Archaeologists in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have uncovered a painting which depicts what might be the precursor to the Italian pizza.
The flatbread depicted in the 2,000-year-old fresco “may be a distant ancestor of the modern dish”, Italy’s culture ministry said.
But it lacks the classic ingredients to technically be considered a pizza.
The fresco was found in the hall of a house next to a bakery during recent digs at the site in southern Italy.
What are the required ingredients? Can they be sure the ingredients are not hidden underneath the ones on top?
They did a taste test, and noticed it had fresco cheese instead of mozzarella
I’ll upvote this but I don’t like it.
90% sure it’s tomatoes. They are not native to Europe and were only introduced in the colonial era.
I get pizza without tomatoes all the time. Chicken bacon ranch pizza contains zero tomatoes. I need to talk to this uninformed pizza gatekeeper.
Not sure the Italians consider a chicken bacon ranch pizza to be a pizza.
This brings up a good point. BBQ chicken pizza, donair pizza, and pesto pizza all don’t have tomatoes.
Required? I’d go with water, flour, yeast, salt, olive oil.
After that it becomes difficult as a pizza bianca with nothing else but olive oil would be strange, you generally get at least garlic and some cheese, but that’s the minimal set of ingredients shared by every pizza.
OTOH, cheese might actually be a requirement, can’t think of a cheese-free pizza right now. Oh this is going to piss of the vegans.
Things may or may not get more complicated, depending on what you consider Pizza, if you include Flammkuchen which doesn’t require yeast or olive oil, and also comes cheese-free by default, instead using some sort of sour cream (and onions and ham). If you ever manage to get your hand on Federweißer, that is a killer combination.
i would say tomato and cheese and think i see both
Tomatoes were only introduced to Italy in the 1500s (from the Americas) so i highly doubt they had tomatoes in Pompeii at that time. :)
Yeah you’re right, i’m dumb. Still think the red thing on the left looks like a tomato wonder what that actually is.
pomegranate?
I don’t know which ingredients are required but I don’t think they had tomatoes at that time. Wasn’t they discovered in the new world?
Correct. They were over 400 years from having tomato sauce on pizza. They did have pesto, as the article mentioned.
Make that over 1400 years.