Introducing the "pizza pie"

November 14, 2023 7:26 PM

She introduced pizza to Canadian television in 1957. She's still around! The adorable story of a dietitian who filmed a TV pilot about pizza. Come for the nippy cheese, stay for her delightful family.
posted by humbug (23 comments total)

Were there really no Italians in Vancouver in 1957? Or was this more of a matter of nobody whatever even have the idea to check if this is how you make a dish, just let the pretty lady talk on television?
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:17 PM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

In the interview she claims pizza wasn't available in restaurants at the time, which is astounding, though I suppose pizza had to break into the mainstream Canadian consciousness at some point. As this is the nation that invented Hawaiian pizza, we clearly have never been tremendously concerned with notions of "authenticity".
posted by selenized at 8:45 PM on November 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Were there really no Italians in Vancouver in 1957?

Boston Pizza was founded by a group of Greek immigrants living in Edmonton in 1964, with the name chosen because "Boston" sounded foreign and exotic, if that helps to put the state of the culinary world around then, and the pizza corner of it in particular, in perspective.
posted by mhoye at 8:50 PM on November 14, 2023 [19 favorites]

Were there really no Italians in Vancouver in 1957? -

As a PNWer, 4 generations deep, to both Vancouver and Seattle (with a whole Italian branch there as early as 1895) - you really can't underestimate how far flung this corner of the world was back then, or where 'pizza' as we know it comes from in italy/the US. My Grandfather spoke exclusively Italian in Renton (just south of Seattle) until his early teens in the 1930s, and remarked once or twice that the first time he heard of pizza was after WWII.
posted by DarlingMonster at 8:59 PM on November 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

I knew exactly what this was about when I saw "pizza pie" and "nippy cheese"
posted by RobotHero at 9:37 PM on November 14, 2023

Here's the clip they're talking about
posted by RobotHero at 9:41 PM on November 14, 2023

Of course there were Italians in Vancouver in 1957. I was very surprised to learn that the first Italian-owned restaurant opened in that year (Nick’s Spaghetti) I can see how this got by.
posted by shock muppet at 11:43 PM on November 14, 2023

This is both cute and disgusting. It reminds me of my paternal grandma's cooking.

Anyway, I feel I saw a map of the spread of pizza before WW2 in Italy somewhere recently, and it was almost nowhere. So if you were an Italian immigrant from anywhere except Napoli, it would be foreign food to you. (I looked for those maps and found thousands of articles about the history of pizza. None of them seem to be reliable. But the dozen or so I looked at all agree that pizza didn't become wide-spread before the 1950s).
posted by mumimor at 1:24 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

That's adorable. She mispronounces "pizzeria".
posted by fortitude25 at 3:22 AM on November 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Food before shipping containers and the green revolution was far more local.

It's also fun to wonder what the Italians ate before the tomato showed up from the new world, and before pasta was brought over from China.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:44 AM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

The newest taste treat! You can eat it with your hands!
posted by Servo5678 at 4:54 AM on November 15, 2023

It's also fun to wonder what the Italians ate before the tomato showed up from the new world, and before pasta was brought over from China.

Looking it up is also fun!

Italian cuisine- History
Marco Polo (Pasta Myth)

There is a legend about Marco Polo importing pasta from China; however, it is actually a popular misconception, originating with the Macaroni Journal, published by a food industry association with the goal of promoting the use of pasta in the United States. Marco Polo describes in his book a food similar to "lasagna", but he uses a term with which he was already familiar. In fact, pasta had already been invented in Italy a long time before Marco Polo's travels to Asia. According to the newsletter of the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association and food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, the durum wheat was introduced by Arabs from Libya, during their rule over Sicily in the late 9th century, thus predating Marco Polo's travels by about four centuries. Steingarten also mentioned that Jane Grigson believed the Marco Polo story to have originated in the 1920s or 30s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.

posted by zamboni at 5:09 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

YouTube tells me that clip is unavailable in the US. Anyone got another link?
posted by briank at 6:04 AM on November 15, 2023

In the interview she claims pizza wasn't available in restaurants at the time, which is astounding, though I suppose pizza had to break into the mainstream Canadian consciousness at some point.

I’m a Canadian Gen-X type, and over the years I have heard from a few boomers of the arrival of pizza into their consciousness in the… early sixties, I guess? I recall one now-deceased bandmate as we chatted over delivery pizza during a break in recording: the place we had ordered from was a local institution and he was telling us of how amazing it was when he was a teenager that this new place called Capri opened up — not only did it have this incredible handheld cheese-centric bread dish but you could call them on the phone and they would send it right to your house! In an era when restaurant food was limited to maybe a couple dozen variations on one-protein-two-boiled-vegetables, this must have been dizzying.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:12 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

the Macaroni Journal

I think I saw them open for Dave Matthews Band once.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:13 AM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

In the interview she claims pizza wasn't available in restaurants at the time, which is astounding

My dad always talked about how unavailable pizza was in suburban 1950s/60s Massachusetts. Outside of Boston you could only really get it in bars as an appetizer. There weren't any places where you could just order a pizza and eat it. I don't know how true this is, but he always credited Papa Ginos with introducing the area to pizza as something you ate as a meal.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:22 AM on November 15, 2023

Were there really no Italians in Vancouver in 1957?
In the interview she claims pizza wasn't available in restaurants at the time, which is astounding,

The only place I can find it is this tweet, but there was a comic about pizza in Mad Magazine in July 1958 by a pre-Lighter Side Dave Berg. It hits all of the clichés of subsequent jokes about other about -"ethnic" food - it's a big trend, you need a cast-iron stomach, it's hard to eat, authenticity, weird ingredients. Note that Mad and Berg were very NYC based at the time.
posted by Superilla at 6:50 AM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

One of the ancestors of a former boss (a wonderful boss) of mine was the mayor of or some sort of bigwig in Chatham when the Hawaiian pizza was created, and family legend has it that said local politico/backroom dealer was somehow deeply, intimately involved in its creation. It’s such a weird thing to brag about that it’s probably true
posted by infinitewindow at 7:03 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's Amore

sung by Dean Martin in the 1953 movie The Caddy.
Nominated for an Academy Award for best original song 1953
posted by yyz at 8:17 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have heard from a few boomers of the arrival of pizza into their consciousness in the… early sixties

In my Pizza Styles FPP from September I posted a comment about my suburban-DC pizza experiences of the early 1960s.
posted by Rash at 8:53 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

The first mention of pizza in the New York Times was in September 1944, where it was described as:

One of the most popular dishes in southern Italy, especially in the vicinity of Naples, is pizza -- a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes. Cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and so on may be used.

posted by mhum at 11:03 AM on November 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

YouTube tells me that clip is unavailable in the US. Anyone got another link?

There is a clip in the linked story in the original post (scroll down) and it is available in the US.
posted by queensissy at 12:54 PM on November 15, 2023

So if you were an Italian immigrant from anywhere except Napoli, it would be foreign food to you.

This is probably what folks should take away from this. There is Italian-American cuisine, and geographically and historically separated from that, a host of different regional food traditions in Italy. Conflating the two is ahistorical and wrong, and will generally make Italians angry and sad.

Migration and history have muddied some of the distinctions, but you can be confident that Sant'Antuono Abate did not descend from the heavens in 1944 and bestow the one true pizza recipe upon Original Original Ray. There is no one true pizza, whatever the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana says - people made them according to what they could get, and what they knew, including the previously mentioned British Columbian dietician, leading to a rich panoply of pizza in the US and Canada, the vast majority of which would horrify a historical pizzaiolo.
posted by zamboni at 2:10 PM on November 15, 2023 [3 favorites]