It’s officially December 3rd, 2018 (EST) and that means Ladies Week has started! We can’t wait to see your fantastic creations!
As a reminder, don’t forget to tag everything as #jojoladiesweek and #jojoladiesweek2018 in the first two tags. It might be helpful to @ us in your post as well if we still haven’t seen it. We don’t want to have anyone lost in the shuffle.
Pizza is a savoury dish of Italian origin, consisting of a usually round, flattened base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with various ingredients and baked at a high temperature.
Modern pizza was invented in Naples, and the dish and its variants have since become popular in many countries. Today it is one of the most popular foods in the world and a common fast food item in Europe and North America.
The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (True Neapolitan Pizza Association), a non-profit organization founded in 1984 with headquarters in Naples, aims to "promote and protect... the true Neapolitan pizza". In 2009, upon Italy's request, Neapolitan pizza was registered with the European Union as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed dish.
The word "pizza" first appeared in a Latin text from the town of Gaeta in Lazio, then still part of the Byzantine Empire, in 997 AD. The text states that a tenant of certain property is to give the bishop of Gaeta duodecim pizze ("twelve pizzas") every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday.
Foods similar to pizza have been made since the neolithic age. Records of people adding other ingredients to bread to make it more flavorful can be found throughout ancient history. Modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples in the 18th or early 19th century. Until about 1830, pizza was sold from open-air stands and out of pizza bakeries, and pizzerias keep this old tradition alive today.
A popular contemporary legend holds that the archetypal pizza, pizza Margherita, was invented in 1889, when the Royal Palace of Capodimonte commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo (pizza maker) Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honor of the visiting Queen Margherita. Of the three different pizzas he created, the Queen strongly preferred a pizza swathed in the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomato), green (basil), and white (mozzarella). Supposedly, this kind of pizza was then named after the Queen.