Introduction

This Pizza book will take us on a magical trip to Italy.

The Italians say that eating is the second most beautiful and important thing in the world. The cave men baked bread which looked like a pizza, a round flat dough-cake made from flour and water, baked on red-hot stones.

The classic pizza as we know it today is about 300 years old. The ancient Egyptians taught the Greeks the art of baking bread.

Soon the Greeks surpassed their teachers and began to enrich the dough with spices, oils, eggs and herbs. They were also the first to cover the dough with toppings before baking, thus turning the pizza into a main course.

The Italians were equally inventive where good eating and making the most of very little were concerned.

The cuisine of the region around Naples offers delicacies that are appealing to the taste buds as well as to the eye. The harbour town of Naples is the culinary centre of Southern Italian cuisine.
The classic pizza owes its existence not least to the discovery of the tomato which was brought to Europe from Mexico.

The cook who first refined the slightly dull dough cake with pureed tomatoes, oil, salt and a little cheese was, of course, a Neapolitan.

Many of his fellow citizens loved the new recipe and copied it. Thus the best-known pizza, the pizza Napoletana, was born. Today the pizza has fans all over the world.