The pretzel may seem like a simple indulgence — golden-brown, warm, dusted with salt — but it carries more than a thousand years of history with every twist. Long before it became a ballpark staple or a mall-food-court fixture, the soft pretzel served as a Lenten food for Catholics in 7th-century Europe, making it one of the oldest documented snacks in Western culinary tradition. German immigrants carried the recipe to colonial Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, and the region has remained the undisputed capital of American pretzel production ever since.