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{{data|21 August 2019}}

OK, so this post isn't about holy breads – as in the Eucharist. It's about breads with holes. And I don't mean little pockets of air as in sourdough bread. I mean breads that are shaped like rings, wreaths or knots, with the dough surrounding one or more holes. You know, bagels, pretzels and the like.

== Common Ancestors ==

Bagels, pretzels and ''obwarzanki'' are similar enough to each other to suggest a common origin. According to Ms. Maria Balinska, who wrote a book on the history of bagels, holey breads date back all the way to ancient Rome. She believes that all such bread products descend from the ''buccellata'',<ref>{{Cyt

| nazwisko = Balinska

}}</ref> or small, round, jaw-breaking double-baked biscuits used as army hardtack by Roman legionaries at least as early as the 4th century CE. Whether they were actually ring or rather disc-shaped is uncertain. The author of [http://pass-the-garum.blogspot.com/2014/10/bucellatum-roman-army-hardtack.html ''Pass the Garum'',] a blog about ancient Roman foodways, reconstructed them as the latter, with only little holes punched with a needle to let air and steam escape during baking. Another hypothesis, also mentioned by Ms. Balinska, says that the ''buccellatum'' was the ancestor of the round communion wafer used by Christians in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Another bread with a long history, which, this time for sure, is made in the shape of elongated rings, is the Middle Eastern ''ka'ak''. These breads get a mention in the Talmud,<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', p. 7</ref> so they must have been known at least as early as the 6th century CE. Unlike the overly simple ''buccellata'', made only of flour, salt and butter, ''ka'ak'' are made from leavened dough. What's interesting is that the leavening agent used here is not yeast, but fermented chickpea.<ref>{{Cyt

| tytuł = Food Composition Tables for the Near East

Let's go back to the Apennine Peninsula. It was in the ports of Apulia, a region of southern Italy, that ''taralli'' were being boiled and baked as early as the 14th century. That's right, it's a kind of bread that is first boiled and only then baked. Why? Because when the starch on the surface of the dough comes into contact with boiling water, it gets gelatinized, giving the ''tarallo'' its shiny and crunchy crust. The stiffened crust also prevents the dough from rising further during baking, which helps keep the bread in shape. And this, in turn, means that you can make bigger ring-shaped breads than you could without boiling them first.<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', p. 2–6</ref> Clever, huh?

Great, but what's the deal with the ring shape in the first place? Why not a ball or a disc, but a torus, which takes a lot more skill to form? Well, this shape has two advantages. First, a bread with a hole has only a slightly smaller volume with a much larger surface area than a whole bread of comparable size (the proof by calculating the surface areas and volumes of a torus and an ellipsoid is left as an exercise for the Reader). And a greater surface area allows the heat to spread more evenly inside the dough during the thermal treatment (boiling or baking). Secondly, a holey bread is easier to transport, especially for a street vendor who can just put his (somehow it's usually been men) ''taralli'' on a string or a stick and peddle them in the street. And the customers could even wear their ''tarallo'' like a bracelet, if they didn't eat it right away.

== Pretzels ==

The Italian "''la brazzatella''" sounds quite similar to the German ''"die Brezel"''… Or is it ''"das Brezel"''? Or ''"der Brezel"''? German speakers can't agree on the grammatical gender of their pretzels. The jury is also out on whether the first "e" in this word is long or short (as in ''"der/die/das Bretzel"''). There are also those, mostly in Bavaria and Austria, who call it ''"die Brezen"'' (or ''"der Brezen"''). Or even ''"die Brezg"'', as they say along the Bavarian-Swabian border.<ref> {{Cyt

