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.”