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The History of Bagels

According to legend, the world's first bagel was produced in 1683 as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, King of Poland. The king, a renowned horseman, had just saved the people of Austria from an onslaught by Turkish invaders. In gratitude, a local baker shaped yeast dough into the shape of a stirrup to honor him and called it the Austrian word for stirrup, beugel. The roll soon became a hit throughout Eastern Europe. Over time, its shape evolved into a circle with a hole in the center and its named was converted to its modern form, bagel.

Another story is that the word derives from the German word, "beigen", which means "to bend", and that the bagel is a descendent of the pretzel. Still another story is that the bagel's round hole developed so that street vendors could pile the bread on poles and carry them around more easily to sell from their carts.

There doesn't seem to be one dominant story about the origin of bagels, though a common thread weaves through them all. In her book, Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan says, "The boiled and baked roll with a hole dates possibly from the Roman period."

THE AMERICAN BAGEL:

In 1872 cream cheese is invented. In 1880, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was started, and in 1920, Breakstone Cream Cheese

In the 1880's hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, many of them Polish Jews, emigrated to America, bringing with them a love for bagels. New York City vendors used the bagel's hole-in-the-middle shape to their merchandising advantage by threading them onto dowels and selling them on street corners throughout the city.

1907, The International Bagel Bakers Union was founded in New York City. Only sons of union members could be apprenticed to learn the secrets of bagel baking in order to safeguard the culinary art.

Between 1910 and 1915 a Bagel Bakers' Local #388 union formed. Eventually, men who apprenticed to the first 300 bakers of that union moved to different parts of the country. In the early 1950's, the Broadway comedy, Bagels and Yox, played to standing-room-only-audiences, and bagels were distributed during intermission. Soon after, Time and Family Circle magazines ran recipes for "bageles."

1927, Polish baker Harry Lender opened the first bagel plant outside New York City in New Haven, Conn. The bagel's popularity began to spread in the United States.

Harry Lender, who had emigrated from Lublin, Poland, taking his cue from the interest generated by the magazine articles, converted his New Haven, Connecticut, bakery into a bagel bakery. In 1955, Lender and his son, Murray, packaged their bagels to sell to supermarkets. In 1960, the first bagel-making machine, invented by Dan Thompson, was introduced. Add bagels had been made by hand before then. By 1962, the Lenders began freezing bagels and marketing them nationally.

1960's, Bagel production skyrocketed as machines capable of producing 200 to 400 bagels per hour were popularized and the tradition of hand-forming bagels virtually vanished.

Bagels began a known, traceable thread in their westward emigration in 1967. Eddie Kaye and Harold Block, who had been sent to the midwest by their New York garment inductry companies, and their wives, bemoaned their inability to buy bagels in this "hinterland outpost." In an interview, Kaye's wife, Sue, now living in Carlsbad, California, told me they contacted a New York friend whose father was an old time bagel baker and used his recipes to open their first bakery in Columbus, Ohio, called Hot Bagels, Inc. Following it's success they opened another in Cincinnati and hired John Marx, a former bouncer in a Cincinnati bar, as a manager.

Eventually Marx bought the bakeries, sponsored sports teams and athletic events, advertised on TV and on the teams' tee shirts and his bagel bakery boomed. Marx, who is neither Polish or Jewish, currently operates three very successful Cincinnati bagel bakeries called Marx Hot Bagels Factory, Inc. DBA Marx Hot Bagels. Occasionally John wears his Bagelman outfit, which he first designed in 1971, when he was invited to demonstrate how to hand roll bagels for a folk festival at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Then CBS's Charles Kuralt spent an entire day filming an "On the Road" sequence at Marx's tiny, but very busy, bakery. Marx now makes bagels in about 50 varieties. He also spends a lot of time in his red Bageman cap, shorts, cape and blue tights, speaking to schoolchildren about the importance of learing to read and staying in school.

1987 -- Bagels made their way into mainstream America, sold around the country in grocery stores and listed as standard items on fast food menus.

With bagel bakeries opening everywhere today, their names are as varied as the flavors and assortment of spreads they offer. There are Baltimore Bagels, Garden State Bagels, Top-O-The-Bagel, I-N-Joy Bagels and others. The Bagel Boyz, operated by brothers from South Africa, is a aply on the words "bagel boys". In that country a bagel boy is a young man who is used to having everything and living in the lap of luxury. "As a child, my grandmother made bagels every Sunday morning," explained Ben Lang, owner of Bagel Boyz in Encinitas, California. "Her bagels were very hard and chewy and tsted completely different from those we bake in America."

Bagels have become a favored food in far corners of the world. I noshed on them at the Hong Kong Bagel Bar. I found a bagel bakery doing a booming business near the University of Texas in Austin. In the past couple of years, five bagel bakeries have opened within a few miles of my southern California home. In Peoris, Illinois, I bought huge, soft bagels in a giant food discount store. The expression, "If it plays in Peopria, it will play anywhere," apparently applies to bagels too.

1988, Americans were eating an average of one bagel per month.

1993, American bagel consumption doubled to an average of one bagel every two weeks.

Ineveitably the popularity of bagels is inspiring home bakers to flour their bread boards, heat up their ovens and bake bagels.

Bread machines have revolutionized home bread baking and removed the tedium of mixing and kneading dough. We've targeted bagel recipes that we've tested specifically for bread machines, a foolproof process when ingredients are measured and timing followed. The same recipes are a breeze to make in a food processor, with a heavy-duty electric mixer, or by hand. We also describe how dough rises quickly in a microwave oven, thereby reducing the prepartation and processing time considerably. Using the combination of frrod processor or electric mixer and microwave now means you can literally have bagels from dough to oven in about 25 minutes.

