‘Tis the season for pie, right? There are two types of pies that we love with a passion: fruit or meat pies in a crust, and pizza pies. Dean Martin (and countless gondoliers in the years since) made the “pizza pie” phrase famous in the song That’s Amore. But you might be wondering why we might even say the words pizza pie together at all, considering we tend to think of pizza and pie as two very different things. What if I told you that at one point, they weren’t?
The ancient Egyptians first gave us the beginnings of pie, in a galette form with honey filling and a crust of oats, wheat, rye, or barley. These treats gave way to other types of pastries, and just as we love sweets now, they were popular then, so much so that there are pictures of slaves carrying pies on the tomb walls of Pharaoh Ramesses II (1304 to 1237 B.C.E.) in the Valley of the Kings.
The ancient Romans used pie-like crusts for cooking meats, such as that in Apicius 7.9.1 for pastry-wrapped ham. The Romans often would cook meats in crusts, but the crusts weren’t always meant for eating, but to make the meat more delectable. This was true for the next few centuries. Many medieval pies looked very much like the pies we know and love today, but the crusts were thick and generally inedible, meant more for cooking meats over an open fire. That’s also where we get the term “pot pie” because the crusts had to be cut open to reach the meat inside. These types of pies were typically savory, with lamb, chicken, beef, goat, or small birds.
Pies were so popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that they were often part of the entertainment. That’s right, the nursery rhyme of four and twenty blackbirds wasn’t just a nursery rhyme! In fact, Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi took it to another level, describing a banquet with live birds flying out of pies and pastry castles! Birds baked in pies were quite common all the way through the Renaissance and into the Baroque eras.
Bartolomeo Scappi, in his 1570 cookbook The Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, among over thousand recipes, includes dozens of pies, both sweet and savory. There are apple, peach and cherry pies, as well as all sorts of pies stuffed with meat or fish. One of my favorite Scappi recipes for pies is for a pumpkin cheesecake pie.
Scappi’s cookbook is also where we start to see the first overlap of the idea of pie and pizza. He has several recipes for pizza, but none of them come close to that of a flat crust topped with cheese, sauce, and meats or vegetables. Instead, his pizzas were sweet. Instead, these "flaky pizzas" range from what we might think of as flaky pastries and donuts, to something that seems like it might be akin to what we know of as a Dutch Baby. There is one, however, that begins to make the use of cheese:
V.130 Get two pounds of fine flour and make up a dough with six ounces of Parmesan cheese that has been ground in a mortar, moistened with a fat broth and rosewater and strained; add in three ounces of sugar, six egg yolks, three ounces of breadcrumb soaked in a fat broth, half an ounce of cinnamon and half an ounce of cloves and nutmeg together. Knead the dough for an hour and make a thin sheet of it. Brush melted butter on it and make a twist of it with the sheet rolled in four layers lengthwise; brush it with melted butter that is not too hot. With that twist make several small cakes, fry them in butter or rendered fat and bake them in an oven in a tourte pan just as twists are done. Serve them hot with sugar over them.
Of course, fruit pies made their way across Europe and over to America, where, despite being around for centuries prior, settlers decided the apple pie was unique to them. America’s first cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons (1796), includes two recipes for apple pie.
Eventually, these sweet pizzas gave way to what we know of as pizza, but not until much later on, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Red sauce definitely wasn’t a thing as the Italians didn't use tomatoes--as part of the nightshade family, they were thought to be poisonous. Plus, the juice from these fruits would run all over the pewter dishes of the wealthy, thereby leaching the lead from the plates and killing people. The peasant population ate off wood or clay dishes and didn't have this problem, but the tomato’s reputation was cemented for a few centuries after they first arrived in America from early Spanish explorers. For a long while, they were largely used as an ornamental plant, but when famine became widespread in Europe, peasants didn’t let a little rumor of poison deter them. Once they realized tomatoes wouldn't kill them, they began eating them on flatbread, and then it likely wasn't much more time before red sauce, cheese, and meat toppings followed. The first recipe for tomato sauce was in Antonio Latini’s cookbook The Modern Steward (1692-94), and it's really more of what we know of as a salsa than a sauce you’d find on pizza. Over the next century, Neopolitans began adding tomatoes to flatbread, and modern pizza was born.
