In pizzerias all around southern New Jersey it is common to hear talk of tomato pies. A style of pizza built upon a thin crust with a chewy edge that is occasionally blistered black, the tomato pie is fundamentally Neapolitan-American, but it is distinguished by the fact that cheese and any desired toppings are applied before the tomatoes. Tomatoes, not sauce! At De Lorenzo’s of Trenton and Robbinsville, they are hand-crushed and radiant with flavor. Cheese-free pies on which tomatoes star go back to the earliest days of American pizzerias, when pizza was poor man’s food and mozzarella was a luxury. A completely different configuration is found in the American South, where the term tomato pie can refer to a casserole of long-cooked tomatoes topped with cheesy bread crumbs.
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven, Connecticut, still boasts of tomato pies even though its repertoire has gone far beyond that.