JetBlue is putting flights on sale in time for fall and winter getaways with travel starting as low as $39.
21.09.2023 - 18:37 / atlasobscura.com
Not long ago, if you ordered Neapolitan pizza at an Italian restaurant, you might have ended up with a slice of custard pie.
The modern definition for pizza did not appear in an Italian dictionary until 1905. The Italian word pizza, which is likely related to Greek pita and Turkish pide, was originally a general term for flat baked dishes made with flour. You can still see this term in action today in dishes like pizza rustica, a rich egg-and-cheese-stuffed pie from central Italy, or pizza Ebraica, a blackened cookie made with nuts and dried fruit that originated in the Jewish quarter of Rome.
Before the 20th century, the cheese pizza that we know and love was a local street food little-known outside of Naples. Some 19th-century writers who encountered cheese pizza even described it with contempt. In 1886, Carlo Collodi, author of Pinocchio, called it “a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonizes perfectly with the appearance of the person selling it.” In 1884, journalist Matilde Serao, who was Neapolitan herself, seemed to squirm as she described how street vendors’ pizza slices “turn yellow in the sun as the flies eat them.”
Pizza was most popular among the lower classes of Naples, which was then Europe’s most densely populated city. But in expressing concern over the hygiene of pizza, both Serao and Collodi mingled their disdain for the food with disdain for the urban poor who primarily ate it. The legend of Italy’s Queen Margherita sampling the pizza Margherita made in her honor, though probably untrue, became popular in part because of what it symbolized: the upper classes showing compassion for the humblest people of the city.
Mass emigration from Naples to countries like the United States in the late 19th century helped spread cheese pizza to the world. In the late 20th century, demand for cheese pizza increased across Italy in part because of an influx of foreign tourists demanding a dish they did not realize was specific to one city.
But long before cheese pizza took the world by storm, there was another, more widely known dish in Italy called “Neapolitan pizza.” This was a baked dessert pie stuffed with almond custard. Other than the name, there’s no relation between the dishes at all.
Bartolomeo Scappi, an influential cookbook author of the Italian Renaissance, included a recipe for the pizza alla Napoletana in his 1570 cookbook, among other kinds of sweet pizza. More than three centuries later, in 1891, Pellegrino Artusi featured the same dish in his own cookbook. La Scienza in cucina, published when Italy had been unified for only 20 years, was the first to bring together recipes from different Italian regions and present them as one national cuisine.
Although Artusi laid the groundwork
JetBlue is putting flights on sale in time for fall and winter getaways with travel starting as low as $39.
For fans of nostalgia TV as well as avid animal and travel lovers, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is back in a big way. Sixty years ago, this beloved show innovated the nature adventure genre, enthralled viewers with its global destinations, won multiple Emmy Awards and galvanized conservation goals and gains. It offered an eagerly anticipated, families-gathered, weekly gaze at creatures in far-flung locales to a television audience that averaged 34-million Americans for much of its initial, astonishingly lengthy 25-year run. Between then and now, weaving through subsequent decades, Wild Kingdom had been transformed again and again, showcased on Animal Planet and as a web series. Now there is a fresh fourth project, the all-new Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, which will premiere October 7 on NBC-TV (as part of its “The More You Know” programming block on Saturday mornings), as well as via NBC.com and NBC VOD. It is co-hosted by wildlife expert Peter Gros (who joined the original series in 1985) and wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant, Ph.D., a National Geographic Society research fellow and host of the PBS podcast Going Wild. Currently primed for 26 episodes set in North America, Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild kicks off with journeys to California’s super-parched Mojave Desert for desert-dwelling tortoises, the Maine Coast for Atlantic puffins (nicknamed “parrots of the sea” because of their colorful triangular beaks), the Florida Coast for aqua-agile manatees and Austin, Texas, for high-soaring-quick-swooping Mexican free-tailed bats. I reached out to Gros and Wynn-Grant to share their behind-the-scenes insights and inspirations, as they forge modern Wild Kingdom paths, while still applauding the footsteps of legendary zoologists Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler, who, as co-hosts of the documentary show’s dawn in 1963, put this legacy wildlife wonderland on the map.
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A burger and fries by the beach in San Diego, California. (Photo Credit: sophia_ross/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus)
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