April 6, 2006
About Food Posted by Claire Lui at 09:15 AM EST American Heritage bloggers have been writing about politics and about food, but what about political food? Food lore gives political power to a number of everyday snacks, including the croissant and the pretzel. I first heard the croissant story in a high school history class, though I fear it may be only a myth. Legend holds that a Viennese baker (or perhaps a Turkish one; the details are muddy) overheard the Turkish army tunneling under the city. His sharp hearing led to the tunnel being blown up, and this patriotic baker asked only that he be given the exclusive right to bake crescent-shaped pastries in honor of the occasion (crescents being the symbol of Islam). Alan Davison, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food, credits this story to the first edition of Larousse Gastronomique, but finds it unbelievable. (I’ve also heard that in French bakeries the curved croissants mean that they are made with real butter, while straight croissants are made with margarine. This too, may be only rumor.) Pretzels, as I learned while watching Final Jeopardy! the other day, are in the shape of crossed arms in prayer. A site called www.catholicculture.org gives more of an explanation: Pretzels, made only of flour, water, and salt, to satisfy the requirements of Lent, were shaped into the crossed arms of prayer (the preferred position of praying back in the early pretzel-making days) to remind snackers that Lent was a time of prayer. (This pretzel history is remarkably like the symbolism of matzoh, another timely holiday food.) And finally, in our own modern times, I was amused to see that in Iran bakeries were renaming Danish pastries “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4724656.stm), in response to the uproar over the political cartoons in Denmark. We, of course, have our freedom fries (a name that my local pizzeria continues to use). Considering that the Danes don’t call breakfast goodies Danishes and the French don’t call their pommes frites French fries, it seems like a bit of a fuss over nothing. The best quote in the BBC article is from a sweet-toothed shopper in Tehran: “I just want the sweet pastries. I have nothing to do with the name," shopper Zohreh Masoumi said.
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