By Lord Heinrich von Holstein
Presented at Atlantia Kingdom Arts & Science Festival, March 2025
Royal Baker Competition

Description

Pizza goes back over a thousand years though not as we know it today. For starters, it did not have tomato sauce as the tomato is a New World food that was widely available in Europe. In fact it did not have sauce or toppings at all and any cheese or other ingredients were incorporated into the dough. It was much more like what we would consider a focaccia bread.

I have not chosen to replicate one of the few available period recipes for pizza but rather concoct my own plausible version that I believe is similar enough that it would have been recognized as “pizza” in 15th century Italy. It is a wheat pizza with onions, cheese, and spices.

My primary inspiration for this project was Marco Gavio de Rubeis’ Early Italian Recipes: Cereals, Bread, Pasta, and Pies [1] and the videos on his Youtube channel: Historical Italian Cooking.

Origins

The word “pizza” goes back to at least the 10th century. It appears in the Codex Diplomaticus Cajetanus, which is a document of treaties and contracts for the city of Gaeta. In it is an entry dated 997 for the rental of a bishop’s watermill. Part of the payment included 12 “pizze” to be delivered on Christmas and again on Easter.
[1, p71-72]

The earliest known recipe for pizza by that name appears in De honesta voluptate et valetudine by Platina. Translations of the text between Latin and the medieval Italian vernacular suggest that placenta (latin), piza, pize, pice, pince, and fugacie (perhaps focaccia?) are roughly equivalent.
[1, p72]

Though a bit post-SCA period, Vincenzo Tanara’s book L’economia del cittadino in villa, written in 1653, includes more recipes for pizza. Tanara also explains that there are different styles and names for pizza.
[1, p73-74]

With these sources we can make an attempt at deciding what medieval pizza is and what leeway there is in its ingredients. Pizza is decidedly a flat, baked bread. It can be leavened or unleavened. It has spices and other ingredients incorporated into the dough. Of these ingredients, it is very common for at least one of them to add extra fat content to the pizza, like animal fats, butter, cheese, and/or olive oil.

Period Recipes

PIZA WITH QUAILS AND FRESH CHEESE
PIZA CUM OCELETTI ET CAXO FRESCO
(15th Century)

Sono etiam et alcuni li quali poneno gli oceletti inel pane cum caxo fresco et grasso daperse de li ucelli; et in forno insieme si cuoceno.

(Platina, 8v)

There are also some who put small birds in the bread [dough] with fresh cheese and the fat drippings from the roasted birds, and they bake them together in the oven.

[1, p296]

PIZA WITH CURED PORK FATBACK AND FENNEL SEEDS
(15th Century)

Impasta quel medesimo pistore tanta farina cum aqua calda quanta sia assai a fare una piza overo fugacia, et impastata li meti dentro dele semenze di finochi e fetoline di lardo o vero butyro overo olio da per se tamen et cum le cose predicte. De novo impasti tanto che tutto si faci in una massa, dapoi la ponzi cum la mano overo cum uno steco et in forno la meti cum il pane o vero sul focolaro soto il texto et cinere cioe a uno modo o vero alaltro. Coperta cum carboni la cuoci.
[Also Platina? Rubeis does not directly attribute this passage.]

The same baker kneads flour and hot water to make a piza or fugacia. Once [the dough] is kneaded, add fennel seeds and slices of pork fatback, butter, or oil inside, alone or with the said ingredients. Knead again to obtain a dough, then flatten it with your hands or with a rolling pin and put it in the oven with the bread or on the hearth under the texto and ashes, in one way or another. Cover and cook it with charcoal.
[1, p294-295]

PINZA
(16th Century)

Le pinze o pinzoni non si mancano a vendere per le piazze, fatte di farina tamisata bene, con sale e anisi, grosse nel mezzo e actue nelle cime.
(Constanzo Felici)

Pinze or pinzoni are seen [sold] in the squares, made of well-sifted flour, with salt and anise seeds, large in the middle and narrow on the ends.
[1, p293-294]

My Recipe

Approximate ingredients per 12″ pizza:

1 ¼ cup flour
Sourdough starter or yeast
½ to ¾ cup water
1 med onion
¼ lbs cheese
1-2 long pepper pods
¼ of a nutmeg seed
1-2 cloves
Olive oil
Salt

Slice the onion along the grain, then caramelize slowly and allow to cool. Mince the cheese into ¼” to ⅓” cubes. Pound and grind the spices in a mortar. Combine flour, starter, spices, salt, and about 2 tbsp of olive oil in a bowl and mix. Then knead until the dough is smooth, adding flour or water as needed. Incorporate the cheese and onions with the dough. Allow the dough to rise and ferment, 4-8 hours as needed. Afterwards, it can be stored in a refrigerator up to a few days before baking.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Coat a baking sheet or pizza tin with olive oil and place the dough on it. Gently spread it out, pressing with fingertips. If it resists stretching, wait about 15 minutes for the dough to relax and then continue. It may not reach all the way to the edges of a 12″ pizza tin. Spread some more olive oil on top of the pizza and then sprinkle on some more salt and spices. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Allow to cool at least 15 minutes on a wire rack before serving.

Ingredient Details

The Flour

I chose an “Artisan Bread Flour” for this recipe. This is an unbleached flour which probably makes it closer to medieval flour than bleached, highly-processed all-purpose flour. It is also a high-protein flour which is good for sourdough, focaccia, and pizza. This worked out really well for my first test pizza so I stuck with it.

