PIZZA ORIGIN SERIES

“Food is a tangible and fun way to connect our visitors to the story of immigration,” said the Superintendent of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island, John Piltzecker. The five pizza establishments represented in the exhibit were out in front of the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration today, giving away their pizza to visitors arriving by ferry. From New York to Chicago to California, Americans consume more than three billion pizzas a year. The origins of pizza, as we know it today, can be traced back to 17 th century Naples, and it was brought to America by Italian immigrants in the late 19 th century. There’s the thickness and crispiness of the crust, the ratio of sauce to cheese, and then there are toppings. Have you ever asked a New Yorker where to get the best pizza? You could be in for a long conversation. Five purveyors of one of America’s favorite foods have been invited to share their crusty craftsmanship and their founder's immigration stories with a temporary exhibit in the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. And in the opinion of this author, it would be difficult to think that a queen not only deigned to prove it, but to give her name.Ellis Island, NY/NJ (June 12, 2019) – The National Park Service and Evelyn Hill Inc., the food service concessionaire at the Statue of Liberty since 1931 and Ellis Island since 2009, have cooked up a way to celebrate pizza.

PIZZA ORIGIN SERIES

The historian John Dickie in the documentary series ‘History of Italian food’, points out that in those years pizza was not only a food consumed only by the poorest (who were the majority), also in Naples the pizza had been associated with the transmission of diseases, following the recent epidemics of cholera. In addition, the letter is addressed to Raffaele Esposito Brandi, being strange at that time the mention of the second surname, but very convenient for the Brandi brothers, his nephews, and owners of Raffaele’s famed restaurant since 1932. In fact, the stay of the kings Humberto and Margarita in Naples was recorded in 1889, at which time the legend places the origin of the creation of the famous pizza.īut from this point discrepancies are detected, because a pizza recipe prepared with the same ingredients was found in a book about the city of Naples dated 1830, 59 years before our history.īesides, the myth is based on the existence of a letter of thanks of the queen to the cook, written by the queen’s chamberlain, and that was exposed in the own restaurant of his heirs. However, both the stamp of the letter and the writing do not agree with other similar documents of the time. A few days later the chamberlain of the queen sent him a note of thanks which can still be seen today in the Pizzeria Brandi, whose owners are descendants of Esposito.

The master pizza chef put his hands on the dough and cooked three pizzas, two, the most famous in the city and a third one, his latest invention and the one that she liked the most was the pizza with the tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and basil, which colors also coincided with the Italian flag.Įsposito did not hesitate to baptize his new recipe in honor of the queen, and asked her in return to put the royal seal on his pizzeria. Queen Margaret Teresa of Savoy had heard of pizza and asked that the most famous chef in the city, Raffaele Esposito, prepare three types of pizza for her, because she had had enough of the gourmet French food so consumed by the European royalty and wanted to try something indigenous.

According to the legend, in 1889 the kings of Italy Humberto and Margaret spent a few days in the Neapolitan palace in Capodimonte.

Pizza origin