Pumpernickel is a dark German rye bread. It gets its color from baking for up to 24 hours in a low, steam-filled oven. Some modern manufacturers cheat on the long baking time and instead add molasses, coffee, cocoa powder and other coloring agents. 

So why the funny name? Some suggest that the bread was named by an 18th-century Frenchman who dismissed its non-baguetteness as "bon pour Nicole" -- good for Nicole, his horse.

Others have guessed that it comes from the word pumpen, a German word for "fart," plus nickel, a nickname for Nikolaus that can mean either a half-wit or the devil himself. Another theory traces the bread back to the 1450s, when it was distributed to the poor during a famine in Osnabrück, earning it the nickname of bonum panicum, or "good bread," which later morphed into "bumponickel" and finally into "pumpernickel."