Pizza, Pasta, Parole

The ninth of February marks World Pizza Day. A day to celebrate that quintessentially Neapolitan dish which has become, er, quintessentially everywhere, but perhaps particularly in the US, where it sometimes morphs into ‘pizza pie’, and in the UK, where it’s become part of our cosmopolitan – some might say heterogeneous – diet. Perhaps you already eat a pizza weekly or more often than weekly. But if not, this is the perfect time to celebrate a once humble, now iconic Italian dish.  

That human icon of ‘Neapolitanity’, Sophia Loren, interviewed on the BBC Desert Island Discs, in which a celebrity chooses eight records to keep them company as they imagine being stranded on the aforementioned island, chose as her luxury to take there … what else but a pizza oven!

Al forno

Ah, ovens! They’re crucial to the creation of pizza. And I don’t mean your ordinary domestic oven in which you reheat the pizza some angel of mercy has delivered to your door. (Actually, ‘angel’ is not too far out: in 2001 a well-known American pizza brand reportedly paid $1,000,000 to deliver their salami pizza in a Russian rocket to the International Space Station). I mean those hemispherical caverns or hearth ovens you might catch sight of in a traditional Italian restaurant. Fired by wood to impart a smoky flavour, they cook the pizza base from below and the topping from above, so the result is perfectly and symmetrically, as it were, cooked.

Some restaurants advertise pizza al forno, or describe themselves as ‘al forno’, which means literally ‘at or to the oven’, i.e. ‘in the oven’. Talking of which, you possibly already know that Italian words in –o, like forno, have a high chance of being masculine, grammatically speaking, and those ending in –a, like pizza, feminine. Please cling on to that information, like mozzarella to a pizza base, because we might be talking about plurals later on.

Last year on the date of National Pizza Day, CBBC, the BBC’s children’s channel, ran a poll about people’s favourite toppings. You guessed it: Margherita, the Italian version of ‘Margaret’, topped the poll at 25 per cent. Which raises the question, who exactly is the Margherita so immortalised? It was named after Margaret Thatcher, who could scoff a pizza with the best of them.

Only kidding!

Legend has it that Queen Margherita of Italy was on a visit to the Capodimonte palace in Naples in 1889. A local pizza chef – a pizzaiolo –, Raffaele Esposito, also a pizza restaurant proprietor, was commissioned to create three different varieties for her. The traditional type which just had garlic and oil (aglio e oli0) slathered on it was considered too unrefined for the royal tastebuds. Her Majesty liked best the red, white and green of the margherita (tomato, mozzarella, basil) because they mirror those of the Italian flag. Supposedly, a letter confirming the royal favour, a bit like the British ‘By Appointment to His Majesty’ on certain goods, was sent to Esposito; a plaque on the premises that were his restaurant still today records the invention of pizza margherita.

Legend – and inspired marketing – it certainly was. There are no records of a royal visit to Naples that year; the phrase only started being used in the 1930s; and that combination of ingredients was already known and written about before 1889.

Pizzas that are not margherita

Lower down the CBBC list of comes pepperoni pizza, a combination which owes nothing to Italy and everything to the United States, invented as it was in New York. Pepperoni sounds very Italian, but the second p in the middle is an intruder. The Italian is peperoni, plural of peperone, meaning ‘a sweet pepper/bell pepper/capsicum’.

Now, that –one ending is what’s known in the lexicography trade as an augmentative, a word unit or affix added to a word to denote larger size. There are masses of them in Italian. You’ll see one in the calzone style of fold-over pizza, in the minestrone you might tuck into before your pizza, or in the panettone you may be offered if you’re eating all’italiana round Christmas. Calzone otherwise is a trouser leg or trousers in current Italian, which shows how the food metaphor originates: you fill the dough with food as you ‘fill’ trousers with legs. It’s the ‘supersized’ version of calza, a stocking for women, a sock for men.

A minestra is a soup, so minestrone is ‘big soup’, which seems a pretty apt description for a hearty dish. And panettone is an ‘augmented’ version of panetto, ‘a little bread’, which comes from pane, bread.

Further down the list of fave pizza toppings comes ham and pineapple, which no vero-Italian restaurant would ever deign to serve, hugely popular though it is in the sweet-toothed Anglosphere. It’s called Hawaiian, pizza hawaiana, but was first devised in Canada.

