Ann St. Martin Stout
LEAVES ARE FREE
In the 1960s and early ‘70s, when I was growing up, selection on the grocery store shelves had not yet reached the expansive variety we have today. Regional foods took a long time to get to small-town New Hampshire. Restaurant choices were limited as well.
Growing up with my Greek grandmother just down the street, I probably had spanakopita, baklava and stuffed grape leaves much sooner than those in communities without a Greek population. My French grandmother passed down her recipe for tourtiere — French pork pie.
The first time I tried pizza was around age 12, a leftover, following my parents’ visit to Dave’s Pizza House in Goshen, NH, the evening before. The owners of the restaurant, the Bevilacqua family, were ahead of the culinary curve for our area. The small restaurant was located near the intersection of routes 10 and 31.
I had pretzels for the first time in my mid-teens, when I started hanging around a family transplanted from Pennsylvania. To my taste the pretzels were just “OK,” but to this Pennsylvania family they were a staple snack food.
While dating, and eventually marrying into the Stout family, we’ve made many trips to Pennsylvania, the Pretzel Capital of the nation, with 80 percent of American pretzels made by the Commonwealth’s 45 companies. (Pennsylvania consumes about 12 times more pretzels than the national average.) My husband tells of eating a warm pretzel, as a child, when it came off the conveyor at Mrs. Smith’s pretzel factory in Easton, PA.
About a half-dozen years after tasting my first pretzel, I discovered its spin-off; the chocolate covered pretzel. Now this was something my taste buds could get behind!
I assumed the chocolate covered pretzel was an American (Pennsylvania) invention, but not so. Thankfully, German baker Herr Franz Joseph Leibniz teamed up with his neighborhood chocolatier in Hamburg in 1544, and the rest is history.
“It took over 900 years for someone to decide that covering pretzels in chocolate was a good idea,” states the website Fatty Sundays.
A few more historical points: first there were only soft pretzels, until a baker fell asleep and overcooked them. The shape of the traditional pretzel symbolizes a child with arms crossed in prayer and was used as a reward by the monks for children who had learned their prayers. They were a Lenten snack because they contain none of the foods then forbidden during Lent: butter, eggs, milk and meat.
Over the years many shapes have become available including nuggets, rods, checkerboard, sticks and thins, along with traditional twists.
On Saturday, Oct. 7, we celebrate National Chocolate Covered Pretzel Day (regular pretzels celebrate on April 26). To make your own chocolate covered pretzels, heat a bowl with chocolate chips in the microwave or double boiler until melted, drop in a pretzel (one at a time), turn over to coat with melted chocolate and harden on a baking rack or parchment paper. If the melted chocolate seems too thick, mix in a couple of drops of vegetable oil.
Of course, if you’re not going to make your own, the supermarket or the neighborhood store probably has some shiny blue packages waiting just for you. Happy Chocolate Covered Pretzel Day!
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