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

[Stephanie Ross]

Urtatim wrote:

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 found a very complete description by William Woys Weaver of the types of
pretzels available in medieval Poland from Maria Dembinska's book.

"Bagels or ring pretzels are called circuli in Polish Latin, butbracellus
or brachitum elsewhere in Europe. The Polish plural terms, obarzanky and
obwarzanky, appear often in the royal accounts of of King Wlayslaw Jagiello
and Queen Jadwiga. Later they are also refered to as praczliki, a term that
first appeared in the 1502 accounts of Prince Sigismund I. A common street
food in Cracow even today, obarzanki are generally made of two pieces of
dough twisted into a ring and then baked with poppy seeds over them. The
name does not imply a specific recipe; it is only a reference to the dried
out texture. Thus, obarzhanki could be made from any type of dough. In
fact, the recipe for (Wroclaw) trencher bread (page 180) [ale barm, beer,
rye and spelt flours, salt] will make both dry obarzanky and fresh raised
dough pretzels (bracellus recens) of excellent texture and flavor, similar
to bagels sold in Wroclaw and other Silesian towns in the 1300s.