The Magic of Bagels Around the World

 Nadene Goldfoot

                                                                            

There is some evidence that the bagel may have been made in Germany before being made in Poland.  Ashkenazi Jews first lived in Germany after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and being in Rome.  Yiddish is a mixture of Hebrew and German.  

The first written records of the bagel date to the year 1610. They showed up then in the community regulations of the Polish city of Krakow, which dictated that bagels were to be given as a gift to women after childbirth.  Linguist Leo Rosten wrote in The Joys of Yiddish about the first known mention of the Polish word bajgiel derived from the Yiddish word bagel in Back in medieval Poland.  Their round shape led to the belief that bagels had magical powers. Bagels stood for "long life" like our number 18. In the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries, the bajgiel became a staple of Polish cuisine. Its name derives from the Yiddish word beygal from the German dialect word beugel, meaning "ring" or "bracelet".

     Ukrainian bublik-Many cultures developed similar breads and preparations. The bublik in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and the obwarzanek (in particular obwarzanek krakowski) in Poland. Somewhat similar in appearance to bagels, these breads are usually topped with sesame and poppy seeds. The ingredients in these breads and bagels somewhat differ, as these breads are made with a different dough using butter and sometimes also with milk. (This would make them dairy food, not to be eaten with meat meals-according to Kosher custom).  

The first recorded history of Jews in Kraków, Poland dates back to the 13th century. Jews began to own land and homes in their quarter and in neighboring quarters of the city in 1312. The city was an important scholarly center during the Golden Age of Polish Jewry (c. 1500-1648).  Bagels have become a Jewish food, possibly because they brought them with them when they arrived from Poland to the USA. 

The basic roll-with-a-hole design is hundreds of years old and has other practical advantages besides providing more even cooking and baking of the dough: The hole could be used to thread string or dowels through groups of bagels, allowing easier handling and transportation and more appealing seller displays.  

                   Sesame bagels-looking more like donuts

 Bagels have been widely associated with Ashkenazi Jews since the 17th century; they were first mentioned in 1610 in Jewish community ordinances in Kraków, Poland. Bagel-like bread known as obwarzanek was common earlier in Poland as seen in royal family accounts from 1394.

A bagel with poppy seeds holds lox (cured salmon) and cream cheese and are are considered a traditional part of American Jewish cuisine (colloquially known as "lox and a schmear"). (Fish is okay with dairy).  

Bagels seem simple enough when you start. In the New York Times a few years ago, Ed Levine wrote, quite factually and descriptively:  A bagel is a round bread made of simple, elegant ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it instead of a whoosh. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.

Three Montreal-style bagels: one poppy and two sesame bagels.  Different from the New York style, the Montreal-style bagel contains malt and sugar with no salt; it is boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking in a wood-fired oven. It is predominantly of the sesame "white" seeds variety (bagels in Toronto are similar to those made in New York in that they are less sweet, generally are coated with poppy seeds and are baked in a standard oven)

The mass produced steamed bagel purchased from the grocery store in Portland and most places...

The bagels that I have found in Portland are very disappointing-being bread dough shaped like a bagel.  It lacks everything about the bagel; aroma, taste, crunch, toughness, but one keeps hoping.   

Portland had been the home of Mosler's Bakery-authentic New York bagels or better, but it died in Mosler.  Now you can  buy the modern bagel with blueberries.  Mosler would roll over in his grave.  

I found bagelahs in Israel very common in the 80s, so they had reached the Sephardic or Mizrachi communities there. I lived in Haifa, then Safed.  

XOHO, A SUN-DRENCHED CAFÉ IN central Tel Aviv, is one of only a handful of places in Israel where you can find what most of the world considers a quintessential Jewish food: bagels. “Many Israelis here order the bagels, but they don’t even realize the Jewish connotation,” says Xoli Ormut-Durbin, Xoho’s Canadian owner and manager. Every morning, her peppy international staff boils small batches of bagels in malt syrup to achieve the delicate chewy-to-fluffy ratio found in a New York bagel. She says this cafe has “come a long way” in getting Israelis to accept the bagel. (That's because they're so acclimated to eating pita and humous for breakfast).  

In the United States, February 9 is often celebrated as National Bagel Day, in which people celebrate the rich history of getting together and eating bagels. Who knew?

Resource:

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-famous-moslers-bagels-of-portland.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2009/03/the-secret-history-of-bagels/6928/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Krak%C3%B3w

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel#:~:text=Bagels%20have%20been%20widely%20associated,royal%20family%20accounts%20from%201394.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bagels-israel