I grew up buying soft pretzels at every school bake-sale, at every school fundraiser, at every school dance, and at every school sports game. We had a whole culture around them -- everyone knew the best part of the pretzel was the knot in the middle and if you tried hard enough you could scoop out the soft doughy part from the harder outer layer.
The pretzels were the best at the beginning of the day when they were warm, but there was nothing better than finding a half-eaten pretzel in your lunchbox that you had bought earlier in the day and then forgotten about.
There’s absolutely nothing like a Philly soft pretzel. And the soft pretzels everywhere else simply do not compare. Anywhere else in the country, there will be spinning racks of pretzels drying out under yellow lights meant to keep them “warm.” The salt dries out the already cracking outsides instead of elevating the flavor. The pretzels are always tough and chewy.
But people still like them.
It’s strange to me to even think about how people can like the pretzel nuggets when they don’t even have the right dipping sauces: the cheese, the chocolate, and the cinnamon.
It’s strange to me to even think about how people can like the pretzels when they’re not even thick enough to scoop out the inside.
It’s strange to me to even think about how people can like these pretzels when they pale in comparison to the ones I grew up with.
It’s strange how much I miss the real pretzels.
At home, soft pretzels were just something I took for granted: they’d always be there and I could have one almost whenever I wanted. Now, it is nearly impossible to actually find a good soft pretzel I’ve talked so much to my friends about the soft pretzels from home that my phone has remembered the phrase and auto-suggests “a box of soft pretzels” so often that for secret santa, my friend gave me a box with a stuffed soft-pretzel inside of it.
I miss the Philly soft pretzels. I miss ripping them apart from each other and the weird shapes they had that I accepted as normal.
I miss splitting pretzels with friends and getting plates of pretzel nuggets.
I miss something so simple because to me they mean so much.