| tytuł = Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache

}}</ref>

But where does this shape come from anyway? Nobody seems to know for sure; even the legends don't agree. One says that the shape of the pretzel is designed to resemble the arms of a monk folded in prayer. According to another one, it was invented by a baker from Württemberg who had been sentenced to death, but whom Count Eberhard von Urach promised to pardon on the condition that he bakes a bread through which the sun would shine three times. In any case, the pretzel shape is so distinctive that bakers' guilds throughout central Europe would adopt it as their coats of arms. You can still find it on the shop sign of many a German bakery. There are differences in the pretzel's orientation, though; sometimes the pretzel is painted on a bakery sign belly-up, sometimes, belly-down, and there are even those compromise signs where it's been placed belly-sideways. This is yet another as-yet-unresolved dispute regarding the pretzel.<ref>{{Cyt

| tytuł = Fragen: Wer hat die Brezel erfunden? Und wo ist bei der Brezel eigentlich oben und wo unten?

}}</ref>

The one thing that is common to pretzels from different regions (apart from the shape) is that they are steeped in lye (4% solution of sodium hydroxide), rather than boiled in water, prior to being baked. This is what gives them their smooth, but cracked, shiny copper-brown crust. According to the aforementioned legend, we owe lye pretzels to the Württemberger baker's cat, which accidentally dropped the unbaked pretzels into a vat of lye. As there was no time left to make new ones, the panicked baker just retrieved the pretzels from the lye and popped them into the oven, thus inventing the recipe that is still used today. Bavarians, though, have a different opinion on the lye pretzel's provenance: yes, they were invented by accident, only it wasn't in 15th-century Württemberg, but in 19th-century Munich.

== ''Obwarzanki'' ==

Modern Polish cuisine is often described as combining two historical strains: on the one hand, the peasant cuisine, the poor, simple fare based on local and readily available ingredients; and on the other, the lordly cuisine of the nobility, sumptuous, abundant, exotic and following the rule, "pawn yourself, but show yourself". This view is somewhat oversimplified, though. Firstly, what people ate and drank had more to do with their actual income than the estate they were born into (for example, a relatively well-to-do peasant could eat just as well as a medium-income nobleman). And secondly, believe it or not, there were other social groups in Poland than just the peasantry and the nobility. Polish townsfolk, for instance, used to eat too, but they tend to be forgotten when historical Polish cuisine is being discussed. One reason for this may be that Polish towns were mostly populated by ethnic Germans and Jews, so their culinary heritage hasn't been included in the canon of ethnic Polish cuisine, which is mostly rural as a result. But there are at least two domains in which the culinary legacy of Polish towns has survived; these are beer brewing and bread baking. Sure, breweries and bakeries existed in the countryside as well, but it was the urban ones that were famous throughout the nation. The importance of urban bakers is still reflected today in the popularity of Poznań crescent rolls, Toruń gingerbread, Lublin onion pastries and yes, Cracovian ''obwarzanki''.

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Production of luxury goods has always been a lucrative business, so it's no wonder that the guild of bakers sought to monopolize the sale of ''obwarzanki'' within the city walls of Cracow. They achieved this goal in 1496, when King John Albert issued a decree restricting the production of white bread (including ''obwarzanki'') to guild members. What's more, ''obwarzanki'' could only be baked during Lent. This law was somewhat relaxed in 1720 (baking allowed on all lean days throughout the year, not just in Lent) and eventually abolished only in the mid-19th century. Naturally, not all bakers would follow these rules. Until 1561, there were bakeries in the northern suburbs of Cracow whose owners didn't belong to the guild. The English language doesn't really seem to have a word for this kind of outside-the-guild craftsman; he would have been called ''"partacz"'' in Polish and ''"Pfuscher"'' in German, both of which may be roughly translated as "botcher" or "bungler". As you can imagine, relations between guild members and the "bunglers" were about as cordial as those between taxi and Uber drivers, and they got most heated when the guild bakers eventually burned the "bunglers' " bakeries down.<ref>{{ Cyt

