[Sca-cooks] Period Pretzels, yet again...

[David Friedman]

My daughter is confident, on linguistic grounds, that the brazzatelle 
are bagels, not pretzels--aside from their being sweet. And I don't 
think I know of any period recipe that meets the restrictions you 
describe. One could take the brazzatelle recipe as evidence for the 
"boil then bake" technique, which is used for modern soft pretzels and 
bagels.


On 2/17/13 5:24 PM, lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
> A cooking competition in March is for soft pretzels. The head of the sponsoring group says the only ingredients that can be used are starter, flour, water, and salt if you wish, and that entrants must make and use their own starter.
>
> We know that pretzel-shaped baked items of some sort are definitely period, since they appear in the coats of arms of cities and guilds, in Books of Hours, in paintings, and more, going back at least to the 12th c.
>
> For a long while we looked at recipes for jumbles / iombols / ciambole / precedella / brazzatelle (and various other spellings). But these are sweet, have many more ingredients than those permitted in the competition, and are more like cookies than soft pretzels.
>
> I no longer remember: has anyone found a recipe or clear reference to something like soft pretzels that includes only yeast, flour, water, and maybe salt?
>
> I reviewed the Florilegium article, but did not study every post in depth, and in my scanning, at least, i didn't.
> http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-BREADS/pretzels-msg.html
> Perhaps i missed the missing link between sweet bread or cookie and our beloved salty soft pretzel...
>
> Urtatim (that's oor-tah-TEEM)
> who is not planning to enter the competition
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-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/