“Word of mouth has always been our thing,” says Erika Bonnett, a manager at Center City Pretzel, which her father started 40 years ago. (It’s that same no-nonsense mentality that makes cheesesteak orders just as abrupt and effective.) Walk into the tiny alcove at the front of the massive, garage-like bakery, request pretzels, pay cash, leave. Center City’s pretzels are crusty and craggy on the outside, moistly dense and soft within - shaped in the classic Philly way to produce an ovular shape, and baked lined up in a close-set row so they stick together. There’s a good chance those pretzels Harris remembers were made by Center City Pretzel, which bakes thousands of pretzels for wholesale and retail from its storefront in South Philly’s Italian Market. It wasn't a proper big business or anything,” she said. “There were just kind of like, one guy, and you had hot dogs and pretzels. Philly native Alissa Harris remembers getting pretzels from the food carts outside Franklin Institute science museum as a kid. Where do these pretzels come from anyway? Kids carried boards of bagels on their heads throughout neighborhoods to sell their baked treats - not unlike the streetside selling you see all over Philly today. Around the turn of the 20th century, Italians ended up playing a role, taking over the city’s pretzel trade as bakers and hawkers. Weaver pinpoints the first mention of pretzels in Philadelphia to a German immigrant from Baden-Württemberg (aka bonafide pretzel country) in 1818. “The German-speaking world was and always has been a large part of the Philadelphia food story.” “You have to realize that, at one point, about one third of Philadelphia was made up of German neighborhoods,” Weaver says. The shape was associated with the Celtic deity Lugh, he says, who watched over bakeries. Germans absorbed this cultural practice as they migrated into the Rhineland from northern Europe. How did Pennsylvania become Pretzelvania?Īccording to food historian William Woys Weaver, the knotted pretzels we know today evolved from Celtic harvest knots, decoratively woven artworks made from dried and braided wheat straw.
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