The Bagel
joan nathan

The Bagel By Maria Balinska Yale University Press 2008, $25, pp. 288

A few weeks ago, my daughter’s friend called to talk about the supremacy of Montreal bagels. For the uninitiated, they are smaller (but with a larger hole), denser and sweeter than New York-style bagels. Baked in wood-burning ovens after a bath in honey- or malt-sweetened water, they contain egg but no added salt. Since I agree that they are probably the best in the world, the friend’s call prompted a discussion on how the Montreal bagel is made.

The bagel: a fascinating topic and one that Maria Balinska treats superbly in her short book, part of a new series from Yale University Press on American icons. Balinska, a London-based BBC correspondent with a Polish, half-Jewish background, has traced the journey of the bagel throughout history, or rather, has traced the history of Jews through the bagel. I especially admire her scholarship, lively prose and tireless reportorial digging that has produced an almost definitive account of this humble yet internationally celebrated bread.

The bagel plays various roles in Jewish life, the author tells us. It is not only an everyday snack food, but also a symbolic bread at Jewish lifecycle events. Jews eat this modest round roll with hard-boiled eggs and chickpeas for the mourning meal after the death of a loved one and for the morning meal after a bris. In America bagels with lox are customarily eaten to break the Yom Kippur fast.

According to Balinska, the antecedent to the bagel originated in regions like Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, where taralli, tiny cracker-like rolls with a hole, are first boiled for a minute or two and then baked to obtain their shine and crispy texture. When I first tasted taralli, I recognized their kinship with Syrian ka’ak, which are not boiled but bear a striking resemblance to taralli and are popular throughout Mediterranean Jewish communities.

Boiling before baking was clearly a very old custom, but I am not sure that it is necessarily related to the bagel in its present incarnation. Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, depict a roll with a hole as one type of local bread eaten elsewhere in the ancient world. Today, in Middle Eastern cities like Jerusalem, large sesame-studded baked-but-not-boiled rolls with holes are hawked in the old city, sold on sticks and dipped in za’atar, a pungent blend of wild thyme and sesame seeds, that is sometimes mixed with salt and olive oil.

Poland in the 17th century under King Jan Sobieski was the breadbasket of Europe, and Jews were often the bakers during this golden age. Balinska traces the ups and downs of Jewish fortunes in Poland and how they affected the bagel and owarzanek, one of the bagel’s precursors, a common roll eaten in Poland and parts of Russia. “Whatever its origin, the story of the bagel being created in honour of Jan Sobieski and his victory at [the 1638 Battle of] Vienna has endured,” Balinska tells us.

In the renaissance of Yiddish culture in late 19th century Poland, the bagel played a starring role in stories by I.L. Peretz and other authors and, as in America, was eaten by non-Jews as well. Beyond starring in fictional works, bagels also feature prominently in childhood memories. Peretz recalls, “I had no breakfast, only coffee. And following the teachings of the Duties of the Heart, I brought my buttered bagel to Avigdor, the teacher’s orphaned son who frequented the study house.” Beyond the literary community, Balinska relates, “Bagel nostalgia is not infrequent in the pages of memorial books (books written about towns destroyed during the Holocaust).”

After the bagel crossed the ocean in waves of Jewish immigration, mostly from greater Poland at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, its rise in America provides another absorbing tale. By 1900 bagels had become a part of everyday life in New York; 70 bakeries on the Lower East Side were making them. Balinska writes that in the beginning, “bakeries were relatively inexpensive businesses to start up....There was no need to acquire machinery...since the workforce was so easy to come by.” But “the conditions were terrible...the temperature was fierce...there was no ventilation...[and the bakers] often lived at their workplace sleeping between the mounds of rising dough and the ovens with cats, rats and cockroaches ‘as big as birds’ for company.”

The first specifically Jewish bakers’ union was founded in 1885 but quickly fell apart. When Local 338 was created after many fitful organizing efforts, its bagel bakers were known as “the kings of the line.” “The 1950s,” Balinska writes, “would see the high point in the union’s fortunes, an extraordinary time when it was impossible to sell a bagel in New York City without [Local 338’s] say-so....It is a sad irony that Local 338 folded just as the bagel was beginning to seduce mainstream America.”

In the 1960s, bagels made outside the greater New York area began coming into the city. Dough preservatives, automated machinery and refrigeration ironically led to the union’s demise. The Lender family of New Haven introduced frozen bagels, and the rest is history: an avalanche of bagels, falling across multi-ethnic America, regardless of race, creed or previous servitude to culinary habit.

Among her many interviews Balinska spoke at length with surviving members of the leading bagel-baking Beigel family of Krakow, a family I had interviewed a few years ago for a New York Times article. Pious and prosperous bakers in the 19th century, with five branches of Beigel bakeries operating at one time, the family heroically smuggled flour from their bakery for their private soup kitchens during World War II to save starving Jews. (They now sell packaged baked goods in Israel and the United States under the Beigel brand.)

Remarkably, Balinska found evidence from the 9th century that might explain why bagel dough is boiled before it is baked. A Polish decree of the time forbade Jews to bake bread because of the connection between bread and the body of Jesus Christ. But if dough was boiled first and then baked, it didn’t fall into the same category as bread and could be made and consumed.

An alternative explanation that I heard from a member of the Beigel family holds that Jewish merchants from Krakow who traveled the countryside to sell their wares needed to take food with them to keep kosher on the road. According to Jewish law, eating bread at a meal requires a ritual washing of hands and a blessing over the food before eating. But in the countryside, that was difficult because of the risk of contracting typhus from impure water. The Beigel family, aware of this predicament, ingeniously decided to first boil the dough and then bake it, thus putting it in the category of noodles.

If water is the prerequisite for a good bagel, it also explains why, until recently, no bagels as we know them have emerged in Israel; bakers in the dry land preferred rolls that required less water. Also, rolls with holes already existed there, coming full circle from Middle Eastern countries where Jews affectionately called them bagela.

Joan Nathan, the author of seven cookbooks on Jewish cooking, is working on her next one about the food of the Jews of France.