Anchovies and Pizza Stay Together.
Anchovies and pizza have a tangled relationship with one another. On the one hand, they’re a pairing as known as wine and cheese, but on the other, no one actually likes them together. Sure, you’ll get a few broadminded, quirky palates here and there that call in the occasional fish-topped pie, but those folks are certainly in the minority.
So how did the classic duet become a classic in the first place?
he tradition begins as far back as 2,000 years ago, way before pizza was even pizza. Ancient Roman flatbreads were often topped with assorted fermented spreads. Among the most popular spreads was garum, which was made of various fish parts finely diced. When pizza was first developed in Naples around the late 18th century as provincial food largely consumed by peasants, fish remained a popular topping. With Italy being largely maritime in diet, anchovy topped pizza, also known as pizza marinara, was a cheap, easy meal for coastal citizens. In addition, anchovies easily preserved in oil and salt, which made them ideal for travel or food storage.
All this is well and good, but how did the anchovy topping sustain over the next 200 years?
Pizza was brought across the Atlantic to the North American continent with the first wave of Italian immigrants in the late 1800’s. Urban Italian bakeries sold their pies to factory workers as street food in their traditional, native format: cheese and tomato, white pizza, tomato and mushroom, and cheese and anchovies.
As these bakeries became more successful and time passed, their clientele became more diverse and the bakeries started to adopt more local tastes like meats and vegetable toppings, thus creating the topping choices we have today. However, many strictly traditional Italian pizzas like the Bianca, which is flatbread topped with olive oil and salt, are quite lowly represented in today’s pizzerias, where as the anchovy topping choice is still rather widespread. With this being the case, it would appear that a sense of tradition and nostalgia are the main backers of anchovies’ survival in the pizza world – they are the strongest symbol of pizza’s origin: inexpensive, maritime, and Italian. The old Latin proverb fits well here: “nihil sanctum est?” (Is nothing sacred?). Apparently, some things are, and one of them is anchovies on pizza.
For thousands of years Italian culture and customs have influenced the world, its language, practices, and cuisine impressed and appearing in all sorts of food, art, and activities. As the anchovy pizza brings a unique culinary tradition to the masses, so too does Zouq’s own Fiery Sticks with their signature Indian red chili and mango blend creating a taste that celebrates a cultures spice for life and an excitement to be shared with the world.
Trivia
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