How bagels conquered the world

According to Maria Balinska, an American journalist, in her charming book-length history, the first written mention of the bagel was in 1610.

The Italians have their tarallo, the Kashmiris their telvor. Ka’ak and simit are nibbled in the Middle East and Turkey. All are baked round breads with a hole—and unappreciated outside their places of origin. Only one circular bread has a global reputation: the bagel. The story of how it emerged from obscurity into a popular treat with a holiday (National Bagel Day on January 15th in America) is a classic immigrant’s tale of perseverance, ingenuity and hard work.

Representational image.

According to Maria Balinska, an American journalist, in her charming book-length history, the first written mention of the bagel was in 1610. Regulations issued by the Jewish Council of Krakow detailed who could “send for” and receive bagels to celebrate a baby boy’s circumcision. One tempting (if dubious) origin story claims bagels first took off in Prussia, where Jewish bakers briefly boiled their rolled breads before “toasting” them, to evade a restriction banning non-Christians from baking.

Bagels came to America with Jewish emigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century. Two main rival styles soon emerged: Montreal and New York. Montreal’s bagels are smaller, denser and sweeter than their southern cousins, because they are boiled in honeyed water before baking in a wood-fired oven, which gives them a snappier crust with a hint of smoke. New York’s puffier bagels are better for sandwiches; the Montreal version is a superior standalone product.

However, bagels remained a niche Jewish food for decades: as recently as 1960, the New York Times felt obliged to explain, inaccurately, that “a bagel is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.” (Calling a bagel a doughnut because both are round and yeasted is like calling a savage beating a massage because both involve hands on bodies.) That was before mechanisation made bagels easy to mass produce. Sleeves of bagels now shiver in supermarket freezer aisles and turn up on fast-food menus. Purists may shudder—mass-produced bagels use a wetter dough, and the final product can be cottony and bland—but their popularity shows that even a bad bagel is pretty good.

Bagels, like hamburgers, hot dogs and pizza before them, have moved out of their culinary ghettos to become American foods with vaguely ethnic roots. Sales of the ringed bread were estimated at around $5bn last year and are growing steadily, with demand especially high in East Asia. Despite rampant “carbphobia” among the health-conscious, the average American eats nearly 40 bagels each year. Innovators have expanded beyond the traditional flavours of onion, garlic, pumpernickel and salt, and created novelties: rainbow-coloured, French-toast flavoured and (shudder) stuffed with cheese and buffalo chicken. Not bad for a petrified doughnut from the shtetl.