The History of Pizza

How was pizza invented? Let’s learn about a delicious slice of history!

Let’s go back more than 2,000 years. People in Italy were baking a flat kind of bread. They put toppings on it, like onions, meat, and cheese. Some people even used fruit as a topping! This food was an early version of pizza. It was an early kind of pizza. 

By the 1700s, Italians called this food “pizza.” At first, it didn’t have tomatoes on it. Many people thought tomatoes were poisonous!

But toppings like meat and cheese cost a lot of money. Tomatoes were cheap. 

Over time, people learned that tomatoes were safe to eat. Plus, they were delicious. By the late 1700s, people tried them on pizzas. Tomatoes made pizza scrumptious. 

By the early 1900s, pizza with tomatoes and cheese was famous in Italy. But most Americans hadn’t heard of it!

Many Italians now lived in New York, but very few of them made pizza. It was hard to make. You needed a huge oven. The oven took hours to get hot.

Then, a man named Frank Mastro had an idea. In the 1930s, he invented a new type of pizza oven. It was much smaller. It got hot quickly. It made scrumptious pizza!

A lot of people bought his new oven. They opened pizza restaurants in New York and all over the country.

Today, you can find pizza all over the world. Most pizzas have tomato sauce and cheese. Many have toppings like pepperoni.

In Sweden, you can find pizza with bananas on it. In Australia, you can eat pizza topped with crocodile meat!

What are your favorite pizza toppings?