Which came first, the hamburger or pizza?

pizza came first, by 120 years. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

Side by side

the hamburger

At least four places claim it. Charlie Nagreen said he flattened a meatball between bread at the Seymour Fair in Wisconsin in 1885; the Menches brothers claimed the same year at the Erie County Fair; Louis' Lunch in New Haven claims 1900; and Fletcher Davis of Athens, Texas is credited with introducing it at the 1904 St Louis World's Fair. No contemporary document settles it. What is documented is the Hamburg steak — chopped beef, no bun — on American menus from the 1870s.

pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.