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BAGEL. A specialty of East European Jews, the classic bagel is a small ring of dough made of white flour, yeast, and water. The dough is first boiled and then baked.

The Bagel in Europe

According to Mordecai Kosover in Yidishe maykholim, the earliest mention of the bagel is in the 1610 statutes of the Jewish community of Cracow, which state that it is permissible to make a gift of bagels to the woman who has given birth, the midwife, and the girls and women who were present (Kosover, p. 129). Even earlier sources indicate that the father would send pretsn, or pretzels, which are historically related to the bagel, to everyone on the occasion of a circumcision. Legends that trace the first bagel to the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 are apocryphal. The very same story is told about the origin of the croissant, the pretzel, and the coffeehouse.

A relatively affordable treat, the East European bagel was portable and small. According to a Yiddish proverb, only by the third bagel would one feel full. Bagels made with milk or eggs were known from at least the nineteenth century, and almond bagels were among the prepared foods exchanged on the holiday of Purim. Bagels and other round foods were eaten before Tisha B'av, a fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple, and in the twenty-first century bagels are served after a funeral and during the seven days of mourning that follow. The round shape symbolizes the round of life. The beuglich described in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto (1892) as "circular twisted rolls" suggest the obwarzanek, a twisted, fresh ring pretzel dating from the Middle Ages and still sold by street vendors in Poland and the large twister bagels sold in Toronto in the twenty-first century.

The Bagel in the United States

The bagel arrived in the United States with Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1890s until the 1950s bagel bakers struggled to form their own union, a process that began in 1907 with the establishment of a benevolent society for bagel bakers. With the influx of younger and more radical immigrants after World War I, the process of converting the benevolent society into a union intensified. Local 338, the International Beigel Bakers Union of Greater New York and New Jersey, coalesced in 1925 and was finally recognized as an autonomous local in 1937. Thanks to the union, bagel bakers in the New York metropolitan area won the best working conditions in the baking trade.

While radical in their politics, these bakers were conservative in their craft. Bagel bakers resisted technology because mechanization of the rolling process would eliminate jobs. As a result the bagel industry in the New York metropolitan area was one of the last of the baking industries to become fully automated. As late as the 1960s bagels were still made by hand in small bakeries by Jews for Jews, and Local 338 controlled the industry. Water bagels plain or salted were the basic varieties.

From 1955 to 1984 bagel bakeries outside New York and outside the jurisdiction of the bagel bakers' union found ways to distribute this highly perishable product far beyond the freshness radius of the bakery. They modified the dough, introduced flavors, packaged bagels in plastic bags, froze them, and shipped them to groceries and supermarkets across the country. Frozen bagels were marketed primarily to non-Jews. Once the bagel was packaged, it could be branded. The bagel began its shift from a generic product to a branded commodity.

With distribution channels in place and demand growing, the bagel industry was ready to increase production. Thompson Bagel Machine, which had been in development since World War I, was patented in 1960 by the Thompsons, an East European Jewish family in Los Angeles. In 1963 the first automated bagel-forming machines were introduced in New Haven, Connecticut; Buffalo, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri. As the growing bagel industry outside New York started penetrating the New York market, the union weakened and automation entered, thereby transforming the bagel baking business and fueling its exponential growth. By 1984 Lender's Bagels, which started as a family bakery in New Haven in 1927 and was the first to use a bagel-forming machine, had become so successful that it was acquired by Kraft and then Kellogg, who saw the bagel outpacing and even supplanting croissants, doughnuts, cereals, and other breakfast foods.

The Bagel Boom

The bagel has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the food industry. The bagel industry, with relatively low barriers to entry, has attracted a wide range of people. H&H Bagels, the icon of the New York bagel, has been owned by Herman Toro, who was born in Puerto Rico, since the 1970s. Hand-rolling is largely a specialty of Egyptian and Thai immigrants. During the 1980s, with growing national awareness of the bagel and the introduction of bagel-steaming equipment, the developing bagel category became dominated by rapidly expanding chains, franchises, and privately held as well as publicly traded bagel companies. By the mid-1990s the bagel boom peaked, and a shakeout followed. Some of the companies that grew fastest showed the most serious losses. Meanwhile the bagel had spread to such places as Germany, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and Bali.

The Bagel as Icon Food

After the Holocaust American Jews came to identify the bagel with the Old World and with immigrant Jewish culture. The bagel became a lightening rod for their ambivalent feelings. While Irving Pfefferblit declared in "The Bagel" that "the Jewish bagel stands out like a golden vision of the bygone days when life was better," upscale Miami hotels during the 1950s served lox on English muffins or tartines rather than on lowly bagels (Pfefferblit, p. 475).

With the suburbanization of Jews and secondary migration of Jews to California and Florida during the postwar years, the bagels and lox brunch became a Sunday morning ritual with its own equipage, including bagel slicers and decorative bagel platters with compartments for smoked salmon, cream cheese, butter, olives, radishes, and slices of onion and tomato. So important did this meal become that "bagel and lox Judaism" became a metaphor for the gastropiety of suburban Jews.

The close identification of the bagel with New York City arises in no small measure from its labor history, though some claim the secret to the New York bagel is the water. Paradoxically the further the bagel traveled from New York, the more it became identified with New York and with all that is metropolitan and cosmopolitan. However, other cities with large Jewish communities also have long bagel histories and distinctive bagels. The Montreal bagel has a narrow coil and a big hole. It is rolled by hand, boiled in water sweetened with honey, sprinkled with sesame seeds, and baked in a wood-fired oven, which gives it a slight smokiness.

Bagel Innovations

New bagel eaters with no prior loyalties are a prime market for bagel innovations. With but a few concepts (size, shape, flavor, topping, stuffing, and carrier or platform), it is possible to produce combinations, permutations, and improbable hybrids. The early Lender's frozen bagels weighed two ounces. Bagels in the twenty-first century range from three to more than five ounces. There are cocktail minibagels and overstuffed party bagels the size of a tire. Cosi recently introduced the squagel, a square bagel. Where there were once only a few varieties (poppy seed, pumpernickel, and eventually cinnamon raisin), by the twenty-first century there were unlimited flavors (from cranberry granola to piña colada), toppings (everything from poppy seeds, sesame seeds, caraway seeds, and garlic to streusel), and fillings (from cream cheese to bacon and eggs).

At bagel shops offering twenty types of bagels, which is not uncommon, and even more varieties of spreads and fillings, customers can create hundreds of combinations. Bagel eaters from birth tend to be disdainful of what might be called the random bagel effect. "Turkey, tomato, sprouts, avocado, and cream cheese on a peanut butter and chocolate chip bagel" at Goldstein's Bagel Bakery in California is an ungrammatical culinary sentence for those fluent in the language.

The bagel replaces bread, pizza, croissant, and tortillas as the preferred carrier or platform for their fillings and toppings. New hybrid bagel products include the bagelwich (bagel plus sandwich), bragel (bagel plus roll), bretzel (bagel plus pretzel), fragel (fried bagel), and flagel (flat bagel) as well as the Bageldog, pizza bagel, UnHoley Bagel (ball injected with cream cheese), bagel chips, bagels for birds and dogs, and bagel bones for people. The bagel is distilled into a flavor of its own for bagel-flavored rice cakes and matzoh.

The bagel has become not only a platform for other foods but also a carrier for meanings and values as diverse as those who eat them. For many it is an icon of East European Jewish culture, for others it is quintessentially New York, and for many around the world, including in Israel, it is American.

See also Bread; Breakfast; Judaism; United States: Ethnic Cuisines.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett