Of course it’s true that the mass production of bagels has resulted in a product which is very different from what you could get in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The holy grail of ‘long shelf life’ means that preservatives keep the bagels chewable for much longer. The downside is that the crust of such a bagel is to the crust of a Brooklyn bagel of yore what a net curtain is to a velvet curtain. ‘Feh!’ as my three year old (who learned this Yiddish all-purpose diss from her 91 year old grandmother) would say.  And then of course there are the complaints of bagels being too big and too billowy. Mimi Sheraton said it best when she wrote in 1981:

…Not even in my most pessimistic moments did I imagine it would come to this. What used to be a fairly small, dense, gray, cool and chewy delight that gave jaw muscles a Sunday morning workout had become snowy white, soft, puffy and huge

But there is a flip side to this. And that is with the proliferation of bagels or the ‘bagelization’ of America, more people are getting to know bagels and therefore more people are wanting better bagels. Sales of frozen bagels, for example, are down year on year for the past seven years. What’s exciting for this bagel maven is the resurgence of the hand rolled bagel.

Does hand rolling really make a difference? I can’t prove it scientifically but the idea of shaping the dough with  human skin and muscle rather than cold steel would seem to give it a little something extra. Certainly to my mind the best bagels in New York these days are the ones made by a friend of mine, David Teyf, whose grandfather was a famous matzah baker in Minsk. David didn’t go into baking to begin with, but, having become fed up with what he felt were inferior bagels, he became converted to the idea of re-invigorating the hand rolled product. Today he’s supplying hand rolled bagels to Manhattan food landmarks like the 2nd Avenue Deli and Russ and Daughters.  

Enjoy!

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is her parting post. Want more? Buy her book!

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One British review of my book berated me for ‘devoting an inordinately lengthy section to the history of the New York bakery unions’ struggles’ but those struggles led to real change for people’s lives (and also arguably resulted in more hygienic bread!).    

The conditions in the cellar bakeries of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 19^th Century into the 20^th were grim. Here’s one account from the New York Press in 1894:

Trays of pretzel biscuit (that is, bagels) more or less fresh from the oven, stood upon the barrels… the wooden floor was rotten and bent under the weight of a person in every part… and wet, so wet that if a man stepped on that portion the splash of the water underneath could plainly (be heard)… the shop was thorougly infested with a great vareity of insect life… real genuine cockroaches, about an inch long, were seen springing at a lively rate in the direction of the half moulded dough.   

It took until 1909 – with the support of the whole community on the Lower East Side – to establish a lasting bakers’ union and set minimum wages. But it would be a turning point for the entire Jewish labor movement in New York. This was the beginning of a period during which Jewish unionists would play a leading role in the wider American movement, most famously in the garment industry.

One of demands acceded to by the bakery bosses in the 1909 strike was a system which was pioneered by the Jewish unions in the US – a system by which employed workers gave up one night a week to unemployed workers. One of the union leaders described it this way:

The Jewish locals demand from their steady men to support the loafing men, not with money but with work… [We] take the list of loafing men and the list of steady men and [determine] just how much the steady men must give up of their time to enable the loafing men to get enough work to cover their immediate expenses and a little above.

Any lessons there for today’s recession?

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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In the 1950s Milton Berle and Molly Goldberg used bagels as props. Even a young Woody Allen in 1963 got in on the act with a routine that taboo subjects are vital to society, so much so that in a place (like the Faroe Islands alledgedly) where sex is casual, sleazy natives peddle food porn instead. When a Faroe woman is asked whether she’d like cream cheese on her bagel she replies: "I don’t do that kind of thing."

The New Jersey artist who in the 1990s figured out a way to preserve genuine bagels and genuine locks (as versus lochs) on canvas had to be counting on the sense of humour of his potential buyers in an upscale Miami gallery – otherwise why hang these arrangements on your wall?

So what is it about the bagel that’s so funny?

Some say it’s the word itself – ‘beigel’ or ‘bagel,’ it’s chunky and chewy just like the experience of eating it.

For others it’s the ring shape with no beginning and no end that has a special hold on our human imagination with its intimations of eternity.   And then there’s the bagel hole – inpsiring or terrifying, depending on how you deal with the concept of infinity (for one London poet of the 1930s, the ring of dough represented life – when you finished off your bagel the hole you were left with symbolised death). The hole is the subject of many tales, the best of which has to be the one about the Fools of Chelm – a staple group of simpletons in Jewish folklore. Finding Chelm’s bagels lacking, a delegation of the town’s sages decided they must act and find out why the neighbouring town’s bagels are tastier, crunchier and chewier. 

"It’s simple," says the neighbouring town’s bagel baker when they ask him, "it’s the hole that makes the bagel."

"Please," say the delegation from Chelm, "can we have some of your holes so as to improve our bagels?"

"Of course," answers the baker and hands over a dozen or so holes which the sages place very carefully in their pockets.

Wending their way home in high spirits, they stop paying attention to the path. Suddenly all of them – to a sage – fall over the crest of a hill and roll down, the bagel holes falling out of their pockets as they gathered speed. Desperately they search the fields for these special holes but to no avail. Crestfallen they return to Chelm empty handed, unable to change the sorry state of the town’s bagels.

