Mark your calendar!

     One very tasteful Christmas gift I received was a special calendar.  It is published and distributed by "The Roadfood Traveler" and lists all the holidays for 2013 that are related somehow to food.  For example August 2 is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day and the following day is National Watermelon Day.  I was somewhat disappointed to learn that on my birthday people across the nation will celebrate National Vanilla Pudding Day, not a very memorable event in my estimation.

     But this Thursday is an epic celebratory day, National Sticky Bun Day!  Yes, a day set apart for one of the truly epicurean delights, perfect any time of the day at any meal.   They are wonderfully, well...sticky and a welcome presence at the table for young and old alike.

 

     Food historians claim that sticky buns have a long history, originating in Roman, Greek and Egyptian societies.  But I can only imagine that what they consumed was certainly only a poor primitive precursor to the baked dough with melted brown sugar and cinnamon and melted butter that we know today.  More reasonably the sticky bun was developed much later, in the Middle Ages, most likely in southwest Germany, an area known as the Palatinate.  They rolled up dough and sweetened it with toppings and termed it Schnecken.

     But what we could recognize came later in history when the residents of that region emigrated to the New World as a result of the Nine Years' War in 1688.  Another wave of immigrants landed on our shores around 1702 when the War of Spanish Succession decimated the Palatinate.  Many of them arrived in Philadelphia in a section of the city we now call Germantown.  And they brought with them recipes for schnecken.  It remains today what it was then, a rolled up dough, baked and topped with whatever is available: honey, molasses, or maple sugar.  Sticky buns can be plain or topped with pecans, raisins or even bananas or pineapple.  Today Philadelphia remains the Sticky Bun Capital of the World.

     For a brief video on how to make sticky buns click on this site.