As your author sits at the counter with coffee in hand, there appears before him a golden circle, clothed in the morning’s first light. Born in distant lands, molded in the pressure and furnace of persecution, it now graces the breakfast table and many other places as well. This is the humble but reliable bread, the bagel.
People have been eating bread since before the beginning of recorded history, making the bagel a new addition to world cuisine. The first recorded recipe of what appears to be a bagel is found in a Syrian cookbook dating from the 13th century, and the food was called a ka’ak. But the bagel as we know it has its origins in the Jewish communities of Germany and Poland. The word “bagel” seems to come from the Yiddish word “beygl” which was in turn derived from “beugel,” the German word for bracelet. The first certain reference to the bagel is found in 1610 in a Jewish legal text from Krakow, which declared that bagels were to be given to mothers after childbirth. The circular shape was thought to represent the circle of life and so they were also given to children.
The story goes that one Polish government officer passed laws stating that bread was officially a Christian food, and Jews were forbidden to make or consume it. The resourceful Jews are said to have overcome this by the unique way bagels are made. Bread is made by mixing flour, water and salt into dough and then baking it in the oven. But this is not so with bagels. Bagels are made with the same ingredients, but the dough is molded into its familiar circular shape and then boiled. Only then are they popped in a hot oven to be browned. In this way, they argued that this food was boiled not baked like regular bread and therefore they escaped the evil prohibition. Because of the boiling, the bagel dough uses about a third of the amount of water mixed into the dough. This produced a tougher and chewier bread that did not break up in the boiling process. The effects of boiling also produced a product that was able to survive longer without going stale.
In the year 1683, the Turks attacked the city of Vienna, which was a dangerous situation. If Vienna fell to the Islamic advance, there would have been little to stop them from entering Europe and making their way to Rome itself. On Sept. 14, 1682, the Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to the city with an army that vastly outnumbered the defenders. Alarmed at the situation, the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, took his mounted army and came to the city’s defense when they were at the point of collapse. In the largest cavalry charge in history, the Polish Hussars descended on the city, broke the siege, saved Vienna and forced the Turks to flee, leaving behind their camp and all their baggage. A wonderful legend recounts that the Jewish community in Poland sent a considerable supply of bagels with the king. Because bagels are tough, they travel well, and that made them the ideal food for cavalry in a hurry.
In another legend, which is almost certainly false, when the Poles raided the camp of the fleeing Turks, they found bags of black beans. On inquiry, they were told that this treasure was to be ground and used to make coffee. Although this story is almost certainly an invention, the marriage of coffee and bagels in a religious war is too good to leave out.
Although there had been Jewish communities in the United States since colonial times, significant Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe began around 1820 and continued for the rest of the century. The flight to the new world was inspired by increasing waves of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. Because food was not always provided for the passengers on ships bound for America, the Jews brought their own supplies for the journey, and this, of course, included the bagel. What is more, some immigrants brought unbaked bagel dough with them as well as the finished product. This may be the lesson which taught modern bagel makers that the flavor of a bagel is greatly increased when it is given an uncooked overnight rest in the refrigerator.
Not long after their arrival, bagel vendors appeared in the streets of New York and a whole new industry was born. Bagels were not hard to make at home and easy to sell for a few pennies, but very soon immigrant bakers began to flourish. The middle of the 19th century was the period in American history when we found the rise of powerful unions to represent workers, and before too long the bagel makers unionized and formed the Bagel Bakers Union 338. The union became more of a guild, and controlled the production. But the same Industrial Revolution which created the need for unions also doomed the Bagel Bakers Union, when a Canadian named Daniel Thompson produced the world’s first bagel making machine, which could produce bagels at twice the speed of the bakers making them by hand.
From New York the bagel spread across the nation and outside the Jewish community. But New Yorkers will often insist that the New York bagels remain the best because of the minerals found in their waters. Even today, New Yorkers will insist that the freshly made bagel is vastly superior to the kind made by mass production in a factory and packaged for widespread sale. Bagels remain a beloved part of Jewish culture to the point that “bageling” has come to mean dropping a word or two in Yiddish in a conversation as a way to let one who speaks tell others that he is Jewish.
It is a long way from the ghettos of Poland to the streets of New York, but we can be glad that the mighty little bagel made the trip. After all, Scripture says, “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)
