Customer Reviews

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread

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This short book (195 pages) does not purport to be a definitive history of the bagel. As the author notes, the bagel is a modest bread made of commonly available ingredients, flour, water and eggs. It should not be surprising that many people throughout history have mixed these ingredients into a dough that is boiled and then baked in a circular shape with a hole in the middle. Similar foodstuffs have been found in many places, including China and Italy. This book focuses on the bagels of the Jewish bakers in Poland and in the United States. It is history-lite.

Actually, it is "histories-lite." It presents a series of summary histories. It tells the story of Jan Sobieski's military victory, lifting the siege of Vienna in 1683. It tells the story of the hard-working bakers and the impoverished peddlers of bagels in the cities of Poland for more than two centuries. It tells the story of the Jewish immigrant bakers in the lower east side of New York City. It tells the role of the Polish Jews in the labor movement in the first half of the 1900s, a movement that pitted capitalism against socialism. And it tells how the Lender brothers guided their bagel baking company into a multi-million dollar business.

Together, these summary histories provide clear snapshots of the lives of people who are not usually mentioned in traditional history books. The book is well written and well worth reading.

Let me respectfully add a word of context to the "History-Lite" review on this page. Maria Balinska, a veteran journalist with the BBC, is the first to admit that her bagel book is not an exhaustive history of all elements related to the bagel. There's an important scholarly tradition now of pursuing such threads through the centuries. If you're looking for such a study, one of the classics in the field is Fernand Braudel's still awesome "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life (Civilization and Capitalism : 15th-18th Century)." (And, yes, Braudel does write a lot about bread.)

That's not the point of "The Bagel." This slim and fascinating volume is aimed at reminding readers that -- as surprising as it may seem to many men and women -- something as simple as a bagel can become a colorful window into the evolving nature of Jewish culture especially in Europe and North America.

And more than that, what's so great about exploring threads of religious and ethnic identity like this? Well, the story of bagels in America also is a part of American Baby Boomer experience, whatever your faith may be. Like a lot of other Baby Boomers, I vividly recall discovering the exotic delight of bagels in the early 1970s and watching this distinctive treat go mainstream throughout my own adult life. Similarly, Jewish Americans have moved more prominently into the American mainstream during those decades.

The author is well aware of the scholarly giants in the field of cultural history and culinary evolution. She readily points out that she's not trying to outdo the Braudels in this field. Rather, her book is a talented journalist's tribute to the enlightenment we all can find in exploring the stuff of everyday life that we all too often take for granted.

Plus, as a lifelong journalist myself, I can tell you that I finished the book with a dozen corners of pages folded over, marking anecdotes and great lines that I plan to share with others. This book is that fun.

It's a very slim book with lots of details and information. Pity the book did not come with samples of each of the breads mentioned in it!!! I read it in about 2 sittings and would have loved to eat a bagel at the end of the book.

Good read and I highly recommend it.

A delightful trip down memory lane for all displaced New Yorkers and a perfect gift book for the hostess next time you're invited for a brunch of bagels and lox.

My daughter, who was a classmate of the author at college, gave me this book for Christmas and I promptly devoured it. It is extraordinary for its breadth and depth of scope, running from the Middle Ages in Poland to New York in the mid-twentieth century. It is as delightful to read as it is erudite; I particularly savored (I can't think of a more appropriate word) the chapters about New York's lower East Side. I bought it as a gift for a Jewish colleague and she concurs with this judgement.

A delightful little book! A charmingly well written journey through the bagel's history, with many interesting asides and footnotes. Well researched and documented but never dull. A find.

More about Jewish and Labor history than it is about the baking/eating aspects of the bagel.

You know what a bagel is; you have had countless opportunities to munch on the tasty, chewy rolls. If you don't have a bagel bakery nearby, there are always frozen bagels at the supermarket. But it wasn't always this way; a mere 25 years ago, 80% of Americans had never tasted a bagel. The bagel explosion is just the most recent chapter in the bagel's history, a history that goes back many centuries, to ur-rolls from which the bagel sprang. In _The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread_ (Yale University Press), Maria Balinska has written a sprightly, fun little book with appetizing doses of world and Jewish history. She also reports on how this ethnic bread isn't so ethnic anymore, and gives some suggestions about where to find the best specimens.

Ring-shaped rolls were popular in many cultures; they were easy to handle, and could be threaded on a string for transportation. Boiled rolls, too, were popular. A bagel-like bread came to Poland in the fourteenth century from Germany, becoming popular in Krakow, and Jewish bakers there began making them in their own bakeries to satisfy dietary laws. The history of European bagel baking includes street peddlers, bakers wise and bakers venal, and bakers pushed towards America for economic and ethnic reasons. Strikes by the baker's unions were to influence all of labor, and within such unions, there was a special section for bagel bakers. They had a beloved product, and specialized skills. A bagel roller had the job requiring the most skill within the bakery, and an average output was one bagel every five seconds. The unions were made more powerful because due to, among other things, the thick and heavy nature of the dough, there was no mechanized bagel roller; it all had to be done by hand. Of course, mechanization would triumph eventually when the Lender family put out machined bagels, and froze them, for delivery straight to consumers.

The Lenders promoted bagels for the use of all America. Murray Lender proclaimed in 1969, "A bagel has versatility. When most people call it a Jewish product, it hurts us. It's a roll, a roll with personality. If you must be ethnic you can call it a Jewish English muffin," and he even downplayed cream cheese and lox, asking consideration for bagels with jam. What's more, the bagel became flavored; the Lenders produced cinnamon raisin bagels, for instance, which could enter the breakfast pastry market. "The bagel had become all-American," Balinska concludes. In the sixties, even reporters for the _New York Times_, when reporting on bakery strikes, would explain that bagels were "glazed surfaced rolls with firm white dough" and they gave the pronunciation for the word, fearing that readers would make it rhyme with "haggle". Such explanations are no longer necessary, of course, but purists are probably right when they claim that there are significant differences between the broadly available, widely consumed frozen product and the toothsome version put out in the old fashioned bakeries. You don't have to be a bakery owner, like Helen Katzman, to find fault in the mass product; she said Lender's wasn't even a bagel, but was a "doughnut dipped in cement and then frozen." Maybe, as Balinska says, the clamoring of the public got it the bagel that the public deserved. She says indisputably good bagels are still to be found in Montreal and London. Oh, and remember Krakow, a historic bagel home? There is one bagel store there, which helpfully explains to prospective customers that bagels are "one of the most popular breads in America." It sells burritos, too.