If you’ve ever wanted to eat pretzels for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, consider Pennsylvania your wonderland.
From the salty figure eights hawked outside Philadelphia sports venues to those buttery twists stocked at malls and farmer’s markets, there might be more pretzel varieties here than there are Sheetzes and Wawas.
They come crispy, chewy, pillowy, and snappy. We dip them in cheese, fill them with peanut butter, and cover them in chocolate. And a lot of these pretzels are made right here in the commonwealth.
Pretzel production is so entrenched in Pennsylvania, in fact, that some writers have referred to parts of the state as the nation’s “pretzel belt” for over a century.
While a Pennsylvanian didn’t invent the European pastry, bakeries here have recognized it could have popular appeal beyond Old World symbolism and traditions, said William Woys Weaver. He’s an ethnographer and author of multiple books about Pennsylvania foodways — including an upcoming one about pretzels.
“It just became a snack food like popcorn, but more popular,” Weaver said. “And in Pennsylvania, there were all kinds of … regionalisms, local tastes.” Other areas of the country have tried “copying” some of Pennsylvania’s pretzel culture and success, he said, “but never to the scale that it evolved here.”
Germans and trains
So how did Pennsylvania become such a hot spot for pretzels? Experts say several factors contributed, from immigration to transportation infrastructure.
“At heart, it’s about Pennsylvania’s historical, deep German roots,” Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, told PA Local. “All the rest of it stems from that.”
According to Weaver, people from Baden-Württemberg and Swabia — now regions of southwestern Germany — brought a pretzel-making tradition to Pennsylvania during their waves of migration here in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Bakers from those areas were typically trained in pretzel-making as well, Weaver explained. Their pretzels could be either soft or “crisp,” were typically made from spelt flour, and sometimes would be boiled in lye before being baked.
At one point in Southeastern Pennsylvania, “every small town had somebody who made pretzels,” Weaver said. “They either went into pretzels as a full line, or it was just the sideline while they were making bread products.”
Pretzel-making established a “deep foothold” in Pennsylvania and “became part of local culture in a way that was never really dislodged,” Przybylek said.
Once technological innovations made it possible to produce and distribute packaged pretzels at a large scale, Pennsylvania turned into the “main commercial origin for pretzels as a snack food,” Przybylek said. (Reading claims credit for one of those technologies, the automatic pretzel machine.)
A factor that helped Pennsylvania-made pretzels succeed, Weaver said, was the state’s strong railroad network, which made it possible to distribute the snacks nationwide. For today’s snack manufacturers, the interstate highway network provides a similar advantage, he added.
Regional (and international) twists
Pretzels have evolved a lot since they first arrived in Pennsylvania.
The many species you can find at grocery stores, gas stations, and dedicated pretzel bakeries statewide trace the ways ingredients and tastes have shifted over the years.
Spelt flour isn’t as common, for instance, and regions like the Philadelphia area have embraced specific styles.
Attributing who came up with this or that twist is hard to say, both Przybylek and Weaver noted.
“It’s really difficult to ever tie a food to one specific place and one specific moment, because it’s food, and it can be that different areas find that tradition at the same time, or multiple people discover it by accident,” Przybylek said.
Plus, Weaver said, as with any successful food innovation, “copycats make copycats of copycats.”
“As soon as somebody comes up with a good idea that sells, 10 other people are doing it very quickly.”
Nevertheless, early on in Pennsylvania pretzel history, a small borough in Lancaster County managed to make a name for itself. Mentions of “Lititz pretzels” appear in 19th century newspapers, with the Sunbury American in 1888 noting that the town had “three pretzel mills,” including one that “has lately been making 10,000 per day.”
Several tales have circulated over the years about how that came to be. One involves a baker’s apprentice who accidentally burned to a crisp pretzels that were supposed to be soft. And when he tasted them, and liked them, he eventually went into business for himself selling crunchy, hard pretzels.
“They were a hit,” said Tim Snyder, current owner of Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery in Lititz, which traces its roots back to 1861 and has been called the oldest commercial pretzel bakery in the country. (It’s no longer an active commercial facility, but the Sturgis family still bakes pretzels in Berks County under the Tom Sturgis brand.)
And when other local bakers saw Julius Sturgis’s success, Snyder said, they tried to replicate it.
“At one point at the end of the 1880s and 1900s, there was like eight or 10 pretzel bakeries in the small town of Lititz,” Snyder said, “and that’s how the hard pretzel industry got started.”
Though that industry is no longer concentrated in Lititz, makers of hard pretzels still maintain a strong presence in Pennsylvania, and many of the companies that produce them today — including Snyder’s of Hanover, Utz, and Herr’s, to name just a few — distribute nationally.
Soft pretzels also remain popular. In Philadelphia, they’ve been a street food for decades, though the local shape deviates from the traditional form: It’s oblong, with two holes instead of three — sort of like an infinity symbol.
At some shops, such as Center City Pretzel Co. in South Philly, you’ll find a “big fat knot in the center,” said Erika Tonelli Bonnett, vice president and COO of the family business her father started in 1981.
“For us, a perfect pretzel … is brown, and it has a crust to it,” Tonelli Bonnett said. “It has the perfect spread of salt over it, and I mean, you can pick your dip of choice, but for me, I’m a mustard girl.”
In Pittsburgh around late December, the fixings get more festive. Bakeries and grocery stores there sell massive, sweet New Year’s pretzels covered in icing and often topped with sprinkles or nuts. They’re thought to bring good fortune.
According to Weaver, this harks back to an old Pennsylvania Dutch tradition of displaying “oversized” pretzels in churches around the New Year to symbolize good luck.
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, fresh, soft, hand-twisted pretzels slathered in butter or covered in cinnamon and sugar can be found year-round. The chain Auntie Anne’s, which first launched in Chester County in the 1980s, sells their version in cities across the world (though the company’s headquarters relocated from Pennsylvania to Georgia in 2021).
And the above variations merely scratch the surface. Bakers have further customized the delicacy over the years by adding fillings, incorporating different types of grain, selling hollow “pretzel shells,” and even using them as a cheesesteak casing.
Like I said above: wonderland.
These ongoing innovations show that while Pennsylvania didn’t invent pretzels, we’ve certainly embraced them.
“Because the pretzel has become such a snack food … the people who are baking pretzels have now gotten really inventive in making all kinds of weird pretzel snacks that never existed a hundred years ago,” Weaver said, “but they’re now part of the pretzel story.”