But let’s go back to Bartolomeo Scappi and his version of “Neapolitan Pizza.” What I love is that he points out that the Neapolitans have been calling some sort of concoction “pizza” for much longer than many may have thought:
V1.142 To prepare a tourte with various ingredients, called pizza by Neapolitans. Get six ounces of shelled Milanese almonds, four ounces of shelled, soaked pine nuts, three ounces of fresh, pitted dates, three ounces of dried figs and three ounces of seeded muscatel raisins; grind all that up in a mortar. Into it add eight fresh raw egg yolks, six ounces of sugar, an ounce of ground cinnamon, an ounce and a half of crumbled musk-flavored Neapolitan mostaccioli and four ounces of rosewater. When everything is mixed together, get a tourte pan that is greased and lined with a sheet of royal pastry dough; into it put the filling, mixed with four ounces of fresh butter, letting it come up to no more than a finger in depth. Without it being covered, bake it in an oven. Serve it hot or cold, whichever you like. Into that pizza you can put anything that is seasoned.
This is certainly more a pie than a pizza! It’s really a fruit and nut pie, not that dissimilar from mincemeat, sans the meat. Seems the Neapolitans had many versions of “pizza” long before Queen Margherita had her first taste in 1889!
Here’s the recipe for Bartolomeo Scappi’s Neapolitan Pizza, modified for modern audiences. It’s absolutely delicious, and the recipe easily stands up after five hundred years! It’s a rich, wintry dish that would be perfect for your holiday table.
Bartolomeo Scappi’s Neapolitan Pizza
(aka Fruit and Nut Pie)
Note: One of the ingredients in this recipe is mostaccioli, which, in the Renaissance, was a biscuit that was often used in recipes as a binder and not the sweet cookies that you might know of today. If you want to make your own mostaccioli, you can head here for a few different recipe versions, or instead, substitute plain biscotti or a cookie like Biscottini di Novara or Pavesini cookies, often found in Italian food stores, or ordered online from Eataly. You could even use something like Nilla Wafers in a pinch. Whatever you choose, it shouldn’t have too much flavor and should be a crispy type of cookie. Scappi’s mostaccioli were flavored with the essence of musk. I didn’t worry about this aspect of the recipe. Getting the anal glands of a now-endangered musk deer isn’t so easy (or desirable) for a modern chef!
Scappi also ends his recipe with, “Into that pizza you can put anything that is seasoned.” According to Terence Scully, the translator of Scappi’s book, that would generally mean something like candied orange peel or other types of sweet condiments. Although optional, adding candied orange peel does make a difference.
For the pie shell, you can use a store-bought pie shell or use your favorite recipe. I’m rather partial to Martha Stewart’s easy recipe, which uses the same ingredients as Scappi’s pastry crusts, although he would have used rosewater instead of ice water. Scappi used rosewater in everything, but it can be overpowering, so I halved the amount of rosewater in this recipe, which works much better for a modern palate.
Ingredients
6 oz. ( 1 ¼ cup) shelled almonds
4 oz (¾ cup) pinenuts
3 oz (approx 10-12) pitted dates
3 oz (approx 12-14) dried figs
3 oz (½ cup) raisins
8 egg yolks
6 oz (¾ cups) sugar
1 tbsp cinnamon
2 oz (¼ cup) rosewater
1.5 oz (¼ cup) ground mostaccioli or biscotti cookies
4 oz (½ stick) butter
2 tbsp chopped candied orange peel (optional)
1 pie shell
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400° F/200° C.
Grind the first five ingredients (almonds through raisins) in a food processor. You may need to work in batches because these are dense, sticky ingredients.
Add the egg yolks, sugar, cinnamon, ground cookies, rosewater and butter and mix until it forms a thick paste.
Fill the pie crust with the mixture. Bake for 15 minutes then lower the temperature to 325° F/160 C° and bake for another 30 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
This pie is equally good hot or cold. Store leftovers in the refrigerator.
Note: This recipe was first published in The Cook’s Cook.
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WHAT’S BRINGING ME JOY THIS WEEK
Cats are always going to win.
I’ve discovered cartoonist Gemma Correll on Threads and I love her sense of humor. Also, if you are the kind of person who is still looking for holiday cards you can buy these from her too!
YouTuber Liam Thompson laughing at all the tech we used to have back in the 80s.
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