The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread

This book by Maria Balinska (2008) is, as the title states, about bagels. Why was I interested in reading about such a seemingly ‘modest’ food item as the bagel?

First, I am a born and bred New Yorker, and fresh bagels from a bagel bakery had always been a part of my personal cuisine. Since living in other countries and travelling through other continents, however, I haven’t been able to find anything similar to a New York bagel. Either there is no equivalent at all or an item referred to as a bagel is merely a white roll with a hole. No comparison. However, I have been in places that claim to be the ‘birthplace’ of the bagel, but – curiously – they don’t sell anything resembling it now.

Second, I am interested in the history of food and of foods. For example, I’ve read about chocolate, olives, olive oil, food in prehistory, beer, salt – but I was excited to find a book about the bagel. There are many myths surrounding its creation, so I thought I would find out the truth in this book. But I’m not so sure that I have. This is a very light read compared to other books I’ve read about the history of a food item, but perhaps that’s because there’s not much of a history to bagels or not much information to research. I’m still not sure about the origin of the bagel known in New York.

Balinska starts out referring to the obwarzanek in Poland and the tarallo in Italy – which are both small round breads with a hole. And then there’s a chapter on the Polish Jewish immigrants to New York City who baked bagels. But it’s not clear how the earlier breads evolved into the type known in New York today (or the type known in Montreal, which I hadn’t known about).

The story continues in New York: how the bagel was sold and what the life of the bakers and sellers was like. Later chapters detailing how the bagel became known in different areas of the United States and how it became a mass-produced, frozen item sold in supermarkets across the USA is also intriguing.

Much of the information in chapter 6, though, is more about bakers than about the bagel. It focuses on the bagel bakers’ union Local 338 in New York and its fight for better pay and conditions – there was nothing about the bagel itself, except for how it was becoming better known to non-Jewish Americans outside of New York. But that theme is also in the following chapter.

Balinska seems to have done quite a lot of research for this book. There are notes for each chapter detailing her sources, and the ‘Further Reading’ section is “a selection of those specialist books in English which [she] found particularly useful and often thought-provoking.” Since none of these books is specifically about the bagel (example sections on the list: On food, bread and Jewish cooking; Jewish history in America, particularly New York; The sociology of consumption and the food business in America), she must have pored over many sources to extract the information specific to the bagel.

Overall, it was a very interesting read with a lot of information about the bagel that I hadn’t known before. But I still wish I could find a good bagel when I’m not in New York.