The New York Bagel

The first known mention of the bagel dates from 1010. in the community-regulations of Krakow, Poland. Today the world's biggest bagel factory may be in Illinois. Still, no other food is so associated with New York as the "Jewish Englishmuffin," which spread from the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century.

What is a bagel? Ed Levine offered this mouthwatering description in The New York Times: "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 shouldweigh 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."

Theories abound about the bagel's origin. In her book The Bagel, Maria Balinska offers several versions, including the possibility that they migrated from Germany to Poland during the fourteenth century (a variant of doughy pretzels made in monasteries for feast days) and that they transmogrified into round rolls with holes, called obwarzanek (Jews in Poland were granted the right to bake bread, a foodstuff normally associated with church rituals, only in the late thirteenth century.) Another theory credits the bagel to a Viennese baker who, honoring King Jan Sobieski of Poland, a horse lover, shaped his doughy offering like a beugel-German for stirrup.

By the 1990s, columnist William Safire wrote in the Times, "a sea change in American taste" had taken place: "The bagel overtook the doughnut in popularity. Today we spend three-quarters of a billion dollars a year on bagels, only a half-billion on doughnuts." But he and others lamented the loss of the old artistry as bagels were mass-produced by machines, which took over the former hand rolling. Less-time-consuming steaming was substituted for boiling. Steel ovens replaced stone. "The formerly chewy morsel that once had to be separated from the rest of its ring by a sharp jerk of the eater's head is now devoid of character-half-baked, seeking to be all pastry to all men," Safire wrote.

Even though bagels are ubiquitous today, they are still associated with the city where they thrived in the twentieth century more than anyplace else. "Pizza belongs to America now," said Josh Ozersky, a food writer, "but the bagel was always the undisputed property of New York.

TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS