Holey Breads
OK, so this post isn't about holy breads – as in the Eucharist. It's about breads with holes. And I don't mean little pockets of air as in sourdough bread. I mean breads that are shaped like rings, wreaths or knots, with the dough surrounding one or more holes. You know, bagels, pretzels and the like.
In a few shopping malls and other places in Warsaw you can find stands like the one pictured here, selling what the sign claims to be krakowskie precle, or "Cracow pretzels". Intriguingly, the company that distributes them in Warsaw proudly boats that these "pretzels" are shipped each morning straight from Mr. Czaja's bakery in Cracow. But if we take a look at Mr. Grzegorz Czaja's bakery website, we'll see that what he bakes there is not pretzels, but something called obwarzanki (pronounced awb-vah-ZHAHN-kee). It seems as though the obwarzanki magically turn into pretzels the moment they arrive in Warsaw! Can we chalk it up to merely yet another linguistic difference between Cracovian and Warsovian Polish? Or is there a more profound distinction between pretzels and obwarzanki?
"Pretzels, "bagels" and "obwarzanki" are all used by both tourists and native Cracovians to refer to the specifically Cracovian bread which "takes the form of an oval with a hole in the middle" and whose "surface is formed by strands of dough twisted into a spiral".[1] Although unique to Cracow, it nonetheless belongs to the great diverse family of holey breads. So let's take a look at the bigger picture now.
Common Ancestors
Bagels, pretzels and obwarzanki are similar enough to each other to suggest a common origin. According to Ms. Maria Balinska, who wrote a book on the history of bagels, holey breads date back all the way to ancient Rome. She believes that all such bread products descend from the buccellata,[2] or small, round, jaw-breaking double-baked biscuits used as army hardtack by Roman legionaries at least as early as the 4th century CE. Whether they were actually ring or rather disc-shaped is uncertain. The author of Pass the Garum, a blog about ancient Roman foodways, reconstructed them as the latter, with only little holes punched with a needle to let air and steam escape during baking. Another hypothesis, also mentioned by Ms. Balinska, says that the buccellatum was the ancestor of the round communion wafer used by Christians in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
Another bread with a long history, which, this time for sure, is made in the shape of elongated rings, is the Middle Eastern ka'ak. These breads are get a mention in the Talmud,[3] so they must have been known at least as eary as the 6th century CE. Unlike the overly simple buccellatum, made only of flour, salt and butter, ka'ak are made from leavened dough. What's interesting is that the leavening agent used here is not yeast, but fermented chickpea.[4] Generously sprinkled with sesame seeds before baking, ka'ak may be still purchased in the streets of Arab and Israeli cities.
Let's go back the Apennine Peninsula. It was in the port town of Puglia (pronounced POOL-yah) in what is now southern Italy that taralli were being boiled and baked as early as the 14th century. That's right, it's a kind of bread that is first boiled and only then baked. Why? Because when the starch on the surface of the dough comes into contact with boiling water, it gets gelatinized,giving the tarallo its shiny and crunchy crust. The stiffened crust also prevents the dough from rising further during baking, which helps keep the bread in shape. And this, in turn, means that you can make bigger ring-shaped breads than you could without boiling them first.[5] Clever, huh?
Great, but what's the deal with the ring shape in the first place? Why not a ball or a disc, but a torus, which takes a great a lot more skill to form? Well, this shape has two advantages. First, a holey bread has only a slightly smaller volume with a much larger surface than a whole bread of comparable size (the proof by calculating the surface areas and volumes of a torus and an ellipsoid is left as an exercise for the Reader). And a larger surface area allows the heat to spread more evenly inside the dough during the thermal treatment (boiling or baking). Secondly, a holey bread is easier to transport, especially for a street vendor who can just put his (somehow it's usually been men) taralli on a string or a stick and peddle them in the street. And the customers could even wear their tarallo like a bracelet, if they didn't eat it right away.
Dry taralli were used in a similar way as the ancient buccellata in that they could be stored for up to half a year and then eaten after being dunked in wine for softening. Were these toroidal taralli inspired by the Arab ka'ak, brought by Levantine sailors to the port of Puglia? Quite possibly, but we don't know that for sure. Whatever the case, soon after the taralli had appeared in southern Italy, similar breads were being made in the north. They bore a plethora of regional names, including "bricuocoli", "ciaramilie", "pane del marinaio", "mescuotte", "ciambelle", "ciambelloni", "braciatelle", "brazzatelle" and "brasadèle"[6] (the latter three are reminiscent of "braccialetto", the Italian word for "bracelet"; ultimately, both "braciatella" and "braccialetto" derive from Latin "bracchium", meaning "arm").
