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Food With a Twist: The Pretzel Family Tree
| Article
# : |
18534 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,250 Words |
| Author
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William Woys Weaver
William Woys Weaver is the author of America Eats, The
Christmas Cook, and other books. His new book, Up-Country
Dutch: Eating Well from the Land, is scheduled to appear next
year. |
Eaten at baseball games, consumed in front of the TV, and available in nearly every corner grocery, pretzels have one of the most twisted and convoluted stories to tell. Indeed, if pretzels could only talk, doubtless they would relate to us one of the most fascinating and surprising tales in food history. As it is, we must settle for less than the full plot, if for no other reason than this: Pretzels predate the earliest printed European books by at least a thousand years.
According to research materials in the pretzel collection of the German Bread Museum in Ulm, Germany, the earliest known picture of a pretzel survives from a Roman manuscript dating from the fifth century A.D. It shows the Trojan hero Aeneas sharing a ring-shaped pretzel with his lover, Dido, queen of Carthage. Since Dido later committed suicide by throwing herself on a burning pyre, the pretzel she shared with Aeneas may have been prophetic in that the pretzel was early associated with suffering, abstinence, or the renunciation of worldly pleasures. In any case, the pretzel was known to ancient Rome. Thus it should come as no surprise to find pretzels in one form or another throughout Western European culture; for example, they were known in medieval England under the name of cracknels, a term also used in America well into the nineteenth century.
The first written reference to pretzels was made by Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636 A.D.), who referred to them by the Latin word bracchium. The root meaning of this term is obvious from its English cognate bracelet, something circular in form that fits around the arm. It has been argued by some scholars that in ancient times the original pretzels were none other than dough substitutes for the arm and neck jewelry worn by the dead. Whether or not this is so, the important point is that pretzels share a common origin with other ring shaped foods, particularly bagels, Italian cimballini (cookies known in colonial America as jumbles), and the modern doughnut. If we were to create an evolutionary chart much like the ones used to show the evolution of plants and animals, the ancient bracchium would be at the bottom, near the roots, and the modern twisted pretzel would be at the very top. Bagels, cimballini, and doughnuts would grace the branches sprouting off to the sides.
The earliest medieval references to pretzels, including the earlier reference by Isidore of Seville, share the common theme that pretzels were associated with fasting. They were food for monks, and, for the most part, it was in the bakeries of monasteries that most pretzels were made. This connection with suffering or abstinence is vividly illustrated
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