(percussive music) [Cecilia Philips] Oh, this is so embarrassing.

The pretzel.

Have you ever wondered how this twisted, salty treat came to be, or how it became a beloved American staple?

Before it was your favorite snack at the ballpark, its history was dark.

I'm talking stories about pagan sacrifices, monks in the Middle Ages, even Celtic gods finding themselves facing a noose.

So how did this morbid, tangled treat find its way into airports across America?

Grab your favorite dipping sauce and join us as we untwist the fascinatingly salty, and dare I say naughty, history of the pretzel.

(percussive music ending) Today I am so excited to learn more about one of my favorite foods, pretzels, from Uli and Sabine, co-founders of Squabisch Bakery.

Let's go.

I'm so excited about being here.

I actually went to Germany for two weeks just to find the best pretzel I could find.

[Sabine] Oh, did you find it?

I didn't.

So that's why I'm here, and I get to talk with two experts.

I don't know if we are the experts, but we will try our best.

[Uli] We've made a couple pretzels now.

[Cecilia] So tell me how you kind of got involved in pretzels.

[Sabine] So Uli's mom is from Schwaben, Swabia.

[Uli] My family immigrated to America.

They raised me German.

My mother was an excellent cook.

I just kind of learned from her.

[Sabine] When we would go and visit Uli's mom, that she would just like, in no time, pull out these pretzels.

[Uli] Swabish ones, the ones that we do, are a little fatter, and then the the arms get thinner and crispier.

[Cecilia] Tell me a little bit about any of the history that you both may or may not know about pretzels.

[Uli] The Germans adhere to the story of that in 1477, that Master Baker Frieder was gonna be sentenced to death unless he came up with a baked good where the sun can shine through in three places.

But if you read about it, the Italian monks in AD something came up with them as well.

[Ursula Heinzelmann] It's a long history, and a lot of people claim it for themselves and their place.

[Leslie Przybylek] It's a debated history that the pretzel form emerged out of either southern France or northern Italy.

[Ursula] In food history, one should never say definitely, but we can say pretzels originate in the early Middle Ages, in the German-speaking areas in Europe.

[Cecilia] One of the oldest depictions we have of pretzels is in a 12th century document, which shows one on a banquet table with a queen and a king, and a guy hanging out off to the side.

[Ursula] There's actually one American food historian who raises the origins of the pretzels to Celtic origins.

[Cecilia] That historian is Dr. Weaver, who you should check out in our chicken and waffles episode, if you haven't already.

And he says the pretzel was around even earlier than the Middle Ages, during the time of the Celts.

[Dr. Weaver] The Celts, they were covering all of Western Europe, most of Spain and Portugal, and of course England, and Scotland and Ireland.

And the pretzel is really a Celtic fertility votive.

So it goes back to the ancient Gauls who lived in what is now Germany.

[Cecilia] And what we learned is that the Gauls were a group of Celtic people who lived in Europe from about fifth century BC to the fifth century AD.

[Dr. Weaver] So the Germans didn't invent the pretzel.

They moved in during the Roman period, and they intermarried, settled down and they absorbed it into their culture.

[Cecilia] So according to Dr. Weaver, pretzels are possibly a Celtic invention dating back to the Iron Age.

Okay, more on the Celts or Gauls in a second.

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All right, it's time for us to get back to our episode.

[Cecilia] I wanna get into pretzel making.

[Uli] This is pretty much exactly my mother's recipe, just blown up and slight little nuances.

After you portion the dough, you need to let it rest so that you can roll it out into a pretzel.

[Sabine] Once the pretzels are formed, you bring them to rest.

[Uli] Then you wanna dip the pretzel into an alkaline bath.

In Germany, it's common to dip pretzels in lye or sodium hydroxide to give them the color and their distinctive flavoring.

After you dip in your pretzels, you're gonna shake off the excess, and then you're gonna transfer it to a parchment covered baking sheet.

[Cecilia] And to not scare the people at home, of course, the lye cooks off.

[Uli] It all evaporates.

And then you can do salting and scoring.

That's where we would add those special toppings.

[Cecilia] Now, while we're making pretzels for delicious snacks, our friends, the ancient Celts and Gauls, were making them for slightly different reasons.

[Dr. Weaver] Before the Christianity came to that region, this was some part of a fertility cult that took place in the spring.

There were human sacrifices involved.

It gets scary.

[Cecilia] That sounds fun.

What do pretzels have to do with human sacrifices?

[Dr. Weaver] The harvest knot has three holes in it, because it's a hangman's noose for three sacrificial victims.

The goddess involved is Rosemerta, who was the Celtic goddess of beer brewing.

So she got her husband drunk, and he got in trouble.

Well, her husband was the Gaulish Mercury.

They rely on her sister, Serona, to come up with a plan.

The three of them work this out.

Three people, three holes.

They come up with the pretzel, and the king is amazed because the sun can go through it three times.

That's the simplistic story about the invention of the pretzel.

[Cecilia] That's where you get the more familiar story, like the one Uli mentioned earlier about the German baker, while facing certain death, inventing the pretzel.

But what about the pretzel making monk story that he alluded to?

[Leslie] The story is perhaps by as early as 610 in the Middle Ages.

A monk had baked this, rolled it up and baked it, and it looks like little praying hands.

And so it was used as a treat for children.

