A Pizza W/O a Country

Italian lawmakers have issued strict guidelines regarding authentic "Neapolitan pizza" (as the grandson of two spaghetti-benders from Campania and as someone who grew up in the pizzatopia of New Jersey, I assert that Neapolitan, e.g. thin-crust, pie is the only one worth eating). Among the rules:

Real Neapolitan pizza must be round, 35 centimetres in diameter, no thicker than 0.3 centimetres in the middle and with a crust of about two centimetres.

"The texture must be soft, elastic, easily foldable," the guidelines say….
They recognize only three types of real Neapolitan pizza: Marinara, with garlic and oregano; Margherita, with basil and mozzarella cheese from the southern Apennines, and extra-Margherita, with fresh tomatoes, basil and buffalo mozzarella from Campania, the region that includes pizza's hometown, Naples.

The dough must be rolled out manually and baked in wood-burning ovens that can reach the required temperature of 485 Celsius.

Such rules, while in keeping with various sorts of controlled-appellation protections used throughout, are mostly pathetic ways to stave off EU mongrelization. As the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore editorialized, "Pizza is now a stateless, boundless, flag-less food."

In other pizza-related news, the Officer Krupkes of Portsmouth, New Hampshire are now offering a "booze bounty" to pizza deliverymen who rat on underage drinking parties to which they're summoned.

[Thanks to reader Jarod for that list bit]