Episode 6: Bagels
The history of the most recognizably Jewish popular food item
Introduction
Today’s episode is all about what is, without a doubt, the most popular recognizably Jewish food in the world — the bagel. I was eager to talk to a real bagel maker for this episode, so I had a great conversation with Joshua Pollack, who operates Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen, my personal favorite bagel shop here in Denver. I’ve included snippets of that conversation throughout the podcast episode. You should definitely go check out Rosenberg’s on social media and visit it if you’re in Denver.
Close, But No Bagel
Ring-shaped breads have been a part of many culinary cultures.
Buccellatum, a twice-cooked ring-shaped biscuit made of wheat flour, was a staple food for Roman soldiers.
Some believe that buccellatum inspired the Arab ka’ak, shaped like an elongated ring and covered with sesame seeds or other toppings. Ka’ak are mentioned in writing as early as the 10th century, and one 13th century Arabic cookbook suggests boiling them before baking. Interestingly, a reference to ka’ak in the 6th century Babylonian Talmud may or may not refer to a ring-shaped bread.
Muslim Uigurs of Northwestern China have long cooked girde naan, which probably made its way to Central Asia along the Silk Road trading route. Girde naan have a deep central indentation rather than a full hole and are typically steamed before baking, rather than boiled.
The Chinese guang bing dates to 1563, when General Qi Jiquang of the Ming Dynasty had his soldiers make ring-shaped breads that could be strung together and worn around their necks while marching.
The tarallo, from Italy, is an unyeasted bread cooked until hard. In the middle ages, taralli were prized as a non-perishable food item that could sustain travelers and sailors on long journeys.
Also from Italy, ciambelle are boiled and baked and flavored with fennel. They were often featured in paintings during the Renaissance.
Poland
You may be asking: did any of those breads lead to the creation of the bagel? Well, probably not. At least not directly. But there certainly are those who have mapped potential influences.
Palestinian writer Reem Kassis posits one interesting potential connection. During the early middle ages, Arabs controlled much of the Southern Mediterranean coastline–including the bustling trading port of Bari, Italy. Kassis speculates that Arab ka’ak influenced the development of Italian taralli, which are known to have been developed in Bari. For the final piece of the bagel-influencing puzzle, Kassis notes that, in 1518, Bona Sforza, an Italian woman from Bari, became queen of Poland. When she emigrated to Poland, she brought with her a royal retinue, including cooks and bakers. So perhaps, Kassis suggests, she brought taralli to Poland, and perhaps those taralli inspired the creation of bagels.
It’s an interesting cross-cultural hypothesis, but it’s probably not an accurate account of the history of the bagel. We can say that because of obwarzanek. Obwarzanek are a Polish wheat flour-based ring-shaped bread that are boiled before being baked, and are often topped with sesame or poppy seeds. Indeed, the word obwarzanek is derived from the Polish word for parboil. So how does the existence of yet another ring-shaped bread undermine Kassis’s theory of Arab influence? Well, as Maria Balinska points out in her book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, the first written reference to obwarzanek is found in a 1394 account of the Polish royal household. That’s over 100 years before Bona Sforza might have brought Italian taralli to the Polish court. (This is a good time to note that I’ve relied heavily on Balinska’s book for the information in this episode. I read it when it was published in 2009 and it’s well worth reading if this topic interests you.)
So what about obwarzanek? How did they come to be? Nobody knows for sure, but one theory is that German immigrants to Poland brought with them the tradition of baking pretzels — another wheat-based bread that’s boiled before it’s baked. From twisted pretzels, it isn’t a great culinary leap to baking circular bagel-like breads. It’s even possible that some of those pretzel-baking German immigrants were Jewish craftsmen and traders who were on the vanguard of what would eventually become a substantial Jewish migration from Germany to Poland.
In any event, obwarzenek are the most likely direct precursor of bagels. But it’s impossible to say when bagels developed or, assuming they did develop from obwarzanek, when they became a discreet or independent type of bread. The earliest surviving document to mention bagels is a sumptuary regulation issued by the Jewish council of Krakow in 1610. The word bagel, by the way, derives from the Yiddish word beigen, meaning to bend. The Jewish council essentially oversaw Jewish communal life in Krakow, including appointing the rabbi and maintaining kosher standards. A sumptuary law or regulation is a decree intended to limit excessive consumption or expenditure. In the case of the 1610 law, it seems like there were twin purposes: (1) ensuring that poor families did not live beyond their means and (2) avoiding stoking envy in surrounding gentile communities. In a region where most bread was made of rye, bagels were made of wheat, which was much more expensive. So bagels were a luxury item rather than an everyday foodstuff. In particular, bagels were associated with brises and other Jewish ritual celebrations.
