For some reason, the francophones only eat small pizzas. I don't know about the original pizzas (pizzi?No, the Italians say "pizze" for the plural, but the internet assures me that pizzas is the correct form in English. I am relieved; thank you, internet.) in Italy, but in Austria you don't get a pizza with less than 35cm of diameter. In France or here in Lausanne on the other hand, they rarely reach 30cm. This one (with extra cheese and bacon lovingly arranged by myself) has a diameter of 23cm. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it is still enough for me, and I won't feel sick afterwards like with our huge Austrian Mega-pizzas.
If you take me for a total nerd because I like to quantify my pizza-experience, you are probably right. At least you are in excellent company, as my girlfriend agrees with you.
On a completely unrelated note, there are only three countries in the whole world that don't use the metric (or SI) system: Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Burma is in really bad company ;)
I think in France some people definitely have smaller ovens to cook their pizza in, like those little self-contained box ones that sit on your kitchen bench. This may be a possible reason for the smaller pizzas, as the big ones simply wouldn't fit into those ovens.
ReplyDeleteAs for the countries not using the SI system, you can at least partially add the UK. For some silly reason they still use miles to measure road distances.
True, I forgot about the UK. But at least they saw the light of reason concerning all other measurements, so one can still hope!
ReplyDeleteConcerning the various oven sizes, do you really think France has more small-size ovens than Austria? Also, this would not explain the size of pizzas in restaurants. Myself, I think it is hold-over antagonism from the Avignon papacy...