This just in: Vietti winemaker Luca Currado and my friend and client Tony Vallone will be presenting Luca’s family’s wines on January 18, 2017 at Tony’s in Houston. I’ll be there. Please join me. It’s going to be a night to remember, for sure.
In the decade that I lived and played music in New York City, I came to learn all the best spots for late-night Manhattan slices as my band’s drummer and I lugged our gear back uptown from our downtown gigs. Oh man, who doesn’t relish a hot slice at 2 a.m. after a night of drinking flat beer and strumming a Telecaster???!!!
Today, the question of pizza and the existential question of pepperoni or regular? play a new and outsized dialectical role in my life: our youngest daughter prefers “cheese” while our oldest waivers between her allegiances to pepperoni and cheese.
The joy, alone, in hearing the word pepperoni uttered by a child, with its trochaic mellifluence, is truly priceless, btw: peh-peh-ROOOOOOH-nee.
My parental pondering of pepperoni pizza led me recently to reflect on the origin of the nomenclature. After all, in Italian, peperoni denotes what we call bell peppers in English. If you ordered a pizza ai pep[p]eroni in Italy, they’d bring you a pizza with bell peppers and not with thinly sliced, slightly spicy sausage.
A Google search prompted by my curiosity led me to a lovely 2011 article by Julia Moskin for the New York Times (our president-elect’s favorite paper!), “Pepperoni: On Top.”
What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.
“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Apulia are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Evidently, the sausage name is a corruption of the Italian peperoncino, as in the little peppers used to impart heat and color to the salami.
Digging a little deeper into my philological neuroses, I discovered that the earliest known printed reference to pep[p]eroni sausage actually dates back to 1888 (the year Nietzsche began to lose his mind) in the Times of London.
This early mention of pepperoni in a list of types of dried sausage leads me to believe that pepperoni might not be an Italian-American invention but rather a food product that is Italo-Britannic in origin (something that is highly plausible).
But I found an even more significant and telling mention in the United States government Yearbook of Agriculture for 1894 (published by the U.S. Government Printing Office), a mention that appears some 25 years before Mariani’s editio princeps.
A mealtime and snacktime favorite of millions of Americans, sausages include a wide assortment of seasoned and processed meat products… Some sausages are dried during processing. Dried sausages like pepperoni, thuringer, and dry salmi are quite firm, very flavorful, and normally do not need to be refrigerated.
Herein lies the rub, as it were. Pizza, as we knew it in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before the pseudo-Neapolitan pizza craze of the 2000s, probably emerged during the “Me” era (that’s the 1970s for you millennials). We think of pizza as an ancient food form. And it is. But the pizza of the 1960s probably didn’t resemble the pizzas pictured in this post, for example. It was the rise of canned tomatoes and processed cheese in the post-war boom of the 1960s that probably made pizza as-we-knew-it possible in the decades that followed.
The passage from the 1894 yearbook reveals that pepperoni sausage was already popular (at snacktimes and mealtimes) in the U.S. by the dawn of the 19th century, long before the great waves of Italian immigration began to take shape in north America. And its popularity was probably owed in some measure to the fact that it didn’t require refrigeration.
Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s probably why it became such a popular pizza topping: it was easy and inexpensive to store.
Regardless of its origins and its linguistic and cultural disconnect, pepperoni pizza is one of America’s great gifts to the world imho. There’s just nothing like a late-night slice after a gig and there’s nothing like the smile on a child’s face as she contemplates: cheese or pepperoni?
Please click here to visit the Italian Grape Name and Appellation Project and listen to Italian grape growers pronounce the names of their grapes and appellations.
The only question isn’t whether or not we should eat pepperoni; it’s which pepperoni is the best. Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza. Others are looking for a (slightly) healthier, flat disc. We prefer our oversized large diameter pepperoni to ensure you get a little in each bite.
Since that time in the 1960s there’s been no looking back. Most Americans hear the word “pizza” and immediately visualize a cheese pie with pepperoni on top. It’s that simple.
What isn’t in dispute is its popularity. Of the three billion pizzas consumed annually by Americans, pepperoni accounts for a whopping 53%. We’re not surprised—it’s the favorite topping of Pizzeria Locale customers, too!
Readers of this blog will remember that pizza originated in Naples, prepared with simple and fresh ingredients: a basic dough, raw tomatoes, fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil, and olive oil. There weren’t any additional toppings, and in fact even tomatoes didn’t hit the dough until the late 1800s.
And speed became essential. As pizza gained in popularity in the United States and chain franchises (like Pizza Hut and Domino’s) began opening, ingredients needed to be mass-produced, easy to supply, and—most of all—readily available. Pepperoni filled all those requirements. “Pepperoni wasn’t really something people were doing a whole lot of until the chains really started popping up,” admits Ezzo.
Evidently, the sausage name is a corruption of the Italian peperoncino, as in the little peppers used to impart heat and color to the salami.
Today, the question of pizza and the existential question of pepperoni or regular? play a new and outsized dialectical role in my life: our youngest daughter prefers “cheese” while our oldest waivers between her allegiances to pepperoni and cheese.
Herein lies the rub, as it were. Pizza, as we knew it in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before the pseudo-Neapolitan pizza craze of the 2000s, probably emerged during the “Me” era (that’s the 1970s for you millennials). We think of pizza as an ancient food form. And it is. But the pizza of the 1960s probably didn’t resemble the pizzas pictured in this post, for example. It was the rise of canned tomatoes and processed cheese in the post-war boom of the 1960s that probably made pizza as-we-knew-it possible in the decades that followed.
A mealtime and snacktime favorite of millions of Americans, sausages include a wide assortment of seasoned and processed meat products… Some sausages are dried during processing. Dried sausages like pepperoni, thuringer, and dry salmi are quite firm, very flavorful, and normally do not need to be refrigerated.
Digging a little deeper into my philological neuroses, I discovered that the earliest known printed reference to pep[p]eroni sausage actually dates back to 1888 (the year Nietzsche began to lose his mind) in the Times of London.
How to Order a Pepperoni Pizza in Italy – Italy Quick Tips | Collette
Why is pepperoni called peperone?
The word pepperoni was invented by Americans; in Italy they typically serve spiced salami as their meaty pizza topping of choice. In fact, in Italy, Peperone (as they spell it) means something very different indeed. Science Direct describes pepperoni as a “raw sausage made from beef and pork or pork only.”
What is a pepperoni pizza?
Science Direct describes pepperoni as a “raw sausage made from beef and pork or pork only.” It’s a common meat topping for many a hungry American pizza eater (36% of all pizzas in the US, to be exact). But in Italy, the meaning is a bit different. Peperone actually translates to roasted red bell peppers, according to HuffPost.
Which pepperoni to eat in Italy?
So, for those traveling to Italy who want to sample an authentic Italian version of the American relative pepperoni, depending on where you are, you should ask for salame or salamino piccante, or salsiccia piccante (spicy salame or dried sausage), characteristic mostly of the South. You will not be disappointed.
Where did pepperoni come from?
In 1919 Italian immigrants in New York City created pepperoni. It is a cured dry sausage, with similarities to the spicy salamis of southern Italy on which it is based, such as salsiccia or soppressata.