A 1930 guide to dining out in New York defined pizza as “a inch-thick, potato pan-cake, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and stewed tomatoes.”

I don’t know how accurate this article is, but find it interesting how many pizzerias were listed from 1958 until 2010 in NY.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/11/30/how-new-york-became-a-pizza-capital/

Page 10 in this article from The Italian Academy tells about how pizza became popular in the 50’s. I had to chuckle when I read this part of the article:

A good starting point to observe how popular magazines dealt with Italian Food in the 1950s is the case of pizza. Before the war, most non-Italian Americans were completely unfamiliar with it. A 1930 guide to dining out in New York defined pizza as “a inch-thick, potato pan-cake, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese and stewed tomatoes.” In 1947, The New York Times Magazine introduced readers to a recipe for making pizza at home, claiming that the Italian specialty, a favorite in New York’s Little Italies, “could be as popular a snack as the hamburger, if only the Americans knew more about it.”22 The prescience is astonishing, as a national market for pizza was created overnight.

http://www.italianacademy.columbia.edu/publications/working_papers/2003_2004/paper_sp04_Cinotto.pdf

I think there are good references in the pdf document above that could be researched more.



Norma