It’s on a blistering afternoon in July, on a drab street called Via Della Meloria in Rome, that I realise that we’ve all been gormless victims of a great con. Perhaps we’ve never noticed because it’s been with us so long. Since those fuzzy days before Google. Before mobile phones. Before colour TV.

In that long-ago era of Chhaya Geet , Campa Cola and Premier Padminis, you couldn’t just pick up your telephone and order a ‘thin crust with smoked chicken and sundried tomatoes’. For many reasons. The first, of course, was that in those days most phones were dead, cross-connected or otherwise incapacitated. The second was that there was no Domino’s or Pronto’s around the corner. And the third was that, almost none of us knew what pizza was.

I remember the moment when ‘pizza’ entered my vocabulary. I was slaving over homework when my mother came home laden with parcels and news. She had just driven past a Mafco stall — one of those little shops that dispensed flavoured milks and toasted sandwiches — and noticed a new menu painted on the wooden shutters. The fancified fare included an item that none of us had ever tasted: Pizza.

We piled into our bronchial Fiat, scurried to the stall and demanded ‘peeza’. The shopkeeper looked first confused and then abashed. “Peejhha,” he confessed, was a project for the future. So we got toasties.

The disappointment was short-lived. Mumbai and Delhi were ready for a slice of margherita — and soon enough a slew of fast food restaurants popped up. Then the aunties jumped into the fray. They swapped tomato sauce recipes and experimented with bread pizzas and bun pizzas and discovered that some bakeries actually made saucer-sized pizza bases. And soon birthday parties featured wodges of pale bread, topped with a tomato-onion sauce, chopped capsicum and grated Amul cheese. As did snooty clubs, Udipi restaurants and streetside stalls. These spread-and-sprinkle creations reigned supreme for years, till the arrival of Domino’s with its 30-minute promise and tandoori fiestas.

For decades, I viewed pizzas as convenient fast food. Till a recent trip to Italy taught me that you also find glorious art in drab side streets with overflowing garbage bins. Through our trip, we’d sampled marvellous pizza. Massive triangles dotted with spicy salami at a budget-eria in Venice. Pies topped with a brilliantly red, piquant sauce and wobbly mozzarella that we consumed on the steps of a Florence church. Oval pinsas, an ancient cousin of the more trendy pizza, smothered with four cheeses, honey and walnuts at a busy Rome eatery. An eggplant and bell pepper beauty gobbled in a rude, sticky restaurant near the Trevi fountain.

Along the way we also encountered the bust of Margherita, the queen of a gazillion menus. Legend has it that in 1889, when Queen Margherita visited Naples, a local pizza maker created three varieties in her honour. She loved the pie topped with tomato, basil and mozzarella and food history was made.

But it is while I squished against the counter of Pizzarium, a modest eatery just outside the Vatican, that I actually realised the grand deception. What I’ve been eating all my life is as close to real pizza as a plastic fridge magnet of David is to Michelangelo’s sculpture.

Pizzarium is run by the man referred to as ‘the Michelangelo of pizzas’. Gabriele Bonci refuses to be tied down to a menu and decides his creations according to his mood and haul at the market. In a year he serves about 1,500 varieties that, as is the custom in Rome, are sold by weight in rectangular slices. Behind the counter is a veritable garden. One pizza is zigzagged with a leafy green herb, another dotted with zucchini, yet another layered with golden potato. Another emerges fresh from the oven, heaped with tuna. We try a pizza topped with creamy codfish and another covered in mozzarella. The four cheese with mushroom is hearty and savoury. The pizza rossa — that manages perfection with just a tomato sauce on Bonci’s magnificent bread — is sweet and zingy. But in every case the base is so light that you feel you are biting through air, till you reach the crunch at the bottom.

The word ‘pizza’ was first recorded in the 10th century, in a Latin manuscript which granted ‘the bishop of Gaeta twelve pizzas every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday’. Since the days of that well-fed bishop, tastes have developed differently. In Rome they like their pizzas thin and crisp, in Naples they like them soft and chewy, and in Chicago they like them drowned in toppings. Still, there are some basic rules.

The pernickety Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana insists that authentic pizza has to be baked on the floor of a wood-fired oven, at 485°C. Chef Giorgio Locatelli insists on ‘the perfect balance between a thin crisp base and a softer garnish, which is why you have to eat it within five–six minutes of it coming out of the oven, or it will be soggy and spoilt’.

Sadly, we have few options. So unless we convert our kids’ bedroom into a wood-fired oven, it’s back to Vegetariana pizza in a soggy cardboard box for us.

An easy Margherita

(though the Associazione guys will sniff)

300g bread flour

1 tsp instant yeast

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp olive oil

500g tomatoes, halved

3 cloves garlic

1/2 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp caster sugar

Fresh basil

1 garlic clove, crushed

125g mozzarella, sliced

Grated parmesan

1. Put the flour into a large bowl, stir in yeast and salt. Make a well, pour 200ml warm water and olive oil and mix with a wooden spoon until you have soft, moist dough.

2. Knead for five minutes on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Cover with a tea towel and set aside.

3. Put tomatoes, garlic and olive oil in a saucepan. Cover and cook for 10 minutes on medium heat. Add sugar. Remove lid and boil for five minutes. Cool, then sieve. Mix in basil and crushed garlic, and season to taste.

4. On a floured surface, roll out dough into thin rounds, about 25cm across. Lift onto two floured baking sheets.

5. Heat oven to 240°C. Put another baking sheet on the top shelf. Smooth sauce over bases. Scatter cheese, drizzle olive oil, season. Put one pizza, still on its baking sheet, on top of preheated sheet. Bake for eight-10 minutes until crisp. Repeat for remaining pizza.

S habnam Minwallais a journalist and author of The Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street

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