[Sca-cooks] Pretzels

[Johnna Holloway]

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley mentions pretzels in the entry "Breads, Braided or Knotted. Also of interest would be the entry "Breads, Ring-Shaped." Riley includes references to manuscripts and artworks.

Johnnae
Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 25, 2016, at 2:20 AM, Rebecca Friedman <rebeccaanne3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "And make them rise with great -" diligence or care, I would make that. And
> more precisely, I think they are rings, not pretzels - bagels precisely I
> can't speak to, but if you're curious about the linguistic argument...
> 
> ... "bracciatello" is in Florio's 1611 dictionary as "A kind of roule or
> bisket bread, we call them round funnels". (Poking around on my other early
> dictionary, I get "bracciatello" described as a "kind of large ciambella"
> and a "ciambella" as "the same dough [as berlingozzo] made in the form of a
> ring" which seems pretty clear. Also, the dough is described as "flour
> mixed with eggs".) Mind, brazzatella --> bracciatello is still a shift.
> -zz- to -cci- is a change that happens very often, maybe even on a
> within-the-same-manuscript basis, but while -a to -o sometimes happens it
> is not nearly that common. So I don't guarantee they're the same, but
> they're very close, bracciatello is definitely an egg bread made in the
> shape of a ring, and I could not find the word brazzatella at all in the
> dictionary. So for whatever it's worth, there's my linguistic grounds!
> Becca
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