Boiling is the important step that gives bagels their unmatched chewable quality and adds the distinctive shine to the crusty surface. It's a deceptively easy task. Boiling the shaped dough is like making pasta, but faster and easier. It's certainly easier than making croissants, for example.

You can make bagels of almost any flavor and size, given the parameters of your kneading ability, and the size of your boiling or "kettling" pot and oven. A 1 1/2 pound bread machine produces 8 to 12 bagels, depending on the size of the bagels. Hand-mixing and heavy-duty electric mixers can deal with larger dough batches.

WHY MAKE BAGELS AT HOME WHEN THEY ARE SO READILY AVAILABLE?

You can load them with your favorite ingredients and really taste them. I've tasted and analyzed many good commercially made bagels, but some have one or two raisins in a cinnamon-raisin bagel, one chip in a chocolate chip bagel and no taste at all in a pineapple-coconut bagel, with no sign of any pineapple. If I hadn't read the bin label, I would have thought I was eating a plain bagel.

The aroma of baking bagels will have your family tumbling out of bed in the morning, anxious to eat them warm right from the oven. Make them for guests -- they'll talk about it for years.

The satisfaction of shaping sough and creating delicious bagles is hard to describe. Children revel in taking a ball of dough, working in a few raisins or chocolate chips into it, and then punching a hole through it. They follow the process through boiling and baking until they see "their" bagel, shiny and hot, emerge from the oven.

Finally, your homemade bagels will have no preservatives and no artificial flavoring. When you bake bagels, you know what's going into them. And if you're allergic to any flours normally used, it's easy to find substitutes.

In this book, along with innovative recipes for bagels, you'll find suggestions for spreads, sandwiches and canapes. Use these for homemade bagels and also for bagels you buy. Most bagel stores and delis offer a dozen or so spreads and sandwiches, some inspired, but most are ordinary because they're the ones that sell the best. At home, you have triple the choice. Any will look elegant and taste haute gourmet if you serve them for bagel brunches, lunches, and at different holidays. the cranberry spreads, for example, will delight your family and guests for Thanksgiving.

What is the real test of a good bagel? If you and your family likes them, that's all that matters. Fortunately, there are no tests, no standards. No one can agree on what is "best." So surge forward. Bake bagels and embellish them according to your tastes.

Some Quotes:

"Theories abound as to their [bagels] origin. The word derives from 'beigen,' German for 'to bend,' and the bagel is a descendant of the pretzel. The first Jewish community in Poland, established by invitation and charter in the thirteenth century, probably brought 'biscochos' with them. The boiled and baked roll with a hole dates possible from the Roman period....Today, in Cracow, where some say the present-day form of bagel was born, the bagel is alive and well, sold on many street corners."
---Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan [Knopf:New York] 1994 (p. 83-4)

"The bagel is a Jewish bread, apparently originating in South Germany, migrating to Poland and thence to North America where it has become the most famous and archetypal Jewish food. Its name derives from the Yiddish word 'beygal' from the German dialect word 'beugel,' meaning ring' or bracelet.' Its history means, of course, that it is an Ashkenazi rather than a Sephardi food. As Claudia Roden points out: Because of their shape--with no beginning and no end--bagels symbolize the eternal cyle of life.'"
---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] (p. 49)

"In the Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten notes that "The first printed mention of bagels...is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland, for the year 1610-which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." He adds that the word is derived from the German word beugel, meaning a round loaf of bread. There are those who dispute this and claim that it derives from the middle High German word bugel,' which means a twisted or curved bracelet or ring..."
---Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Food Encyclopedia, Craig Claiborne [Times Books:New York] 1985 (p. 23)

"...It's believed that bagels were invented by a Jewish baker in Vienna in 1683. To thank King John III Sobieski of Poland for saving the city from Turkish invaders, the anonymous baker crafted a hard roll in the shape of a riding stirrup, in honor of the king's favorite hobby. The bread's original name was 'bugel,' from the German for stirrup." It's high time that that piece of fakelore be laid to rest. The earliest known use of the Yiddish word "beygl" is in the communal rules that the leaders of the Jewish community of Cracow promulgated in 1610. The rules stipulate that bagels are among the gifts which may be given to women in childbirth and to midwives. The word was thus being used at least 73 years before John III Sobieski defeated the Turks. The bagel, in fact, is even older. When a word or expression is new or thought to be little known, it is often defined... yet the communal rules of 1610 contain no definition or explanation. Hence it is clear that the word beygl was well established in Cracow Yiddish of the early 17th century. Indeed, since those rules allude to earlier communal rules about bagels, we may be certain that this bread is even older. We do not know when and where the bagel was invented nor whether its inventor was a Jew or a German. Contrary to popular opinion, Yiddish beygl is not derived from German bugel, although the two words are distant cousins."
---"A Bagel Brief: Rolling Back the Lineage," The New York Times May 7, 1993, Section A; Page 30; Column 4; Editorial Desk

"In the book Menu Mystique, Norman Odya Krohn, discussing Russian bubliki , writes: "This is the name for the original bagel that was made famous in Russian song and rhyme." Held together by string, they were said to have been sold at Russian fairs and were believed to bring good luck. Wherever it might have first appeared, the bagel's name as we know it today evolved slowly; based on the Yiddish verb beigen , meaning "to bend," the roll with the hole was called a beygel.The bagel persevered and flourished in Europe for a few centuries before heading for foreign shores. In the United States, the bagel first appeared at Ellis Island, brought by Jewish refugees leaving Eastern Europe shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. However, the destination for most emigrants was New York City, and here the bagel settled."
---"OBSERVATIONS; THE BAGEL'S BEGINNINGS; FOLLOWING THIS HUMBLE ROLL AROUND THE WORLD," Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1987, Magazine; Page 36B;

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