Celebrate Breadsticks at Your Favorite Italian Restaurant in Manchester
10/15/15
If you check out our menu, you’ll see that our most popular item is our “ugli” sticks. If you’ve ever tried them, you’ll understand why they’re at the top of the list. The buttery homemade garlic breadsticks are the perfect addition to any meal, whether you like to dip them in marinara or just have them on their own. Although we think that our ugli sticks are something special, breadsticks are a classic addition to Italian food. As an Italian restaurant in Manchester, breadsticks are important to us, which is why we need to tell you about the holiday that we celebrate on the last Friday in October: National Breadstick Day!
Let’s take a bite out of this Italian restaurant favorite. The history may surprise you!
Fact vs. Fiction
As with most popular foods, especially Italian foods, there is a traditional story about the origin of breadsticks that may or may not be true. Traditional Italian breadsticks are thin and crispy, and long “bone-thin” bread was being baked in Florence as early as the 1640s. That’s the boring, probably-true history. The more interesting, probably-not-true story, however, involves a duke, as these stories often do.In 1675, the young duke of house Savoy was nine years old. He was sickly and frail, and his mother tasked their personal physician with finding something the boy could eat. The physician identified the boy’s ailment as food poisoning from bread polluted by pathogenic intestine bacteria (gross, we know). His solution? Bake the bread long and hot enough that it kills the bacteria. The result was crisp breadsticks called grissini, and they became the favorite bread of the household. While it’s a nice story, it’s probably not true. A mere four years later, grissini were in such high demand that the government had to set a ceiling price. So they had almost certainly been around for a while.
The North-American Twist
Now, you might be thinking that crispy breadsticks the size of pencils aren’t what you want when you order ugli sticks from your favorite Italian restaurant in Manchester. As happened with so many other foods, when immigrants brought them to North America, they took on a life of their own. While they still retained the long shape, breadsticks morphed into bigger, soft bread, often served as a side or an appetizer.
Luisa’s Pizza: Your Favorite Italian Restaurant in Manchester
At Luisa’s, we’ve taken our favorite traditional Italian dishes and foods and made them our own. Whether you’re in the mood for pizza, calzones, pasta, or something else, we have something on our menu that will hit the spot. And of course, don’t forget the ugli sticks!
