Balinska describes the horror with which some New Yorkers greeted the advent of frozen bagels: "How can that be a bagel? A doughnut dipped in cement and then frozen?
A truly good bagel, wrote one critic, should be "a fairly small, dense, gray, cool and chewy delight that gave jaw muscles a Sunday morning workout," not the pillowy monstrosities now preferred by "a public too lazy to chew.
Personally, I've become a bit of a bagel snob, after spending a year in Manhattan for grad school and discovering the joys of fresh, chewy bagels. I still get nostalgic and cave in to those squishy grocery-store bagels from time to time, but they really only taste good as a canvas for cream cheese. Also, he takes issue with my comment that he never cooks -- he claims he once created a casserole called the Sugar Pops Tuna Wiggle.
I can only presume my brain has tried to block out that traumatic memory. Amanda Fiegl is a former assistant editor at Smithsonian and is now a senior editor at the Nature Conservancy.
A bagel with lox, a uniquely American combination. Flickr user Matthew Mendoza Do you remember the first time you tasted a bagel? The bagel's known history goes back at least a good six centuries, and, in practice, probably more than that. While we know them in the here-and-now of 21st-century America, the bagel's likely rollout to the world probably began in Poland.
Balinska first suggests the possibility that they came East to Poland from Germany as part of a migration flow during the 14th century. At the time, pretzels the thick bread of the German variety, not the American kind that comes in plastic bags were making their way out of their original home in the monasteries and being made into readily available feast day bread.
German immigrants, brought to Poland to help provide people power for building the economy immigration was then encouraged, not discouraged , brought the pretzels with them.
In Poland, that theory goes, the German breads morphed into a round roll with a hole in the middle that came to be known in Poland as an obwarzanek. Written records of them appear as early as the 14th century. They gained ground when then Queen Jadwiga, known for her charity and piety, opted to eat obwarzanek during Lent in lieu of the more richly flavored breads and pastries she enjoyed the rest of the year.
While that might seem like quite a step in the context of Marie Antoinette's later "let them eat cake" comments, take note that, although Jadwiga was apparently pretty down-to-earth as queens go, obwarzanek at that time wasn't exactly the kind of inexpensive street food that bagels became a few centuries later.
Lent, then as now, was, of course, a period during which devout Christians consciously chose deprivation -- but what constitutes "deprivation" is relative.
What the queen chose for her daily bread was, at the time, actually rather costly, as it was made from wheat, which was not cheap. Most Poles at that time could barely afford the cheaper, coarser breads from rye flour, so white wheat was pretty much off the table for all but the wealthy.
Obwarzanek was primarily the province of princes, nobles, and men and women of means, but generally not for the poor. Still one other version dates the first bagels to the late 17th century in Austria, saying that bagels were invented in by a Viennese baker trying to pay tribute to the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski. The king had led Austria and hence Poland as well, since it was part of the empire in repelling invading Turkish armies.
Given that the king was famous for his love of horses, the baker decided to shape his dough into a circle that looked like a stirrup -- or beugel in German.
Going back a bit, at the same time Germans were making their way to Poland, so too were a good number of Jews, which is where my ancestors would have gotten involved. In that era it was quite common in Poland for Jews to be prohibited from baking bread. This stemmed from the commonly held belief that Jews, viewed as enemies of the Church, should be denied any bread at all because of the holy Christian connection between bread, Jesus, and the sacrament.
Strange though it sounds, Jews were often legally banned from commercial baking. The bagel as Jewish food really came of age during the era of Polish history known as the "Nobles' Democracy. Unlike almost every other country in Europe, Poles identified themselves as citizens of their country rather than of any divisive framework based on religious, ethnic, or linguistic origins. This mindset created the environment where Jews were first allowed the opportunity to bake, and then sell, bread -- of which bagels were an integral part.
The shift started to take place in the late 13th century. Balinska refers to the breakthrough code that came from the Polish Prince Boleslaw the Pious in that said, "Jews may freely buy and sell and touch bread like Christians. William Safire wrote in the New York Times in , "A sea change in American taste took place at the beginning of this decade.
The bagel overtook the doughnut in popularity. Yes, the bagel — which the New York Times described in as "an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis" — has outlasted one ridiculous food phenomenon after the next.
It dates back six centuries, and its origin story is as contested as "Game of Thrones" fan theories. In the 14th century, Germans migrated east to Poland where the economy flourished. They brought their pretzels with them — "the thick bread of the German variety, not the American kind that comes in plastic bags," Ari Weinzweig writes for The Atlantic.
The doughy treats, common in German monasteries, evolved into a circular roll with a hole in the middle. Known as an obwarzanek , the bagels emerged as a feast day bread. They later exploded in popularity when Queen Jadwiga, the first female monarch of the Kingdom of Poland, gave up rich breads and pastries in favor of eating obwarzanek for Lent, a religious observance in which Christians offer a small sacrifice up to God.
However, there's another, more popular theory that can be chalked up to gastronomic lore, according to Balinska. The story goes, a baker in Vienna, Austria, accidentally invented the bagel in the late 17th century.
The baker, aware of the king's love of horses, shaped the yeast dough into a circle and called it a beugel , which is Austrian for "stirrup. Jan Sobieski III.
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