Even though I rarely ate them, my earliest pretzel memory is of the soft kind, eating them off the cart outside the American Museum of Natural History when my parents would take me into the city from New Jersey, where we lived. (That’s my memory of where it happened, anyway. I was young enough that my sense memory floats pure — disembodied, all tongue.)
I remember the salt, white and lofty as pearl sugar, biting back. I remember the soft-toughness of the pretzel, its harder ends, its dampish underbelly, where the salt had drawn condensation from the pretzel’s heat meeting the colder air. I remember the burnished brass gloss of it, glossier than a bagel. I didn’t know what malt was but I knew that this barley sweetness that kissed the skin of the pretzel was special. I wanted more.
Now I like all pretzels, but I’m partial to sticks and rods and, for nostalgia, big soft pretzels with their oddly damp underbellies (but not the sweet ones). But I’ve been buying the bigger bagged sourdough kind, in that classic pretzel twist. Splits. They are substantial but aerated, and crunch and shatter between my teeth like packed snow under winter boots. I perch on the windowsill in my apartment where I sometimes eat snacks and lick the salt off.
Pretzels are such a textural pleasure. Smooth and sweet beneath the rough and sharp. Like summer at the beach, sea salt scorching the back of your throat as you dip under velvet water. When I eat a pretzel, I have to press its flecks of salt into my tastebuds, however briefly. It’s the only way.
I used to do this in school, licking the salt of pretzel sticks when I was bored and had an appetite but wasn’t quite hungry. The roughness and salinity hurt my tongue a little, but the smoothness underneath felt nice too. For a moment, I’d think about horses, or rather, I’d imagine being one. My mom used to take me to visit the stables in Watchung, New Jersey, near my hometown, and I was fascinated by the salt licks in the horses’ stalls, the way they ran their strong soft tongues on them over and over, as if it was the only thing they’d been thinking of all day.
In food, people talk about mouthfeel and texture a lot but I don’t think they really talk about the sensation of licking, how much of that can be the pleasure of a snack. We don’t usually lick our breakfasts or dinners, but we do lick our ice cream cones and lollipops and twisted-off Oreos and some of us lick our pretzels.
I’ve always loved salt. When I visited my grandparents, they’d ask me what I wanted to eat and I went through a phase where all I said was “roasted air with salt and pepper,” refusing to state another preference. I thought this was hilarious. But this isn’t about saltiness, not just. It’s the whole contrast, taking the bitter with the sweet, as Carole King says. (I would never have made this reference as a kid. But I don’t buy that kids don’t know bittersweet. It is an early feeling.) I don’t crave pickles or chips or miso the way I crave pretzels when I’m wrung out, with too little sleep, too many tears, too much energy expended in dry conditioned heat or under the hot sun.
I crave pretzels after hours at a museum, on long car rides, on airplanes, after a day at the beach. I’ve craved them in the hollows between hard times, when I was too exhausted to sleep or cry. I crave them in the week before my period, when it feels like all the minerals in my bones have dissolved into my bloodstream and I am just sloshing around. (Maybe it is the iodine in them. Maybe I am not getting enough, after years of salting my food with Maldon and Diamond Crystal, which, as the boxes remind us, do not supply iodine, a vital nutrient. A question for my doctor.)
One way or another, this is a sensation and comfort — if I can call licking the rough salt off pretzels a comfort — that I sought on my own when I was little, through play or boredom or some other driver, and then set aside. I started again in my thirties, as if some five-year-old me had manifested onto my LA windowsill from the flat suburbs of central Jersey (or Central Park), pretzel in hand. There I am, finding my way through appetite, movement, touch. I lick the salty nubs of pretzels, with their commercial iodized salt, like a horse, no, like a deer running its tongue against the earth. You say I used to be wild, I say I used to be young.
Snacks
Happy 7th to TASTE! I love this magazine — one of the best food writing outlets out there, in my opinion, both in content and editing experience. Here’s a piece on kosher salt by Mari Uyehara, to keep with today’s theme. The Kosher Salt Question
Also from TASTE, here’s another by Jordan Michelman, since Valentine’s Day chocolate content (and anti-white chocolate snobbery) is alive and well: You’re Wrong About White Chocolate
And I wrote in praise of Guittard chocolate over at Wirecutter!