Since I started pretzels over a week ago, I’ve been inundated with myths I’d never heard of before. There’s the one about the baker’s apprentice who burned some bread “braids” while his master was out on morning deliveries. There’s the one about how the Swiss gave them as gifts at wedding ceremonies, thus giving birth […]
READ ONWhat would any tour of bogus food myths be without at least a stop at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man? Quite poor, methinks. To get a sense for how this one goes, start with the standard story about how the croissant originated there, and merely […]
READ ONReader Michael F. submits this whopper by way of his Scottish grandmother: The Pretzel was Roman, but they invented it when they invaded the British Isles…they took English wheat to make their traveling biscuits but it was too soft to make the hard biscuits that they made with their own flour so the shape was […]
READ ONI love this one for the sheer inventiveness of it. It regards a young baker (variously referred to as an Italian, a German, Frenchman, even a colonial American) falsely accused of a crime (usually theft or fraud). The poor fellow is called before the local magistrate and sentenced to prison — with one caveat. If, […]
READ ONA radically different story about the origin of pretzels credits American Indians, who as the story goes had an ingenious method for preventing animals from making off with surplus wheat. They’d store it in rings of unleavened dough that they baked on hot rocks, then strung over the branches of trees a dozen or more […]
READ ONMy own thought on the origin of pretzels, and it’s not original, is that they were invented in Central Europe, somewhere around the region of what is now known as Germany. That said, this is absolutely not how it happened. Frankfurt, located in the German State of Hesse, has been an important commercial hub for […]
READ ONIt’s awfully hard to date the pretzel. That’s because its main ingredients — flour, water, salt, yeast — are the basis for just about every bread product known to man. Its shape, on the other hand, is quite distinctive. Perhaps a little too much so. Why? Because in an effort to make themselves sound intelligent […]
READ ON…is pretty much what I get every year when I see a food columnist parroting more of the same old hot cross bun claptrap. There are probably as many erroneous, exaggerated, or just plain made-up stories about the hot cross bun as there are about the pretzel. The most oft-cited myth goes like this: the hot cross bun is descended from pre-Christian peoples, for whom carving a cross on a round bread was a deeply mystical act connected to food and/or blood sacrifice. The symbolism, having to do with the progression of the sun
READ ON