[Dr. Weaver] I can tell you that monk never existed, but the story of the monk inventing the pretzel is strictly an American invention in the 1920s in order to clean up the pretzel, because the pretzel was associated with beer drinking.

[Cecilia] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

We'll get to the pretzel and beer drinking soon enough.

[Cecilia] Does it all start here with this giant, giant machine that is not as tall as I am?

(machine whirring) Does this machine have a name?

[Sabine] The name is Ricardo.

[Cecilia] Ricardo, okay.

(upbeat music) [Sabine] So once you have the dough, we have to portion it out.

[Cecilia] This is a two-hand job.

(dough slapping table) - All right.

[Uli] So this is the Duchess machine.

It is a dough divider.

[Cecilia] Oh, cool.

[Uli] So it has a cartridge in there that cuts the dough into 36 pieces, the exact same weight.

[Cecilia] Oh my God.

[Sabine] We can actually take it straight from here to our next machine.

So you take the dough piece and then you put it in the center of the opening.

[Cecilia] Whoa, yes.

[Cecilia] One fascinating fact we learned was how pretzels made their way to the United States.

Some scholars think pretzels may have been part of the Mayflower's cargo, as the pilgrims spent time in Holland.

[Leslie] The pretzel in the form that we clearly know of it today also begins to be more widely spread here after you have this larger migration into this country.

German immigrants started in the 1820s into the 1830s, 40s.

[Cecilia] Around that same time, we get this.

Now, who started baking the first hard pretzel and when is disputed, but in the Redding, Lititz, Lancaster area, one name kept popping up.

[Leslie] I know Julius Sturgis, who is connected with a family that still operates a pretzel factory in Lititz today.

The company does claim that he invented this by kind of looking, specifically seeking for a version of a pretzel that would be more shelf stable.

[Cecilia] So being shelf stable puts pretzels in bars and saloons.

Before we get to that, I've gotta show Sabine and Uli my pretzel making skills.

(upbeat music) [Sabine] Now we are ready to make the pretzels from these ropes.

[Cecilia] How do you think of my technique?

I'm barely touching it.

It looks good?

[Sabine] It looks great.

[Uli] Yeah, yeah.

[Cecilia] Should I try to do it fast the first time?

[Sabine] Oh, almost.

[Uli] You could fix it.

[Cecilia] (laughs) So embarrassing.

All right, this is a good link, huh?

Almost.

Oh yeah.

Okay, here we go.

All right.

[Sabine] Very nice.

Yes, fold it once fold it twice.

[Uli] Beautiful.

[Sabine] Oh, what a beautiful one.

Yeah, look at that, look at that (clapping).

[Sabine] That is a beautiful pretzel.

[Cecilia] I did it.

[Cecilia] Unfortunately, pretzel's partner in crime, beer, became wrapped up in the prohibition movement.

[Leslie] It does eventually become a target, for the people who really are deeply pro temperance tried to get rid of saloons by taxing them, and they tried to do other things, and they begin to ban the practice of the free lunch.

[Cecilia] You know when you go to a bar and sometimes they give you some food to eat, like peanuts, popcorn, pretzels?

That's what was referred to as a free lunch.

[Leslie] It starts between about 1908, 1909, and the only thing you could serve is relish.

You can have cheese and crackers and pretzels.

But wait a minute, pretzels are really salty.

So are pretzels food?

[Cecilia] This debate heats up in Missouri in 1913.

It got so wild, they even brought the cops and two attorney generals in to figure out if pretzels counted as food.

But the pretzel could not be kept down.

[Leslie] One of the Redding Pennsylvania news ran this editorial, and there's a little picture of an American flag, and then there's a little headline, "Pretzel vindicated."

[Cecilia] The whole article traces the pretzel, not to Germany, but to Italy.

Why?

Because it's World War I.

The US is at war with Germany.

Wartime xenophobia strikes again, and it was spreading fast.

So we conveniently rebrand the pretzel as Italian.

Maybe this is when the Italian monk story came about.

[Leslie] Over time, prohibition, in some ways, was almost a good thing, because it separated the pretzels from the beer.

[Cecilia] So pretzel one, beer zero.

(upbeat music) [Uli] If you could please salt this row here.

[Cecilia] All right.

(oven door closing) [Cecilia] The one thing I can say about this snack, other than it's absolutely delicious, is its amazing ability to adapt.

[Cecilia] Okay, so these are gorgeous.

Look at what you taught me how to do.

I've never made one with any flavors on it.

So this is how they look when they come out of the oven.

[Sabine] Yeah, they're amazing.

You're a natural.

[Cecilia] Got our s'mores one.

They're so beautiful and light.

They're just airy, and they smell so good, and the color.

(upbeat music) [Uli] Cheers.

[Sabine] Cheers.

[Cecilia] Cheers.

How do you say it in German?

(Sabine speaks German) (Uli speaks German) (Cecilia speaks German) Bon appetit.

(Cecilia laughing) (upbeat music continues) I can't even speak.

The cheese is so good.

Whether you prefer your pretzels soft or hard, salted or flavored, paired with mustard or beer, there's no denying the enduring appeal of this twisted treat.

Thanks for watching.

Don't forget to like and subscribe and tell us in the comments what's your favorite way to enjoy a pretzel?

And while you're there, let us know what other foods you'd like us to explore next on "Beyond the Menu".

(musical flourish)