Is there a more fun-filled gig for a food-loving Italian history professor than making pizza with a world pizza-making champion – one who hails from a family of 20 children, nearly all of them pizzaoli?
SBS is chatting to John Dickie, the host of (4.30 pm Fridays on SBS, starting September 15) about the iconic Italian food we all love – although he says he never makes it at home.
“Always and everywhere it’s been a food that you go out and eat, from a place with a proper oven,” he says. So where’s his favourite place to find pizza in Italy?
“Well, after meeting world pizza-making champion Teresa Iorio in Naples – a real larger-than-life character, the 19th of 20 children, nearly all of them pizzaioli – I have to say her little pizzeria, . The tripe pizza there is sublime!”
Dickie, a professor of Italian Studies at University College London, meets the effervescent Iorio – the 2015 World Pizza Champion and the first woman to take the title in the title’s 14-year history – and makes pizza with her in the fifth episode of his new show.
An episode titled “Going Hungry” might not sound like one for food lovers, but in fact it’s a fascinating look at how times of extreme hunger and poverty, and the diseases and despair that accompanied it, also gave rise to extraordinary resourcefulness - and great food.
Pizza, we learn, is an amazing survivor. It has reached its globally-adored status after shaky beginnings. The cholera that took a huge toll on the population of Naples almost did the same to pizza. Even the Italians weren’t sure they liked these discs of dough. And as for the truth of the stories about Queen Margherita and the pizza that bears her name, that was one of many tales Dickie and the show’s researchers spent many hours on.
“[For the show] Apart from being based on my thoughts, which draws on all the right research, we had a production team who were absolutely obsessed with getting the historical facts right, and we argued long and hard about details that might seem absurd. You know, the particular details of the pizza story and Queen Margherita and what is true and what wasn’t is very complicated and we were obsessed by getting that right.”
There’s one moment in the episode, though, that no amount of research preparerd Dickie for.
“The great breakthrough for the millions of Italian soldiers fighting on the Austrian front in the first World War was tinned food. This tinned meat imported from the Americas represented a massive leap in food quality for many peasants who wouldn’t eat meat from one religious festival to the next - many scarely ate it at all. And so to have a daily tin of bully beef or whatever it might be was great for them,” he tells SBS Food down the line from London.
John Dickie goes hunting for old cans on a former battlefield.
“If you go to that part of the world now, where the trenches were, you can find tins all over the place. You just need a metal detector, and you’re constantly unearthing tins. We thought that was a nice thing to do, to go there with an expert, a local guy, and go find some tins, find out what people were eating and tell that story. So we did. And we started our dig … and about a foot down I started pulling out bones. And I didn’t think anything of it, I just put them to one side. And then he said ‘oh, hang on, these are human bones’ … We had to stop, because of course we notified the police that we’d found a body. We had to stop work and wait for the cabinieri.”
Since then, Dickie says, a proper forensic dig has been undertaken to try to identify the fallen solider, and several more bodies have been found.
“It really brings it home even more strongly what I said in the film, that war isn’t a game. The business of that conflict was appalling.”
It’s a sobering moment, but despite the unexpected discovery, this is far from a sad episode. In getting hands-on with the idea of hunger, Dickie entertains onlookers with his attempts to climb a greased pole, has flour tossed over him by the pizza champion (he looks “too tidy” she says), carries pizzas through the city in an intrigeing “pizza carrier”, and sets leading Italian chef and host of Italy’s Masterchef, Bruno Barbieri, a budget challenge.
Pizza-lovers may be surprised to hear Dickie explain, as he wanders the streets of pizza-loving Naples, that in the 19th century, most Italians didn’t even know what pizza was – “and many of those who did know it, thought it was disgusting”.
Aren’t we glad Italy decided it loved pizza, after all!
happy ending
History with bite: the secret life of pizza
Part of the credit goes to Queen Margherita, and the Napolitana pizza named in her honour.
But it was not until surprisingly recently – the 1960s – that pizza began its march towards global domination.
In his book – a history of Italian history thorugh its food - Dickie writes “The word ‘pizzeria’ is not recorded in an Italian dictionary until 1918. Even in 1947 a Neapolitan journalist, describing his city for a national audience, used the word in inverted commas – he clearly thought outsiders might not be sure what it meant. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that most of the rest of Italy found pizza not only digestible, but delicious.”
So what happened, SBS asked Dickie.
“Italy underwent its ‘economic miracle’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s: it became an industrial country, churning out Zanussi fridges, FIAT cars and Pirelli tyres. The miracle was also accompanied by a great deal of migration from countryside to city, and from South to North. So some families migrated north and set up pizza places to cater for their fellow southerners who were working on the building sites and in the factories of places like Turin and Milan,” he explains. Coupled with that was an increase in income and leisure time: eating out became an option for more people. Teenagers arrived, and they needed places to hang out. The humble pizzeria catered for these new types of consumer.
The mass immigration of Italians to America and other lands - between 1876 and the First World
War, more than seven and a half million Italians were shipped to the New World, Dickie tells us in Delizia – then saw pizza truly establish itself as one of the world’s favourite foods.
Discover more of Italy's rich culinary heritage in John Dickie's series, Eating History: Italy, 4.30pm Fridays on SBS from September 15 and then on . Find out more in our .
