The Snack Food You Can Thank Monks for Inventing
Monks and the idea of snacking seem diametrically opposed.
I don’t think snacking is a sin, but it feels like it’s getting close, like some sort of “gateway sin.” Trying to picture a silent monk going to town on a Snickers just doesn’t make sense in my head. You’d think he’d have to go straight to a confessional and atone with chocolate still on his face. And so, it’s incredibly surprising to me that a common and beloved snack was cooked up in a monastery by the pious.
Even more shocking is that it’s a snack that people still actively and frequently eat in the year 2024, when everyone’s taste buds are desensitized to subtlety by snack foods blasted in powders of various kinds. A snack made by monks seems like something that would only fulfill a craving back when salt was still worth its weight in gold. Something incredibly bland and possibly painful, like gnawing on a briar branch.
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Yet, all the way back in 610 AD (or thereabouts), a monk invented the pretzel.
Now, it was likely not as butter-drenched and heavily salted as the Auntie Anne’s of today, but it still sounds totally solid. Another point in their favor was that they were of the soft variety, not the vastly inferior crunchy kind. They were merely strips of leftover bread, baked and twisted into the well-known pretzel shape because they (if you squint, I guess) look like arms crossed in a prayer pose.
Either way, they caught on quickly. In fact, pretzels would stay associated with monks for centuries, being given out to the poor as a sort of Church-branded snack.
They expanded even further in their role as a religious treat because their recipe eschewed eggs and dairy, which meant they were allowed during Lent. Not bad as far as religious bread goes, since I’d take a pretzel over matzah any day of the week.
They also hold the distinction of saving the city of Vienna. When the Turks attempted an invasion via tunnel, monks that were baking pretzels in a basement heard the digging and alerted the city. Which is how the pretzel also became, to my knowledge, the only snack food to ever grace an official coat of arms.