Breadsticks first appeared around the 14th century BCE in Turin, Italy.
These tough, crispy, pencil-shaped sticks had the uniformity of crackers and also last for days. The trick was to bake them to the preferred level of crispy-ness without burning them.
An Alternative Background of the Breadstick
In the year 1675, when the young duke, Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy, was 9 years of age, got seriously ill.
The doctor established that the young boy had eaten bread contaminated by pathogenic intestinal tract bacteria .As the tale goes, the doctor himself had actually had comparable disorders when he was a child, and his conditions had been cured by his mother’s bread– well-baked, well-leavened crunchy bread with hardly any crumb.
The doctor then had the baker replicate this bread– breadsticks (“Grissini” in Italian from the Piedmont Dialect ghërsa which means a long shaped bread) . The young boy’s health soon improved and went on to become king in 1713 .
The crunchy grissini came to be the bread of choice in the Savoy household, which is exactly how it became known and also enjoyed by all aristocracy of the age.
One More, Much Shorter Alternate History of the Breadstick
There’s one more historical record that states that in 1643, 32 years prior, a Florentine abbot discovered in a community beyond Turin a brand-new kind of bread that had a strange shape, a form that was as long as an arm and as thin as dead bones, yet scrumptious. Going even farther back in history, there is a referral to a special type of bread called “pane barotellatus”, which suggests stick.
pic source: Taste.com
