It's the Brian Lera Show on WNYC.

Welcome back, everybody.

I'm Kusha Navidar, filling in for Brian today.

Now we'll wrap up today's show with the continuation of our WNYC Centennial series called

100 Years of 100 Things.

Number nine on the list is pizza, one of New York's most famous foods, or is it Italian?

Well, I think we're going to agree.

It's delicious.

And who better to answer these questions than our next guest, Ian McAllen, Italian-American food expert and author of Red Sauce, how Italian food became American.

He joins us now sitting right across the desk for me to dig into the history of this cheesy, saucy, crusty delicacy loved by all. Ian, welcome to WNYC.

Good morning. How are you doing? Great. I'm a little hungry. I'm happy. This is our last

segment. Get us started off with pizza's origin story. Where does it come from? Is it Italian-American?

Why do we have such a hard time pinpointing its roots? Well, so the sort of distant cousin of pizza goes back thousands of years across the Mediterranean basin.

This includes Jewish-style matzah, Greek pita, which might actually be where the term pizza comes from.

But what we think of pizza today, round crust with cheese and tomato sauce, really develops

in the 19th century in Naples.

And, you know, of course, across the Italian peninsula, there are all sorts of flatbreads.

And some of those manifest themselves in a modern sense of the square slices, the Sicilian that we see in New York. But the round pizza is really a Neapolitan thing that comes out of the 19th century in the working class neighborhoods. The poorest laborers were eating this as a regular sort of fast food, so to speak.

And literally, we had delivery in the 19th century.

They would pack it up into look carts and people would come door to door to sell it.

There was also fried pizza, which you can still get now in Italy, which is delicious. But that kind of fell

out of favor because it was actually cheaper to make wood-fired pizza, the little round ones.

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