National Pretzel Day comes around for the twisted, salted bread you can eat with one hand. Buy one warm from a counter, or shape a tray at home, and get to it while the crust still cracks.
National Pretzel Day has no documented founder. A Pennsylvania congressman described April 26 on the floor of the U.S. House in 2001 as a day the industry had designated, without naming any body, and Pennsylvania has recognized the date since through a governor's proclamation in 2003 and a House resolution in 2014.
On April 26, 2001, a congressman from Pennsylvania stood up in the House and said something odd about a holiday. "Mr. Speaker, though many people do not know it, today has been designated by the industry as National Pretzel Day," Representative Joseph R. Pitts told the chamber. He did not say which part of the industry, and nobody asked.
That single minute is the earliest trace of National Pretzel Day in the congressional record, and it describes the day as something already up and running. The story everybody repeats instead credits another Pennsylvania congressman, Robert S. Walker, with founding the day in 1983. What Walker actually filed that summer was a resolution to make October National Pretzel Month, and it died in a subcommittee.
Which leaves the pretzel itself to carry the day, and it is stranger than the paperwork. What separates a pretzel from bread tied in a knot is a bath of caustic soda before it ever reaches the oven.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Pretzel Day ran on April 26. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Strip a pretzel of its knot and you still have a pretzel. Strip it of its bath and you have a bread roll. Before it goes anywhere near an oven, the shaped dough is dipped in an alkaline solution, and the European Union's own specification for the Bavarian pretzel puts a ceiling on it: a lye solution thinned to less than 4 percent sodium hydroxide.
That specification also reaches back for the shape. It traces the form to Roman ring bread served with the evening meal and eaten in particular in monasteries, and derives the name from Brezitella, the old High German word for the Latin brachiatellium, meaning little arm. The knot, it says, resembles and symbolises arms folded in prayer.
The bath has a birthday, and the EU records it as a story rather than a certainty. The Bavarian version, it writes, tells of a chance mistake in 1839.
A baker named Anton Nepomuk Pfannenbrenner was working at the Royal Coffeehouse of Johan Eilles in Munich. He normally glazed his pretzels in sugar water. One morning he reached instead for the lye kept for cleaning the baking sheets, and an envoy of the King of Wuerttemberg tasted the result the same morning.
German speaking immigrants carried pretzel baking to Pennsylvania, and in 1861 a man named Julius Sturgis started selling them in Lititz, in Lancaster County. Pennsylvania's legislature calls that America's first commercial pretzel bakery, and says the recipe and methods are still used by his descendants.
What grew around it was a hard pretzel country and a soft pretzel country in the same few counties. When Pitts listed the large pretzel producers in his district in 2001, he named Auntie Anne's, Herr's, Anderson, Sturgis and Hammond.
Walker's October resolution went to the Subcommittee on Census and Population in July 1983 and stopped there. By 2001 an April 26 pretzel day was circulating anyway, credited on the House floor to an industry nobody named.
Pennsylvania took it from there. Governor Ed Rendell redeclared the day in 2003. The state House followed in 2014, adopting a resolution that recognized April 26 as Pretzel Day, and not one member voted against it.
TIMELINE
Today we have with us Mr. Snyder, who operates the oldest hard pretzel bakery in the United States located in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and Mr. Snyder told me to remind everybody that 75 percent of the pretzels consumed in the United States are made right here in Pennsylvania.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The bath sets the stage. The oven does the browning.
A 2012 study of hard pretzel production dipped dough for 45 seconds in hot sodium hydroxide and found no Maillard derived cross links in it immediately after dipping, even when the dipping conditions were made severe. Baking and drying increased the redness, and in the finished pretzel the Maillard products that can link proteins were small next to the ones derived from dehydroalanine, chiefly lanthionine and lysinoalanine.
United States food law lists sodium hydroxide under the names soda lye, caustic soda and lye, and affirms it as generally recognized as safe for use as a direct human food ingredient. It is permitted there as a pH control agent and a processing aid, which is exactly what a pretzel bath is.
A 2019 analysis of soft pretzel crust identified 28 odour active compounds, led by one that smells of roasted popcorn and one that smells of caramel. What set the crust apart from other pastry crusts was partly what was missing from it, including any pyrazines.
GOOD TO KNOW
The Bayerische Breze has been a protected geographical indication in EU law since February 2014. Its specification calls for thicker arms, no split along the thicker middle, and a fat content of 1.5 to 4 percent.
The neighbouring Swabian pretzel is the Bavarian document's foil: its arms sit very low down, leaving a curved upper part sometimes called the belly, and it runs fattier at 4 to 8 percent.
The American centre of gravity, and the only place that has formally recognized the day. Its legislature calls the state the Snack Food Capital of the World.
MYTH VS FACT
A monk invented the pretzel in the fifth century as a reward for children who learned their prayers.
The story is told constantly and never with the same date. The Congressional Record puts it at 610 A.D. in North Italian monasteries; Pennsylvania's own resolution says the seventh century and prefaces the whole thing with the words according to various sources; the EU's reviewed product specification tells no monk story at all and traces the shape to Roman ring bread. Treat it as folklore rather than a founding date.
Pretzel comes from pretiola, Latin for little reward.
That is what Representative Pitts told the House in 2001, and it is widely repeated. The European Union's product specification for the Bavarian pretzel derives the name instead from Brezitella, the old High German word for the Latin brachiatellium, meaning little arm. Two official documents, two etymologies, and no settled answer between them.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, so it is a normal working day, and no federal designation of it appears in the government publishing records checked.
COLOPHON
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