Pretzel: Lye-Dipped Bread
The best-known legend about the pretzel's origins even comes with a date: around 610, a monk somewhere in a monastery is said to have twisted a strip of dough into the shape of arms crossed in prayer and handed it out to children who had learned their prayers. The story has one flaw: nothing backs it up. The German Wikipedia doesn't mention it at all, and the folklorist it quotes notes drily that hardly any other baked good has collected so many legends about its own origin.
A pretzel (German: Brezel) is a lye-dipped bread made from a strip of leavened dough twisted into a knot: a thick "body" in the middle, thin crossed "arms" against it, and on top a glossy dark brown crust with coarse salt. Its home is southern Germany, but it is just as much at home in Austria, in Alsace and in the German-speaking part of Switzerland - and that is exactly where I ran into it.
What Brezel Means and Who Lays Claim to the Pretzel
The pretzel has its name written into its body. The German Brezel goes back through the Old High German brezzitel and monastic Latin all the way to the Latin bracchium, arm - the twisted ends of dough look like arms folded across the chest. Czech borrowed the word from German, image and all. Whose arms they originally were is something two German regions still squabble over today: the Bavarian Brezn has arms almost as thick as its body, the Swabian one wears them thin and crisp, with a fatter, slashed belly and more fat in the dough. Each side has its own legend about who invented it. Neither one holds up.
From that core the pretzel spread across the whole German-speaking world. In Austria the authorities list it among traditional foods, the French count the Alsatian bretzel among their own specialties, and in the German-speaking Swiss cantons it is baked right at the railway stations. So it is no Swiss invention - the pretzel is German and shared by the entire German-speaking world, Switzerland included. Its relatives differ in how the dough is treated before baking: Turkish simit is rolled in sesame and never sees lye, Romanian covrigi sometimes keep the shape of a ring, and the Polish bagel is briefly boiled in water instead of taking a lye bath. A lye bath is also what gives its crust to the Swiss ring Silserkranz (see Swiss bread and pastries).
Monastery Evidence and a Legend With an Exact Date
The documented history begins in monastery libraries. The oldest known depictions of a pretzel appear in lectionaries written in the 11th century for the monastery of St. Peter in Salzburg; in them the pretzel lies on the table at the Last Supper. Alsace, though, disputes Germany's claim to the oldest depiction. The lye crust has a legend of its own as well, dated to the day: on 11 February 1839 a Bavarian baker is supposed to have brushed his pretzels by mistake with the lye used for cleaning baking sheets. The story knows the date and the baker's name - except that the court supplier in whose cafe it all supposedly happened provably did not exist yet. The sober version is duller: the pretzel most likely has no single inventor.
Lye, Butter and Why a Pretzel Won't Last Till Morning
The dough itself is unremarkable: flour, water, salt, yeast and a little fat - a Lenten simplicity that allowed the pretzel to be eaten even in the weeks when almost nothing else was allowed. The one big difference is the bath before baking, a sodium hydroxide solution of a few percent - a chemical better known from drain cleaners. On the surface of the dough it sets off reactions that grow in the oven into a glossy dark crust with a flavor no undipped bread can imitate. Without lye a pretzel is just a nicely twisted salt roll. The hard pretzels out of a bag, the ones we tip into a bowl with beer back home, are only distant cousins dried out to a crisp.
You eat it with your hands, on the go: on the way to the train, at a mid-morning break, with a beer. In southern Germany they slice the pretzel horizontally and spread it with butter; that one is called Butterbrezel and is sold pre-packed too. At Oktoberfest the rule is that a pretzel has to weigh at least 250 grams; anything smaller cannot be sold there. There is one thing you should never do with a pretzel: save it for later. A lye crust lives only a few hours, then it goes soft and the arms stop crunching.
A Snack at the Three-Country Corner
I bought my pretzel in Basel, the city where Switzerland meets Germany and France on the Rhine. One cost 1.20 CHF (1.20 EUR) and I ate it outside, on the move. The crust was thin and salty, with the faintly bitter undertone that only lye can give, the crumb soft and springy, the thin arms snapped; I was still knocking salt crystals off my fingers a street later. From Basel it is barely an hour on foot to the German border. The pretzel made that journey long before I did.