What I find endearing about the shape of bagels is that while they may aspire to be the perfect halo, they are by their plump, lumpy nature imperfect and a bit cheeky.   

In the 1960s El Al introduced a booklet – El Al Looks into the Bagel – to explain bagel history and etiquette to those passengers (there were quite a few it turned out) who had never eaten one before. The booklet was a hit and was reprinted at least four times. In fact, such was the scale of interest generated that El Al created a Bagel Research Center in its New York office – or did it? No one I spoke with in the course of my research (including the airline’s unofficial historian) knew anything about it. Was this a further bagel joke? Or is there a great archive of bagel jokes out there? Anyone with more information?

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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"…[T]here is so much memorialising about the Holocaust and yet so few people know anything about who those people were. You never learn five six [million] of them spoke Yiddish another good five ten per cent spoke Ladino in the Balkan countries. People mourn these people and yet they don’t know anything about their culture. And I realised you can’t mourn somebody without understanding them and to me it became a way of keeping something about them alive… I grew up in the eighties on Long Island, typical conservative Hebrew school and the Holocaust was a very, very large part of our curriculum and yet we learned absolutely nothing about the way that those people lived." 

The story of the bagel in prewar Poland is basically a story of what everyday life was like. For starters almost half of all the country’s bakeries were Jewish owned – in other words way out of proportion to the overall size of the Jewish population which made up about 10%. When you see those kinds of numbers you get a tangible feel for just how important those Jewish bakers were for the towns and cities of Poland. And because the bagel was such a popular food you find lots of observations about them – some more serious than others (in 1934 one sociologist did a survey of 129 of Warsaw’s 600 bagel peddlers) but all of them provide memorable pictures.  Like the rabbi in a medium sized town whose supper – reflecting his somewhat better off social status – was usually a glass of tea and ‘a day-old bagel.’ Or the hiding place for the socialist conspirators hollowed out under the bagel kettle. Or the the young woman bagel peddler in Warsaw who lost her leg running away from a policeman (who would have arrested her because she had no licence to peddle) but continued to hobble along on a wooden stump with her basket of bagels because there was nothing else she could make a living from.

I’d argue that this kind of history – this history of the everyday – is crucial to understanding the thorny subject of Polish-Jewish relations.

Within Poland there are a number of initiatives to make this kind of history available to a wider public. In the town of Lublin, for example, TNN a theatre group that started in 1992 on the site of the gate between the Jewish and gentile parts of the city has a growing archive of oral history about life in Lubin before World War II (there are many memories of buying bagels). And then there is Warsaw’s planned Jewish Museum which is going to have galleries which commemorate the culture and work of Poland’s Jewish community since the 10th century as well as a section on the Holocaust. Yes, it has attracted controversy in the world wide Jewish community – some New York friends of mine, for example, refused to donate any money, for them Poland is a cemetery best left alone. But to my mind those hundreds of years before the Holocaust were crucial to today’s Jewish community and to today’s Poland. They cannot be completely divorced. Not everyone will agree. Novelist Dara Horn, for example, takes issue with the argument I make in my book that Jews did not live in a world apart in Poland.

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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This Saturday night, as most Saturdays, I drove to the North West London neighbourhood of Golders Green to stock up on the week’s – still warm – bagels. Carmelli is Israeli owned and many of the staff there these days are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe. This week it’s bitterly cold – we’re experiencing so-called ‘Russian’ winds and snow – and people weren’t lingering outside the bakery. Usually there is a fair sized crowd milling around on a Saturday night, mostly young Jewish Londoners picking up bagels and cream cheese after a night of clubbing. It takes a good 40 minutes by tube from central London to get to Carmelli’s but one Saturday I even bumped into members of a Manchester Jewish youth group who’d come especially for the bagels.  

Bagels have been around in Britain as long as they have in the US but it’s only recently that they’ve begun to ‘make it’ on the high street and in the train stations. In the UK the bagel is still used as a badge of Jewish identity. In the 2002 novel Bagels for Breakfast, for example, the exotic act of eating a bagel is one of the hurdles the Jewish hero’s gentile girlfriend must leap before being accepted.

The Beigel Bake on Brick Lane – which 100 years ago was the heartland of Jewish London and now is almost completely Bengali – is the cult place to eat bagels, immortalised (for some) in the lyrics of the 1990s alternative Bristol band Earthling. Night shift workers, actors on their way home after the show, financial whizz kids (it’s right next door to the City), even Mariah Carey who allegedly was told to go the back of the queue like everyone else. It’s those bank workers, though, who got me thinking as I listened to yet another grim report about the financial crisis on the way home from Golders Green Saturday. So just how are bagels being affected by the credit crunch? A natural enough question for anyone who has obsessed about the history of bagels and bagel makers for the past few years. And a bit of research turned up the fact that one major bagel player in London (which has been shipping its annual production of 150 million bagels across Europe and to Japan and Hong Kong) just last week called in the receivers.  

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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