It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc. Welcome back everybody. I'm Cusha Navadar filling in for Brian today.

Now we'll wrap up today's show with a continuation of our WNYC Centennial series called a hundred years of a hundred things.

Number nine on the list is pizza one of New York's most famous foods or is it Italian? Well I think we can agree it's delicious and who

better to answer these questions than our next guest Ian Mac Allen 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, you know, thousands of years across the

Mediterranean Basin.

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

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

really develops in the 19th century. 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

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