Pizza is one of the world’s most recognisable foods. It is a kind of pie without edges. In fact, the Italians called it a pie for centuries.

Like so many everyday foods, it is made with simple ingredients. The pizza we know today is an oven-baked, flat, round bread topped off with tomato sauce, cheese and various meats and vegetables.

Anything added on top of the basic ingredients is called a topping. The additional meats and vegetables are optional, and the variation in these options gives the pizza its range of flavours. Many restaurants specialise only in pizzas. A place that does this is called a pizzeria.

The word pizza may come from an from Old German word pizzo meaning ‘mouthful’, changed by Romans into Latin as pizza.

However it got there, the word pizza means ‘to bite’ in Latin. It is the same kind of word that gives us pita bread, and the dough for a pizza is basically the same as a pita bread.