La vera Pizza - The Soul of Naples - A Slice of Italy's History, Heart, and Table #999162

A LOVE LETTER WITH A CRUST
There are dishes that feed you, and there are dishes that tell you who a people are. Pizza belongs to the second kind. It is bread and fire and tomato and cheese, yes — but it is also a Neapolitan grandmother's Sunday, a bricklayer's cheap and honest lunch two centuries ago, a queen's compliment to a pizzaiolo, and today, a language spoken and understood on every continent without a single word.

I have spent my life around Italian tables, and no dish has taught me more about my country than pizza. It is humble — born from the poorest kitchens of Naples — and yet it has become one of the most recognized foods on Earth. It carries the geography of Italy in its regional forms: thin and blistered in Naples, cracker-crisp in Rome, thick and golden in Sicily, folded and fried in the back alleys of the Spanish Quarter. It carries the seasons in its toppings. And it carries, above almost anything else we cook, the story of how Italians turned scarcity into something the whole world now craves.
This book is my attempt to give English-speaking readers the Italian pizza in full: where it came from, why it looks the way it does, the small facts and legends that Italians grow up hearing, the regional variations most tourists never taste, and — at the heart of it — recipes you can actually make at home, written the way I would explain them to a friend standing beside me in the kitchen.

I have organized the book so you can read it start to finish like a story, or open it anywhere and cook. Either way, my hope is the same: that by the last page, you don't just know more about pizza. You feel, even a little, why we Italians love it so fiercely.

“Pizza is not fast food. Pizza is slow love, cooked fast.”
  — Guido Valli

A note on ingredients: I have written every recipe assuming you are shopping outside Italy, and I suggest substitutes where a true Italian ingredient is hard to find. But I encourage you, whenever you can, to seek out San Marzano tomatoes, real buffalo mozzarella, and Italian 00 flour. They are not snobbery — they are the difference between a good pizza and the pizza that made Naples famous.
Buon appetito, and welcome to my table.