The Yeast

There are plenty of options available to medieval bakers for obtaining yeast. Most practically, as with even many modern bakeries, is to use some leftover dough from the day before. There are also descriptions of obtaining baking yeast from fermented grape must. I chose to use a sourdough starter as my source of yeast, and to add a little extra flavor to the pizza. This is also the method that Rubeis uses in his recipes and many of his videos, including ones for pizza. [1, p293-297]

My first attempt at this was a mix of all-purpose flour and tap water. After three days of no activity I deemed this a failure and went back to do more research. My next attempt was with my artisan bread flour and bottled spring water. This started bubbling within the first day. However, after about 5 days it started to smell quite pungent, like really potent sauerkraut. A more experienced baker advised switching to whole wheat flour. After feeding that to the starter every day for another week, the smell changed to something sweeter, like banana bread with a slight hint of vinegar.

The Cheese

My test pizzas used low-moisture block mozzarella cheese cut into small cubes. This resulted in perfectly acceptable pizza, though the cheese flavor was never particularly pronounced. I also tried goat feta for one attempt but it melted away into nothing during baking and failed to impart any typical feta flavor to the pizza.

Marco Gavio de Rubeis does not specify the type of cheese in his recipe for Piza with Quails and Fresh Cheese [1, p296-297]. However, in his video featuring that recipe, and several others demonstrating medieval Italian food, he uses “scamorza” which is a lightly aged and sometimes smoked ball of mozzarella. For my final presentation of this pizza I deferred to that expertise and obtained some imported scamorza from a local Italian marketplace.

The scamorza is a wonderful cheese. Texture is similar to the block mozzarella but the cheese flavor is much stronger from the brief aging process. You can see below the typical shape of scamorza cheese: a ball of mozzarella tied with a string and hung to age.

The Onions

While, in medieval times, onions have an association of being a common food, they are hardly unheard of on the dinner tables of nobility. I chose onions as a filling for this pizza because they straddle the line between sweet and savory and because I personally love onions. However I also decided to fully caramelize them as a time-consuming technique to make a more elevated ingredient.

I used yellow onions in this preparation, as the modern go-to for caramelized onions, but other varieties will work though the sweeter the better. I sliced them with the grain, from stem to root, to help preserve some structure during the long cooking. Then I put them in a pan on high heat with olive oil, a little salt, and some water to quickly get them softened and up to temperature. After they were soft I gradually reduced the temperature to keep them sort of a medium-low simmer and stirred every now and then. For a small batch this could take 45 minutes to an hour. For a larger amount of onions it can take multiple hours. They are done once they have a deep brown color and they have reduced in volume significantly. Be sure to allow them to cool to room temperature before incorporating them in a dough otherwise the heat could kill off yeast and hamper rising. Also, you should use the cooking oil from the onions as it will add even more onion flavor to the pizza.

I must admit that I haven’t found a period source that describes this way of slow-cooking onions in detail. However, even with modern cookbooks, authors are vague or outright misleading about how long it takes to properly caramelize onions. Regardless, there’s nothing about this method that couldn’t be accomplished by a medieval chef.

The Spices

Medieval recipes often just list “spices” as an ingredient with little further specification. Sometimes you may see something equivalent to “sweet spices” or “strong spices”, suggesting the inclusion or lack of black pepper. For Medieval Europe, including Italy, these spices will generally be some combination of pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg.

While the period pizza recipes above list only one spice (fennel or anise) or no spices at all, many other recipes in Rubeis’ book use one or more of the typical European spice blend. I have chosen to use a subset of these spices and seasoned my pizza with pepper, cloves, and nutmeg. Furthermore, I’ve decided to use long pepper, more expensive and prized in-period than black pepper, to add a little extra complexity.

Conclusion

Though very different from modern pizza, this medieval pizza is just as addicting. With a crust both chewy and crispy, and all the salt, cheese, sweet caramelized onions, spices and added fat, it’s always tempting to have another piece.

In addition, I personally gained a lot of knowledge and skill from this project. I learned about the linguistic origins of “pizza” and gained an appreciation for 15th century Italian cooking, which I have not delved much into previously. I successfully cultivated a sourdough starter over many weeks, and I intend to keep it going. I refined my technique for caramelizing onions. And I greatly increased my familiarity with bread dough and all the mixing, kneading, proofing and manipulation thereof.

I hope my esteemed judges and populace enjoy this pizza as much as I enjoyed baking it.

Sources

[1] Early Italian Recipes. Cereals, Bread, Pasta, and Pies, Marco Gavio de Rubeis
I Doni delle Muse, 2023

Pizza Addendum: Gluten-Free Recipe

As part of the contest in which this pizza was submitted we were asked to create a gluten free version of the recipe. For this accommodation I made three major changes.

Firstly, I replaced the “Artisan Bread Flour” with “Gluten-Free Pizza Flour”. This is another high-protein flour obviously formulated for making pizza. It consists mostly of gluten-free wheat starch, corn starch, and sorghum flour.

Second, I have substituted my sourdough starter for dry yeast. The sourdough starter consists of primarily whole wheat flour so it is not a gluten-free ingredient. However, it won’t have any of the sour taste from sourdough starter.

Lastly I have shaped these pizzas differently to make the distinction clear. The 16th century recipe for pinza by Costanzo Felici instructs that they should be shaped “large in the middle and narrow on the ends”, so I will form them in that shape. [1, p293-294]

Recipe