Fast forward about 100 years. Israel ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal Shem Tov, has founded the Hasidic spiritual movement. One of his primary objectives is to encourage his followers to rejoice in finding God in the everyday world. Balinksa relates a story supposedly told by Eliezer’s disciples. According the story, Eliezer told a simple man that bagels are of such worth that a Jew can get a non-Jew to help him by giving the non-Jew a bagel. The next day, the simple man falls in the river. He remembers he has a bagel in his pocket, so he fishes it out and throws it at some nearby gentile peasants on the river bank. When the bagel lands at their feet, they realize the Jew is drowning and rush to rescue him. Whatever the moral of the story may have been, it shows that, by the 18th century, Polish Jews had a special affection for bagels.
Life in Poland, including Jewish life, became more difficult as the 19th century dawned. Politically, Poland was essentially partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. As a result, the Polish economy was depressed and people throughout the country experienced protracted hardship and sometimes even famine. These factors contributed to substantial internal migration and the further rise of Jewish shtetl communities–especially in the Pale of Settlement. One counternote is that, in the middle of the century, wheat became more widely available, and correspondingly less expensive, thanks to American exports by steam ship. Historical records, including folk songs and surviving letters, indicate clearly that bagels continued to play a role in the diets and ritual lives of Polish Jews.
But the reach of bagels was not limited to Jewish consumers. Bagel bakers were Jewish men and women, but they sold their goods not only to their shtetl neighbors, but at market days that attracted Jews and Gentiles alike. Bagels were easy to transport and easy to eat amid the bustle of the market. And, of course, they were delicious. Beyond markets, bagels were also common fare in Polish inns and taverns. Bagels were becoming a popular and recognizably Jewish food in broader Polish society.
Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, industrialized relatively late. But as that process unfolded, Polish peasants, including Jewish bakers and other artisans, flocked to cities. In the 1880s, Warsaw had the largest Jewish population in the world, at over 125,000. Urbanization changed social and economic structures. Jews were becoming increasingly assimilated. They were also becoming increasingly politically engaged, including resistant to the rampant antisemitism around them. Jewish bakeries, including bagel bakeries, were often meeting places or recruiting zones for Zionist and Bundist activists.
Urbanization and industrialization also saw the rise of a Yiddish literary class. Yiddish was no longer just a shtetl language; it was seen by younger urban Jewish creatives as a legitimate vehicle for scholarship and art. Bagels featured prominently in the burgeoning body of Yiddish fiction.
But the 1880s brought tragedy for Jews in the Pale of Settlement. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. That triggered a wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms across the Russian Empire, including in Poland. Then, in 1882, Tsar Alexander III implemented the May Laws, a series of harsh regulations channeling prevailing antisemitic attitudes and targeting Jewish communities. The May Laws restricted where Jews could live and severely curtailed their educational and professional opportunities. These hardships coincided with technological advances in steamship technology that made emigration to the United States more feasible and less costly. And so from around 1882 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, over 2 million Jews emigrated from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe to the United States. Unsurprisingly, they brought their bagels with them.
America
Many Jews who arrived at Ellis Island made their way to the tenements of the Lower East Side. By 1900, the small but crowded neighborhood had 70 bagel bakeries. Conditions in the bakeries were awful. Many were located below grade on Hester Street or Rivington Street. Temperatures inside were uncontrollably hot. Ventilation was non-existent. Bakers worked 14 hour days 6 or 7 days per week.
Socialists and union organizers capitalized on these terrible conditions to organize bagel bakers. The Journeymen Bakers’ National Union formed in 1886. The United Hebrew Trades formed in 1888. In 1909, a two-month-long strike by bagel bakery employees led bakery owners to formally recognize the unions, close their shops to non-union labor, and increase wages significantly. The victory was seen as a turning point in the broader Jewish labor movement in New York. Bagels were at the forefront of the shifting social and economic dynamics of early 20th century America.
Bagels remained a more or less exclusively Jewish delicacy in the US throughout the first half of the century. That changed in the 1950s and 60s for a number of interrelated reasons. First, the invention of the modern revolving oven both increased the speed of bagel production and meant that bagel bakeries could move into street-level storefronts rather than below-grade spaces. That, in turn, meant that bagel bakeries could sell their products to retail customers rather than just to wholesalers and middlemen. “Hot bagel” signs began proliferating not just on the Lower East Side, but throughout New York City. (My bagel store as a kid in suburban New York was simply called “Hot Bagels.”) At the same time, bagels began attracting attention from even farther afield. In February 1958, the Saturday Evening Post ran an essay by Sol Fox recalling his favorite dishes growing up, including a bagel, lox, and cream cheese sandwich for Sunday breakfast. Soon, more articles were being written about Jewish cuisine generally and bagels specifically.
