US National Pizza Day
<p>In June 1889, in a kitchen on the Salita Sant’Anna di Palazzo in Naples, a pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito is said to have baked three pizzas for King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy. One of them, the story goes, carried tomato, mozzarella and basil, the red, white and green of the young Italian flag, and the Queen liked it so much that the pizza took her name. It is a tidy origin tale, and probably too tidy to be entirely true, but it sits behind every slice eaten on 9 February, when the United States marks National Pizza Day. The day has no documented founder of its own, yet it celebrates a food whose journey from Neapolitan street snack to American staple is one of the best-documented migrations in culinary history.</p>
<h2 id="from-naples-to-the-new-world">From Naples to the New World</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Pizza began as poor people’s food. In nineteenth-century Naples, flatbread topped with whatever was cheap and to hand, tomatoes, garlic, oregano, a little oil, was eaten standing up by labourers and sold from open-fronted shops. The marinara, with no cheese at all, is older than the famous Margherita; a pizza dressed with tomato, mozzarella and basil was already being made in Naples decades before Esposito supposedly served one to a queen in 1889. Esposito was a real pizzaiolo, his shop still trades today under the name Pizzeria Brandi, and the royal visit is documented. The wrinkle is the celebrated thank-you note from the palace, which scholars have picked apart for mismatched seals and inconsistent handwriting that point to a later forgery. The pizza is real; the fairy tale around it is partly invented.</p>
<p>What is beyond dispute is what happened when Neapolitans emigrated. They carried their dough westward across the Atlantic, and in the tenement kitchens and bakeries of New York, Chicago and Boston the dish was remade for new ovens, new flours and new appetites. The shop at 53½ Spring Street in Manhattan, the one usually remembered as Gennaro Lombardi’s, has long been celebrated as America’s first pizzeria, said to have received a licence to sell pizza in 1905. The story is messier than the plaque suggests. The pizza historian Peter Regas has shown that Lombardi arrived in the United States only in late 1904, and that the Spring Street premises were already operating as a pizzeria before he could have owned them, very likely under a baker named Filippo Milone, who appears to have set up several of the city’s earliest pizza shops. Lombardi’s name stuck partly because the business endured: it closed in 1984 and reopened a block away a decade later under his grandson. Whoever fired the first oven, the pattern is clear enough. For decades pizza stayed a largely Italian-American food, eaten in immigrant neighbourhoods. It was the return of American servicemen from Italy after the Second World War, having tasted the real thing, that helped push pizza into the national mainstream.</p>
<h2 id="a-nation-of-regional-styles">A nation of regional styles</h2>
<p>Once pizza took hold in America it splintered into argument. New York gave the world the thin, wide, foldable slice sold by the wedge from corner counters. Chicago answered in 1943, when Pizzeria Uno is said to have introduced the deep-dish pie, a buttery crust built up like a pastry case and filled with cheese and chunky tomato. New Haven, Connecticut, developed its charred, coal-fired apizza; Detroit produced a thick, rectangular pan pizza with cheese crisped against the edges; St Louis made a cracker-thin version cut into squares and topped with processed Provel. Each style reflects the flour, ovens and tastes of the community that built it, and each has partisans who will defend it with the conviction usually reserved for sports teams.</p>
<p>This regional fracturing is exactly why pizza rewards a dedicated day. The food is not one thing but a family of things, related by dough and sauce yet wildly different in execution. Someone who only knows the chain delivery box has barely met the dish. The differences are not cosmetic: the Neapolitan original is a soft, blistered, faintly soupy thing baked in well under two minutes at around 430 degrees Celsius and eaten with a knife and fork, while the New York slice is engineered to be stiff enough to fold lengthwise and eaten on the move, and the Detroit pan pizza inverts the usual order entirely, laying the cheese to the very edge of the tin so it caramelises into a lacy brown skirt called <em>frico</em>. The same impulse that produced these styles keeps producing more, which is why the United States now hosts a calendar full of pizza observances, from the topping-specific <a href="/specialdate/us-national-sausage-pizza-day/">US National Sausage Pizza Day</a> to the deliberately plain <a href="/specialdate/us-national-cheese-pizza-day/">US