David Miller relief thread: Pizza

This is your daily respite from David Miller's screaming. 

The question is: are anchovies a legitimate pizza topping? Share your opinions here!

No, but pineapple is when done right.

Real pizza doesn't have pineapple

You will get laughed out of the shop in Brooklyn, da Bronx, queens or Staten Island if you ask. 

From slate,com

Why do pizzerias offer anchovies?

Italians have been putting fish on bread for at least 2,000 years. Ancient Romans topped their flatbreads with garum, a ubiquitous condiment made of fermented fish parts, and fish was one of the toppings for pizza when the dish was first developed, in Naples during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The original varieties were pizza bianca, with olive oil and salt, pizza margherita, with milled preserved tomatoes, pizza con pomodori, with sliced tomatoes, and pizza marinara, with tomatoes and anchovies. This was peasant food, and anchovies made an ideal topping—they were cheap, plentiful, and could be preserved almost indefinitely in oil and salt. There’s no indication that Neapolitan sailors, from whom pizza marinara got its name, ever asked for green peppers or pork products on their pies.

Pineapple and jalapeno--both pretty much alien to much of the old country--makes for a great combo.

As a general rule I dont eat anything with the eyeballs still in it.    

Growing up in Western NY every neighborhood pizza joint  had the little fishies as an option for the topping.   We never got them.    Shrooms, Pepperoni and Italian Sausage was my got o combo....but in Buffalo they dont f@ck around with the shitty toppings you get at many places.   They would cut up Italian sauasage length wise and lay it accross your pie  and they had some kind of spicy pepperoni that I dont find much anywhere else.   

For the most part I dont miss living there but I do miss their pizza. 

In my younger years I developed a taste for anchovies on the pizza.  Now, no way.  Though I'm a "supreme" gal, everything else.  Pile it on (but no anchovies)!  Oops, I prefer our place's creamy garlic sauce rather than red sauce.  Yum.

My place features a different pizza or two for a "limited" time.  Right now it is "Outlaw" pizza, which includes Fritoes!  Actually very good.

Candy 

Thin crust Supreme.

I generally order two or three toppings rather than a whole bunch, but on many of the occasions when I have ordered a "supreme" or "everything" pizza, I've gotten a sidewise glance and been asked, "With anchovies or without?" as if all the other toppings were a given but anchovies needed a special exemption.

I appreciated Don's background info on anchovies. It makes perfect sense, given where pizza originated (Iceland), little fishies would be a very common topping.