Which came first? Pizza🍕 or Pie🥧?
Plus + what bestselling novelist Kerri Maher is reading.
This is a partial repost, so if you’ve seen this pizza recipe before, that’s because I shared it a couple of years back. But February 9th is National Pizza Day, and this “pizza” is SO good that it’s worth sharing again. It’s a wonderful winter comfort food.
Which Came First? Pizza or Pie?
We love two types of pies 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 in Apicius 7.9.1 for pastry-wrapped ham. The Romans often cooked meats in crusts, but they weren’t always meant for eating; they were meant 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 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 common through the Renaissance and Baroque eras.
Bartolomeo Scappi, in his 1570 cookbook The Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, among over a thousand recipes, includes dozens of sweet and savory pies. There are apple, peach, cherry pies, and all sorts of pies stuffed with meat or fish. One of my favorite Scappi recipes is for a pumpkin cheesecake pie. I make it every year at Thanksgiving now.
Scappi’s cookbook is also where we start to see the first overlap of the idea of pie and pizza. He has several pizza recipes, but none 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. Still, 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 used mainly as ornamental plants, 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 return 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 undoubtedly more a pie than a pizza! It’s a fruit and nut pie, not that dissimilar from mincemeat, sans the meat. It 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 perfect for a holiday table (or really, anytime).
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.
You can use a store-bought pie shell or your favorite recipe for the pie shell. 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.
What We’re Reading
Kerri Maher is the USA Today Bestselling author of fiction about women in history, notably The Paris Bookseller and All You Have to Do is Call. She lives with her daughter and dog in a suburb of Boston, MA. She loves to connect with readers on her newsletter and you can find her on Instagram. Her next novel, Summer of Love, releases in July 2026.
What I Just Finished Reading:
The Unwedding by Ally Condie. Honestly I picked this because it was on sale at LibroFM, it was a Reese pick, and I'd seen a lot of raves on Instagram - which were well-earned. The tense thriller really had me wondering whodunit, the evolving and layered grief of the main character kept me invested, and the often beautiful prose capturing the California coast impressed me.
What I’m Currently Reading:
I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself (a memoir) by Glynnis MacNicol - It's absolutely terrific! What starts as a sexually liberated romp through post-lockdown Paris becomes a wise and learned--and always accessible--meditation on aging, art and art history, flaneurs and odalisques. MacNicol is 46 in 2021 and fearless, and I can't help but feel a little more fearless reading her book.
What I’m Looking Forward To Reading:
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl - SO MANY people have recommended this novel to me, I think I finally have to read it (and stay in Paris a little longer following the MacNicol). I read one of Reichl's memoirs years ago, Comfort Me with Apples, and loved it for its vivid descriptions of the food scene in California in the 1970s, so I'm anticipating this as a great read.
Where I’ll Be
Join me at Wellesley Books for a fun Galentine’s event on Feb. 13th! Tickets here (the cost can be put toward the purchase of a book).
What’s Bringing Me Joy
The new Jovanotti album. And I love his videos. He always looks like he’s having so much fun (and this is true of his regular Instagram updates too).
But a bit more serious here…and what a beautiful video.
Thanks for Joining Me
If you love food and love Italy, and haven’t read THE CHEF’S SECRET or FEAST OF SORROW, click the links to learn where to buy your copy! And now you can order my latest, IN THE GARDEN OF MONSTERS!
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Hey Glynnis made it on! She's awesome. Don't know if a man could write her book though. What's charming in a woman is icky in a man : )
The newsletter is a joy as always.