Pretzel’s Twisted Tale

Foods with distinctive shapes just seem to cry out for myth-making. Take the pretzel.

Many people like to say a monk invented it (usually “around 610”) as a reward for children who learned their prayers, the word “pretzel” coming from the Latin pretiola, which means “a little reward.” Others claim that monks designed it after the hands of a person in prayer, with the name coming from preces, prayers.

Both stories ignore the fact that in German the word is bretzel, not pretzel. In medieval Old High German, it was even less like pretiola--it was brezitella. Linguists think brezitella probably came from the medieval Latin brachiatellum, meaning a little brachiatum, which would be a bread baked in the form of crossed arms. Not that anybody has found the word brachiatellum in any manuscript; the linguists only claim their explanation is less unlikely than the others.

In any case, the pretzel belongs to a German family of breads that are moistened before baking to give them a chewier texture. In a bakery, pretzels are sprayed with a solution of lye, and the resulting alkalinity encourages their familiar dark brown color (fortunately, the caustic lye combines with carbon dioxide during baking and becomes harmless). Bakery pretzels are then baked for about half an hour--pretty long for something not much thicker than a cracker--to make them absolutely dry and hard.

Homemade pretzels and soft pretzels are often made much the same way as bagels, by poaching them in boiling water before baking, the difference being that bagels are usually poached in salt water rather than water and baking soda. And, of course, that bagels aren’t pretzel-shaped.