Pretzels
The Italian "la brazzatella" sounds quite similar to the German "die Brezel"… Or is it "des Brezel"? Or "der Brezel"? German speakers can't agree as to the grammatical gender of their pretzels. The jury is also out on whether the first "e" in this word is long or short (as in "der/die/das Bretzel"). There are also those, mostly in Bavaria and Austria, who call it "die Brezen" (or "der Brezen"). Or even "die Brezg", as they say along the Bavarian-Swabian border.[7] What they all do agree on is the pretzel's shape. Not a ring, not a wreath, but a knot which looks like two sixes conjoined at their bellies, with not one, but three holes.
The pretzel's grammatical gender is also an important issue in France, allowing Alsatians to tell an authentic Alsatian pretzel from a fake non-Alsatian one. Or so at least claims one Alsatian blogger:
"Le bretzel" is this little unspeakable, incongruous and indigestible thing sold by packets in the supermarkets across the Vosges. "La bretzel" is a succulent Alsatian speciality. | ||||
— PiP, vélodidacte: L’histoire de la Bretzel selon l’Hortus Deliciarum, in: Autour du Mont-Sainte-Odile, Overblog, 2013, own translation
Original text:
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The same blogger proves that pretzels have been known in Alsace since at least the 13th century, because you can find their images in Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights), a kind of medieval illustrated encyclopedia. It was created by Herrad of Landsberg, an abbess of the convent on Mount Saint Odile in the eastern Vosges. You can see breads twisted into the unmistakable pretzel shape in three illuminations depicting Biblical figures seated at a table. What's interesting is that in all three pictures the pretzels lie right next to fish.
What might pretzels have to do with fish? Well, neither of them contains any ingredients of land-animal origin (pretzel dough contains no eggs or butter), which means they may be safely consumed during a period of Catholic fast. Along with fish, the pretzel used to be one of the chief symbols of Lent, which is best illustrated by Pieter Brueghel's famous painting, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent.
And because pretzels were made from the relatively expensive wheat flour, they were not only a lean product, but also a luxurious one. Some of those who could afford them couldn't even wait until Lent and would start eating them already in the carnival. And so in some parts of Germany and the Low Countries has the pretzel become a traditional carnival treat. In many towns pretzels are given away during carnival parades. The Flemish town of Geraardsbergen is still known for its tradition of throwing little pretzel-shaped sugar-covered cookies called krakelingen into the crowd on the first Monday of March.[8]
But where does this shape come from anyway? Nobody seems to know for sure; even the legends don't agree. One says that the shape of the pretzel is designed to resemble the arms of a monk folded in prayer. According to another one, it was invented by a baker from Württemberg who had been sentenced to death, but whom Count Eberhard von Urach promised to pardon on the condition that he bakes a bread through which the sun would shine three times. In any case, the pretzel shape is so distinctive that bakers' guilds throughout central Europe would adopt it as their coats of arms. You can still find it on the shop sign of many a German bakery. The are differences in the pretzels orientation, though; sometimes the pretzel is painted on a bakery sign belly-up, sometimes, belly-down, and there are even those compromise signs where it's been placed belly-sideways. This is yet another as-yet-unresolved dispute regarding the pretzel.[9]
The one thing that is common to pretzels from different regions (apart from the shape) is that they are steeped in lye (4% solution of sodium hydroxide), rather than boiled in water, prior to being baked. This is what gives them their smooth, but cracked, shiny copper-brown crust. According to the aforementioned legend, we owe lye pretzels to the Württemberger baker's cat, which accidentally dropped the unbaked pretzels into a vat of lye. As there was no time left to make new ones, the panicked baker just retrieved the pretzels from the lye and popped them into the oven, thus inventing the recipe that is still used today. Bavarians, though, have a different opinion on the lye pretzel's provenance: yes, they were invented by accident, only it wasn't in 15th-century Württemberg, but in 19th-century Munich.
In the 19th century, a baker by the name of Anton Nepomuk Pfannenbrenner was working in Munich at the Royal Coffeehouse of Johan Eilles, purveyor to the Court. One day in 1839 whilst in the bakehouse he made a mistake which would have tremendous consequences. Although he would normally glaze the pretzels in sugar-water, on this particular day he accidentally used lye solution which was actually meant for cleaning the baking sheets. The result proved so impressive that on the very same morning, the lye pretzel was tasted by Wilhelm Eugen von Ursingen, an envoy of the King of Württemberg. The date of 11 February 1839 has since been considered the very first day a lye pretzel was sold. |
— Publication of an application pursuant to Article 50(2)(a) of Regulation (EU) No 1151/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council on quality schemes for agricultural products and foodstuffs (2013/C 262/06), EC No: DE-PGI-0005-0971, Official Journal of the European Union |