Around 1970, Lenders began marketing pre-sliced frozen bagels for sale in supermarkets across the country. Harry Lender was a skilled baker from Poland who landed in the US in 1927 and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew a local bagel bakery into a successful wholesale operation, but it was his son Murray Lender who really changed the bagel landscape in America by marketing frozen bagels as a convenience; busy moms could just pop them in the toaster oven straight from the freezer. Frozen food was becoming an increasingly important part of American culinary life, and bagels were along for the ride.
For better of for worse, Murray Lender also worked to mitigate any ethnic stigma bagels may have had to Americans beyond the eastern seaboard. He signed cross-promotional deals with brands that were household names–brands like Dannon, Maxwell House, and Smuckers. Most famously, he engineered a deal with Kraft to cross promote Lenders bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese. These marketing maneuvers broadened the appeal of bagels and soon Lenders had distribution deals with Howard Johnson’s restaurants and US military bases. By 1977, Lender’s bagels were truly available nationwide and Lenders was advertising nationally on television. In 1984, the Lenders brothers sold the company to Kraft, consummating the proverbial marriage of Lender’s bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese.
That’s more or less where things have stood since then. Most Americans get their bagels from the supermarket, but there are thousands of independent bagel shops throughout the country–and not just on the coasts. There are also chains like Einstein Brothers, which was created by the Boston Chicken company in 1995 and today operates roughly 700 retail shops. I’ve seen estimates that 200 million Americans eat at least one bagel each year.
What is a Bagel, Anyway?
Somehow I haven’t yet talked about what a bagel actually is. That is, what makes a bagel a bagel. I’ve tried to distill it down to a handful of absolutely essential criteria.
First, a typical bagel is made of wheat flour. (I say typical because, of course, there are bagels that incorporate other flours, like rye and pumpernickel.) And while there are gluten free bagels, the best sort of flour for bagel making is high in gluten, which creates a chewy crumb. Conveniently, American wheat from places like Kansas and the Dakotas fits the bill perfectly.
Second, the only other ingredients in a plain bagel are yeast, salt, water, and barley malt syrup (or some variation on it).
Third, bagel’s are made using a low hydration dough — usually around 50 or 55% hydration. That makes bagel dough tough to work with, but again contributes to the characteristic chew.
Fourth, bagels are cold fermented. That means the shaped dough is kept in a cool place for hours prior to baking. That slows down the fermentation process and encourages the development of lactic acid bacteria, which contribute a slightly acidic flavor and promote the development of a shiny, crispy exterior when baked.
Fifth, bagels are boiled before they’re baked. That gelatinises the starch in the dough and also adds to the glossy crust. If it’s not boiled, it’s not a bagel; it’s just bread with a hole in the middle. And as far as I’m concerned, steaming counts as boiling.
Sixth, and finally, bagels are baked at a higher temperature than a typical bread–usually around 425 degrees.
If you’re doing those six things, you’re making real bagels.
I’m mostly a traditionalist in my own bagel flavor preferences, but even the revered everything bagel was probably invented as late as the 1970s. It certainly wouldn’t have been known to the denizens of the Lower East Side in the 1920s or the Polish shtetl dwellers of the 1800s. Everything changes, including bagels. So if you prefer a blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese or an asiago bagel with jalapeno cream cheese, more power to you. And more bagel for you, because you won’t have to share with me.
Bespoke Bagels
Very recently, there has been a bagel retailing renaissance of sorts.
PopUp Bagels has opened up six locations in the New York metro area–including one about a mile away from my childhood bagel shop. Call Your Mother, whose branding and marketing lean heavily into kitschy Jewish nostalgia, has almost 20 stores throughout the country. And on the west coast, you’ve got popular shops like Boichik Bagels in the Bay Area and the Yeastie Boys bagel trucks in Los Angeles.
Yes these are bagels for the Tik Tok influencer era, with the marketing you’d expect in 2024. Sam Silverman, the so-called Bagel Ambassador, has a bagel-devoted Instagram account with 17,000 followers and runs an annual BagelFest. PopUp Bagels has well over 100,000 followers on social media.
But by all accounts, many of these relative newcomers are not only making great bagels, but they’re innovating while maintaining the integrity of the bagel tradition. PopUp, for instance, isn’t rolling its bagels; it’s punching holes in balls of dough. And Boichik, which was founded by an engineer, has a highly automated process that nevertheless makes an authentic-tasting bagel. And at Rosenberg’s, Josh worked with university chemists to manufacture a machine that treats water so that his Denver bagels taste like the New York City bagels of our forefathers.
For whatever reason, the humble bagel has taken the world stage, and it’s done so while fully embracing its ethnic Jewish origins. Fifty years after Murray Lender did what he could to make bagels less Jewish, it’s nice to see a return to authenticity.
By the way, my friend Nathalie would kill me if I didn’t mention that, in many cities, you can now also buy Montreal-style bagels, which are smaller, sweeter, have a relatively larger center hole, and are baked in a wood-fired oven.