A charming history of the unassuming bagel

Can there be anything more quintessentially Jewish for breakfast than a toasted bagel – make it a sesame one, please – slathered with cottage cheese and lox? Not likely, unless you’re on a strict diet or allergic to flour.

 The bagel is so connected with  culinary Jewish identity that few observers have bothered to investigate its provenance. But as Maria Balinska reminds us in The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (Yale University Press), the antecedents of the bagel may not be necessarily Jewish.

In this altogether charming and scholarly book, Balinska – an American whose ancestors are both Jewish and Polish Catholic – suggests that the bagel as we know it today may well have been preceded by the Polish bajgiel or obwarzanek, the Italian tarallo and the Chinese Muslim girde.

Balinska, who bit into her first bagel in the early 1980s when she was a university student, explores its historical trajectory at some length, but she focuses her inquiry on Poland, where the bagel was a favoured snack of both Jews and Christians of every class.

However, the bagel was principally produced by Jewish bakers and sold mainly by Jewish pedlars. By the 1930s, the bagel was “a Jewish product that was an integral part of Polish everyday life,” she writes.

Having explored the status of the bagel in Poland, where it was popular tavern and street fare, Balinska moves on to the United States, where it has attained universal appeal thanks to the marketing skills of the Lender family.

As best as she can determine, the unassuming bagel arrived in America in the 1880s, when waves of Jewish immigrants, among them bakers, settled in New York City. According to Balinska, the craving for bagels was instrumental in the development of the Jewish labour movement in the United States.

 Jewish bagel bakers on the Lower East Side worked under appalling conditions, as she observes: “The bakeries were located… down steep flights of stairs to a space rarely higher than seven feet. Because of the rudimentary ovens, the temperature was fierce and, on the whole, impossible to control. There was no ventilation. Bakers worked stripped to their waist for 13 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Typically young and unmarried, they often lived at their workplace sleeping between the mounds of rising dough and the oven with cats, rats and cockroaches…”

In response, the first Jewish bakers’ union was formed in 1885. But it soon fell apart, says Balinska without explanation. “It would take a group of other workers to organize the bakers into something more lasting,” she notes.

The muckraking press lobbied for better working and sanitary conditions, and the New York State Assembly got the message. In 1895, it passed a law  hailed by reformers. Bakers were banned from sleeping in bakeries. Hours were regulated. Plumbing and drainage were introduced.

Interestingly enough, cats were allowed to remain in bakeries so that they could deal with rodents.

The legislation, backed with enforcement standards, was replicated by other states in the country.

But as Balinska points out, further improvements were necessary. In 1910, Jewish bakers won a nine-hour day.

The bakers’ victory ushered in a period in which the Jewish labour movement came to play a leading role among American unions.

Yet bagel baking was impervious to to “mechanical challenges” for a long time. The mark of a good baker was his ability to “roll” a bagel, a skilled and demanding function.Yet there was no machine capable of performing this all-important task.

This problem was resolved with the advent of the modern revolving oven, which also accelerated the rate at which bagels could be baked, she says. “It also meant that the bagel bakeries could, at last, move out of their dingy cellars.”

A staple of Jewish households, the bagel shot into mainstream prominence when a major American magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, praised it in a 1958 piece. Look, another magazine, took notice in 1961, and McCalls, a competitor, followed suit two years later.

It was left to a Polish-born baker, Harry Lender, who landed in the United States in 1927, to popularize the bagel beyond anyone’s imagination.

A true innovator, Lender froze his bagels and packaged them in polyethylene bags. Now the bagel could be sold in supermarkets. As Lender put it, “So we went from freezing as a convenience to us to a marketing tool for the consumer.”

As Balinska says, this was a path-breaking development that revolutionized the industry. “Frozen food was becoming integral to American eating habits as more women worked outside the home, and the daily commute to the workplace put a premium on quickly-prepared meals.”

Despite the changes, the bagel was still perceived by the majority of Americans as an ethnic specialty bread. Lender addressed this issue by trying to broaden its appeal.

“When most people call it a Jewish product, it hurts us,” he said. “It’s a roll, a roll with a personality. You can use it for breakfast, sandwiches, TV snacks, dinner rolls – from morning till evening. We don’t talk of bagels, lox and cream cheese. It limits them. Think of toasted bagels and jam, if you like.”

Lender’s strategy proved successful. In the early 1970s, he snagged his first nation-wide food service contract with the Howard Johnson hotel and restaurant chain. By 1977, Lender bagels were available all across the nation.

Balinska says that the widespread acceptance of the bagel was rooted in timing.

“The market for bagels was expanding at a time when the cultural mood of the country was changing. It was not just that anti-Semitism had ceased to be respectable, or that the Jewish community was growing in confidence. There was also, more generally, a shift away from the homogeneity and standardization promoted in American popular culture …”

Thankfully, toward the end of her book, Balinska takes note of Montreal’s famous bagels.

“To this day,” she writes, “the city’s two landmark bagel bakeries, the St. Viateur Bagel Shop and the Fairmount Bagel Bakery, continue to vie for Montreal’s ‘original bagel’ crown.”

Personally, I like the bagels from St. Viateur’s wood-burning ovens. But who’s to say that that Fairmount bagels are inferior?

Any of them will do for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and I suspect that Balinska would agree.