Italy's pizza detectives
32 comments
·August 3, 2025logifail
MarcelOlsz
>"on mass"
En masse?
PeterWhittaker
Makes me think of those who pronounce "coup de grâce" as "coupe de gras". Ew.
Once I tried pointing this out. The speaker said "it doesn't matter". Sure, bud, enjoy your lard. Ew.
logifail
> En masse?
My French is just fine - merci beaucoup - yet unfortunately yet another HN thread gets distracted from the intention of a post by someone determined to focus on semantics :/
gowld
PP was asking to clarify your English, not your French, so that readers could understand what you were trying to express with your neologism.
fsckboy
yes, but to be fair, for an english speaker, en masse is pronounced more like "on mass" than like "en mass".
to be more french, say "awning" but lose the entire "-ning" part, and then "mass", like the "a" in father, not the "a" in cat.
pseudolus
It's amusing to read some of the early articles, such as one that appeared in the New York Times ("Pizza a pie Popular in Southern Italy, Is Offered Here for Home Consumption"), explaining to the mainstream what pizza is and heralding its availability as take-out in the US: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1781097393301119360?lang=e...
tossandthrow
Flat bread topped with some sort of condements is expected to have independently discovered basically everywhere where they had bread in some incarnation.
The Italians really did their marketing well to get the attribution
bavent
Quesadilla? Pizza. Taco? Folded pizza. Calzone - taco, therefore folded pizza. Toast with jam? Sweet pizza. Shit on a shingle? Military pizza.
pfcd
Any food without bread? Pizza without bread.
Pizza without bread? Pizza without bread.
Pizza? Pizza.
Pizza with pizza? Pizza++.
deathanatos
Pizza is toast, unless it's deep dish then it's quiche: https://cuberule.com/
A quesadilla is a sandwich, though.
fsckboy
the italians have plenty of flat breads with condiments (try foccacia), and they are not pizza. those italians don't say "hey, we invented that too", nor should anybody else.
we all agree what pizza means at least till the point we need to duke it out over pineapple (which is not pizza)
i'm reminded of an old Lake Wobegon piece about Minnesota tacos (pronounced to rhyme with tack-o). they're made with folded over white bread and with your flannel sleeves rolled up because the juice will run down your arms
afandian
By coincidence I heard an interview on Radio 4 today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gqz2 41:00
Approx transcript:
> by the 1970s Italy had left its peasant origins behind it had become an industrial consumerist, democracy, and at that point, people start to get nostalgic, and they make the past simple for themselves by turning it into recipes, turning into simple forms. And that has become actually, and this is another novelty, very politicised in recent years. The current government, which of all the various right wing parties have been in power since 1994, is the one that most is most proud of its sort of fascist DNA, if I feel like, it's linked to historical links to Mussolini's fascist Party. They've really wedded themselves to this idea, this food nostalgia, this idea of defending Italian culture against contamination from abroad or wherever it might be.
fsckboy
pizza got bigger (than in Italy) first in America, and that started to happen well before the actual Fascists. So, no, pizza standards are not a nostalgic defense against contamination.
French winemakers started defending their region names as trademarks in the middle of the last century (picked up steam in 1960s to 1970s) and cheese followed, and the rest of the Europe too. That's where the joke "real Existentialism must come from France, otherwise you just have sparkling anxiety" comes from.
As one rather benign example, Hungary and Slovakia asserted rights to the name of the wine Tokaji/Tokai and in 2007 Friuli Italy had to stop using that name for their wine, a name they had been using for hundreds of years (though the grape is still called Tokai in Italy). In Hungary, the measure of quality/sweetness of the wine (it's a dessert wine) is called Puttonyos. The Italians now call their wine Friulano (not a dessert wine in particular); I want the Italians to start measuring their quality in Putanas just to give the finger to Hungary.
afandian
Today I learned about pizza fritta! Lends unexpected legitimacy to what I saw on the menu in a chippy one night out long ago in Glasgow. I never dared to try it.
(But I can attest to the deep fried mars bar)
pryelluw
Why do they need to be undercover? It’s not like anyone is expecting to be raided by the pizza police. And can they do anything about hot pockets? Or is that considered a calzone? Are calzones off jurisdiction? They’re basically a pizza folded onto itself.
gowld
> Why do they need to be undercover?
It's a marketing gimmick to promote their pizza brand.
drdec
A calzone should have ricotta cheese not mozzarella.
Stromboli is closer to folded up pizza as it typically has mozzarella cheese.
carlob
> A calzone should have ricotta cheese not mozzarella.
It typically has both. And ricotta is legally not a cheese in Italy (because it's not made from milk).
SoftTalker
In the USA any of those can be anything.
Sromboli can be ground sausage and cheese on a french bread roll.
asveikau
Stromboli is American, from Philadelphia. It was named after a movie about a Sicilian island that was popular in 1950, because they just wanted to give it an Italian sounding name.
Afaik they don't serve those in Italy or even that far away from Philadelphia. So "in the USA that can be anything" is ... I guess accurate, for a regional American dish
drdec
Just because some people abuse the language out of ignorance does not make them right ;-)
jmuguy
It tracks that if you're going to give an accreditation you want to make sure its being upheld. Pizza shops can cut a lot of corners that a normal patron might not notice or care about.
null
seydor
Italy's economy needs a refresh
wagwang
These detectives should come from new york given that ny pizza is far superior than italian pizza
I've travelled quite a lot in the top half of Italy over the decades for both work and pleasure - Milan, Venice, Florence, Siena, Verona, Bologna, Pisa, Parma.
I would suggest that from the outside it could be easy to underestimate just how seriously (many) Italians take their food.
Last year - as a family, on the way somewhere else - we visited a "factory" that makes Parmesan cheese. It's astounding how much work and time goes into making a product that, although it's of course produced "on mass", feels anything other than mass produced.