A check of my nearest Italian restaurant menu suggested a couple of pizza varieties I might otherwise have missed: alla diavola (with spicy salami and chillies, literally ‘at or to the devil’) and prosciutto e funghi (Parma ham and mushrooms). That alla is the feminine counterpart of the al we saw earlier in al forno. Both are used to refer to how a dish is cooked, and with alla the relevant adjective is given the feminine –a ending: for instance, alla marinara (‘the sailor’s way’, if you will), which denotes a simple sauce of tomato, garlic, oil and oregano.**

The tomato sauce that serves as the basis for nearly all other*** toppings on pizzas is simply salsa – Spanish has the ‘same’ word, whence the dance style. Salsa in both cases comes from the nominalised (‘turned into a noun’) Latin sălsa(m),from the adjective sălsus ‘salty’.

Little golden apples

But Spanish has tomates, French tomates, English tomatoes, the Genoese dialect tomate, and so forth, while standard Italian has pomodori, singular pomodoro. How come? It was the sixteenth-century Italian herbalist, Pietro Mattioli, who first christened the fruit pomo d’oro, which means literally ‘apple of gold’. He based it on his country’s homegrown, as it were, Latin, in the shape of pōmum aurĕum, ‘golden fruit (apple)’, a reference to the yellow colour tomatoes would have had at the time, before they’d been selectively bred to be uniformly red. Think today’s ‘heritage’ tomatoes. People seeing such tomatoes for the first time might well have thought of them as exotic apples. The French at the time also called the fruit ‘golden apple’, pomme dorée.

As for where the word pizza comes from, it’s one of those about which lexicographers scratch their heads. Nobody knows for sure. It’s first recorded in Italian in 1531 and in English in 1825. One theory derives it from the Modern Greek pitta, ‘cake’, as in pitta bread, another from Vulgar Latin (that means a dialect, not rude Latin!), a third from the language of the Lombards (think Lombardy, Lombardia, capital Milan), Langobardic, a dialect of Old High German.

Grammar via pasta

Pizza is, of course, far from being the only Italian food now adopted as an Anglo staple. The other mainstay is pasta, whose grammatical gender you will have spotted at a glance (feminine). But what about different kinds of pasta? Well, they too can be a gentle ‘Introduction to Italian Grammar’. On the one hand you have spaghetti, fusilli and rigatoni, on the other, penne, linguine and conchiglie (that ch is pronounced /k/as in chianti). Which are masculine and which feminine? (I’m being highly selective here: there are at least 350 different pasta shapes. I’ve ‘curated’ this list for you.) And yes, you’ve guessed correctly. The first three are masculine, the second three feminine. A noun ending in –i is often the masculine plural of a word ending in –o or otherwise masculine; a plural in –e is nearly always feminine and the plural of a feminine word ending in –a.

At the risk of infuriating any pizzaioli, pizza is another form of bread and uses mostly the same ingredients. Heavenly bread, Sofia Loren might argue, but bread nonetheless. Other Italian familiar breads include ciabatta and panini. Through one of the quirks of language, in English we talk about ‘a panini’. But as you now know, its –i ending shows it’s plural. So technically, we should order ‘a panino’, right? To ask for one in that way would really make one sound more than a little pretentious, wouldn’t it?

Words coming into English tend to be anglicised, and that’s as it should be. We’re speaking English, not Italian. We talk about Rome and Naples, not Roma and Napoli. (Place names like Rome and Naples that differ from what the inhabitants call them are exonyms).

Another word whose grammatical status has changed during importation is spaghetti. We talk about ‘some spaghetti’, making it what is called a mass noun, like water or cheese. But the final –i gives the game away: it’s another plural. Italians talk about gli spaghetti, spaghetti buoni, etc. (‘the spaghetti’, ‘good spaghetti’, etc.).

I hope what I’ve said has given you a little taster – boom boom! – of Italian. There are masses of Collins resources if you’d like to take it further. In many ways, it’s one of the easier European languages to learn. And Italians will generally appreciate your making the effort.

To finish on a pizza-flavoured note, remember that in Italy people generally eat pizza with a knife and fork, not their hands. And a pizza there is very much a one-person dish. Which couldn’t be said for the pizza that Pizza Hut created last year in Los Angeles (where else?), at a whopping 13,990 square feet and 68,000 slices.

Buon appetito!

** In British English people tend to stress the third syllable, o-ri-GAH-no, in American English, the second, o-RE-ga-no, which is the syllable stressed in Spanish orégano and Italian origano.

*** ‘White pizza’, pizza bianca, doesn’t have a layer of tomato at all.

By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.