National Cheese Pizza Day</a>, and even to the gloriously over-specified <a href="/specialdate/us-national-pizza-with-the-works-except-anchovies-day/">Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-earns-its-place">Why the day earns its place</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>A national pizza day is easy to dismiss as a marketing invention, and some of these food holidays genuinely are. This one carries more weight than most because pizza is the rare dish that crosses every line of class, age and region in American life. It is the food of children’s birthday parties and late-night student kitchens, of office lunches and stadium concourses. A day that asks people to notice it is really asking them to notice how completely a Neapolitan flatbread has been absorbed into the country.</p>
<p>There is also a craft worth defending. A good pizza is a deceptively hard thing to make: a properly fermented dough, a sauce that is bright rather than sweet, cheese that melts without flooding, and an oven hot enough to set the base before the toppings overcook. The Neapolitans take this so seriously that the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, founded in 1984, publishes a rulebook running to exact specifications for the flour, the rise, the diameter and even the height of the cornicione, the puffed rim. The European Union granted the <em>pizza napoletana</em> protected status in 2010, the first pizza to earn it. Marking the day by seeking out an independent pizzeria, rather than the nearest chain, supports the people who still treat that craft seriously. The interest in pizza has even spilled into adjacent celebrations such as <a href="/specialdate/beer-and-pizza-day/">Beer and Pizza Day</a>, which pairs the pie with the drink most often ordered alongside it.</p>
<h2 id="how-the-day-is-marked">How the day is marked</h2>
<p>On 9 February, American pizzerias commonly run discounts, two-for-one slices and free-topping promotions, and the chains compete for attention with limited-edition pies. At home, the day has become an excuse to make dough from scratch, a project that turns a meal into an afternoon and reliably teaches the maker how much patience real pizza demands. Households assemble their own pies, each person dressing a section to taste, and the result is as much an activity as a dinner.</p>
<p>Beyond the United States the date passes largely unremarked, but the underlying enthusiasm does not. Italy guards its heritage fiercely: in 2017 UNESCO inscribed the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiolo on its list of intangible cultural heritage, recognising the skill itself as something worth protecting, the petition behind it gathering some two million signatures. The honour did not go to a recipe but to the craft of the people who twirl the dough, slide the pie into the wood-fired oven and read the heat by eye. Brazil, home to one of the largest Italian diaspora communities outside Italy, takes its pizza so seriously that it keeps its own <a href="/specialdate/brazilian-national-pizza-day/">Brazilian National Pizza Day</a> on 10 July, a reminder that America is not the only country to have made the dish its own.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The marinara, not the Margherita, is the older Neapolitan pizza, and despite its name it contains no seafood; “marinara” refers to the sailors’ wives who supposedly made this cheaper, cheeseless version.</li>
<li>The famous royal thank-you letter that supposedly proves the Margherita’s 1889 origin was examined by the food historian Zachary Nowak, who flagged mismatched seals and inconsistent handwriting pointing to a later forgery.</li>
<li>In 2017 UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan “Pizzaiuolo” to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.</li>
<li>Chicago deep-dish, often held up as the antithesis of “real” pizza, is younger than the aeroplane and the radio, dating only to around 1943.</li>
<li>The first licensed pizzeria in the United States, Lombardi’s, opened in New York in 1905 and originally sold pizza by the whole pie wrapped in paper and tied with string.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>The pleasing thing about pizza is how it refuses to belong to anyone. Naples gave it its form, Italian immigrants carried it abroad, and Americans then argued it into a dozen regional dialects, each insisting it had got closest to the truth. A dish that started as the cheapest food in a poor city now has its own forged royal letter, a UNESCO listing and a national day, and it wears all of that lightly, still best eaten by hand from a paper plate. Perhaps that is the real point of 9 February: not to settle the arguments about crust and toppings, but to enjoy that a humble flatbread became important enough to argue about at all.</p>
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