BTW, anyone arguing for a "purist" approach to cuisine: are you serious?
The history of cuisine is nothing but an ever-changing, ever-expanding festival of exploration.
Yesterday's "Yuck!" is Tomorrow's "Tasty!"
Happens over and over. Rinse, repeat.
I realize sometimes some people are behind the curve. :wink:
Food Timeline: food history & vintage recipes
Well of course, but for all the successful experiments there are countless thousands of failures.
Besides, my personal preference for authenticity doesn't exclude innovation, it just means that I prefer that if someone calls something "pizza" it be at least comparable to the truly mind boggling food experience I'd have if I had pizza at Mateo's on the Via Tribunali in Naples.
If it doesn't sit somewhere on a scale which that experience sets then it's not Pizza IMO. In my experience "pizza" restaurants which put pineapple on their "pizza" produce something which may well be delicious to many people, but bears no relationship to Mateo's Pizza, and should in my opinion be called something else so that people expecting Pizza are fairly warned that in fact they aren't ordering Pizza but something completely different which should be judged according to its nearest culinary analogues.
For instance, Turkish "pizza" is called Lahmacun, it shares some basic features in common with Italian Pizza but is in many ways very different, but because I'm ordering Lahmacun and not Pizza I'm not going to be comparing it to Pizza but to other Lahmacun food experiences I may have had. I wont therefore be confounded by the dissimilarities, and possibly disappointed because I was expecting a Pizza experience when what I got was a Lahmacun experience.
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