O que faz uma pizza Perfeita?

What makes the perfect pizza?

Pizzas are more popular than ever, but their history has been suprisingly eventful

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How do you like yours? Photograph: Studio Eye/Corbis

It seems it's boom-time for pizza chains. Now that we're all staring into the abyss of financial extinction, we've turned to pizza for comfort in our hour of incipient poverty. Which is ironically and nicely circular, because pizza started out as a food of the poor.

Flat breads smeared with a few highly flavoured ingredients have been staples around the Mediterranean since the dawn of them and us. The Romans filled up on lagnum or pictae, and you'll find pizza equivalents in Provence (pissaladiere), Turkey (pide) and the Lebanon (lahma), but it was the Neapolitans who first put their finger on pizza's commercial potential in the 19th century.

It's assumed that'd be where to go to find the perfect pizza. Not in my experience. In fact, I have had better pizzas almost everywhere else in Italy. The pizza's ubiquity is historical testimony to the huge internal migrations from the south to the north, as impoverished southerners moved northwards to provide the raw energy that powered Italy's economic growth between 1960 and 1980. Peasants from Campania, Calabria and Basilicata took their foods with them, putting down roots and setting up pizzerias wherever fortune took them.

Pizza, in fact, carries multiple historical burdens. Taken to America, it's progress described the American dream perfectly. It arrived a thin, poor, undernourished thing, a pure peasant dish. It came into contact with a land of opportunity. The pizza suddenly went super-sized, king-sized, over-sized, deep-pan and cheese-injected. It showed that anyone could become a millionaire in America, even if it was a calorie millionaire.

And taken to England, it's become high street chains such as Pizza Express, Strada, Prezzo, Ask and has acquired topping combinations that would cause Italian pizzaioli to down tools. Pineapple, prosciutto ham, field mushrooms, mozzarella, tomato or chicken and peppadew sweet peppers, mixed with cajun spices, garlic and red onion, to name but two.

I must confess, that when it comes to pizza, I am for strict orthodoxy – thin, crisp crust, with a minimal amount of spring to it; intense tomato used sparingly; good (but not top) grade mozzarella, applied with a light hand; a few anchovy fillets, a scattering of capers; and an olive or two.

Less is more when it comes to pizzas as far as I am concerned. But you may feel differently. Go on, what's your idea of pizza perfection?

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