Who invented bagel history

The birth of the bagel is debated, largely because bagel-shaped bread has been around for centuries in various cultures. One legend provides the bagel was invented in as a stirrup-shaped tribute to Polish king Jan Sobieski after he defended Vienna from Turkish conquest. But, Maria Balinska, the author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread , points out that bagels look a lot like obwarzanek, a Polish bread that dates back to the late s.

Why do bagels have holes in them? The holes also made bagels stackable on a dowel, or wooden pole, which made it easier for street vendors to sell them. Gussin claimed he was sweeping seeds out of the oven and got the idea to combine them on a bagel. Hold the coffee this time. Although bagels clearly had multi-ethnic origins in Poland, here in the US they came fairly quickly to be associated with Jewish culture.

Like blintzes, latkes, pastrami, and rye bread, which came from the Eastern European communities so many Jews lived in, bagels came to be known as primarily Jewish. Over the course of the 20th century, bagels followed the pattern of so many other ethnic foods still superficially "Jewish" -- they got softer and sweeter as they successfully moved out of New York's Lower East Side into the middle of the country and the mass market.

The mass-market bagel world, led most prominently but not exclusively by Lenders, left behind much of the real work. Hand shaping shifted to machine rolling; boiling was switched to the less time consuming steaming; bakeries opted out of stone ovens in favor of standard steel.

The results of all these "efficiencies" were the soft, round breads more akin to a sort of savory donut than the chewy, crusty, hand shaped, boiled ones that came over with my grandparents' generation.

As Mr. Safire said, "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. The first written records of the bagel date to the year They showed up then in the community regulations of the Polish city of Krakow, which dictated that bagels were to be given as a gift to women after childbirth.

Back in medieval Poland, their round shape led to the belief that bagels had magical powers. Like the round loaves of challah we eat at Rosh Hashanah to symbolize a full and complete year to come, the round shape of the bagel was believed to bring good luck in childbirth and to symbolize long life.

I'm happy to have any good luck charm I can get - it never hurts to knock on wood, and I don't mind carrying a bagel with me in my bag for good luck either. This is the date of the incident -- it would not be written about until many years later. Thanks to reader Popik for the correction. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe.

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Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading I don't. As a kid in the '80s and '90s, I chewed my way through thousands of those boiled-and-baked rings of bread dough. Fresh bagels from Bruegger's a national chain that started small in Burlington, Vermont, my home turf, in , frozen bagels, mini-bagels We often bought bakery "day-olds" foolish, since most connoisseurs will tell you a bagel goes stale within a few hours , and my dad still prefers microwaving to toasting—another form of bagel heresy.

According to him, 22 28 seconds is the perfect amount of time to warm up a large bagel in the microwave. That's the closest I've ever seen him come to cooking. Now a new book by Maria Balinska titled " The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread " has made me realize that I narrowly avoided a horrifying fate: If I'd been born a few years earlier, I might have suffered a bagel-less childhood at least in rural Vermont.