a symbol. coined the “a ogge a otto”, which came to mean “eat today, pay eight days later”, reinforcing that role as a symbol of poor post-war Naples.
American Coffee. Therefore, fried pizza was not invented in the postwar period, since there was a previous context of fried doughs, but it was the time of the popular explosion due to necessity. This Neapolitan boy was particularly proud when telling me the story because, although less known, Neapolitan fries are also a traditional dish, but the one that lifted the city after the war was… pizza.
And it’s funny how my first impulse was to think that fried pizza was just another thing about Americans determined to fry things, when really it’s even something cultural for certain people. These types of stories are always fascinating to me, like the one about American coffee that we can think was invented in the United States when, in reality, it was an invention of the Italian baristas of the Second World War who they added water to the coffee because the American soldiers did not like the concentrated flavor.
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