From the 16th century comes the oldest known mention of the Turkish bread products called ''simit'', which bear an uncanny resemblance to the Cracovian ''obwarzanki''. Both kinds of bread are made of two strands of dough that are braided into a wreath, sprinkled with sesame seeds, baked and finally sold in the streets from special carts. There are some differences too: the ''simit'' aren't parboiled, but just steeped in a mixture of water and molasses; the sesame seed sprinkle is much more generous in the Turkish version; and the carts are different colours (blue in Cracow, red in Istanbul). However, as recently as the early 20th century, the Turkish ''simit'' had the form of a thin single-strand ring; the ''obwarzanek'' in Cracow, on the other hand, was shaped into the wreath form no later than the 1920s. I can't tell who copied from whom with absolute certainty, but my local patriotism requires me to assume that this distinctive shape was born at the foot of the Wawel Hill.

Especially that ''obwarzanki'' of this particular shape are practically unique to Cracow. Polish ''obwarzanki'' outside Cracow are much smaller, unbraided, single-strand rings with smooth crust. Among these, Smorgonian ''obwarzanki'' (from what is now Smarhon, Belarus) were particularly famous, as they were sold at the yearly Saint Casimir's fair in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). It was probably this kind of ''obwarzanek'' from Poland's borderlands that Marshal Józef Piłsudski had in mind when making a similë between the nation and the ring-shaped bread.

You can find similar breads even further east, where the word ''"obwarzanek"'' has evolved into ''"baranka"''. Apart from ''baranki'', the East Slavs (Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians) also bake the slightly larger ''bubliki'' and the slightly smaller ''sushki''. The ''bubliki'' have made a particularly interesting career not only in the culinary realm, but also in song and literature. Mostly as a symbol of poverty; bakers may have been relatively well off, but the peddlars who distributed the ''bubliki'' earned next to nothing. The only thing worth less than a ''bublik'' was the ''bublik'' hole.

{{clear}}

{{ Cytat

| <poem>As we've promised, we divide equally:

}} }}

So how has a Cracovian invention got to be a New York speciality? Because there's no doubt that Cracow is the bagel's original hometown. The first known mention of bagels comes from sumptuary laws issued in 1610 by the Jewish community in what was then Poland's capital. The purpose of sumptuary laws was to prevent members of the community from overspending on luxury goods lest they provoke their gentile neighbours with their ostentatious wealth. As for what the law was actually saying on the topic of bagels, there are conflicting interpretations. Some say that the regulation allowed only those Jewish women who had just given birth to buy bagels. Others argue that bagels were allowed only on special occasions such as the circumcision of a newborn boy.<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', p. 44–46</ref> Whatever the case, one thing is sure: the bagel, just like the ''obwarzanek'', was a luxury.

In the Russian Empire, for instance, bagels would become the Jewish equivalent of the ''bubliki''. You can best see it the chorus of the Yiddish version of a Russian song written in Odessa during the New Economic Policy (1921–28), when for the first time since the Great October Revolution one could legally sell privately baked rolls with holes.

{{ Cytat

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Jewish immigrants would eventually bring both the recipe for bagels and the song to America and, specifically, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was here that a few families – Jewish this time around – would monopolize bagel production by setting up their own guild… I mean, trade union. The union, known as Local 338, counted about 300 bakers among its members. They were all Yiddish-speaking men of the Jewish persuasion, with membership typically passing from father to son. All union bakers made their bagels by hand, just like back in the old country.

Up to the mid-20th century all of their customers were Jewish too. For New York Jews, a sandwich of bagel schmeared with cream cheese and garnished with lox was the foundation of a typical Sunday breakfast. But the 1960s eventually saw a revolution in the bagel business, brought about by technological progress. First, the Lender brothers, whose father had been a bagel baker back in Lublin, discovered that consumers couldn't tell between a fresh bagel and a defrosted one. Then they leased a bagel-making machine invented by the Canadian Daniel Thompson. The bakers no longer had to work all night long to make enough bagels for the Sunday morning peak. Frozen machine-produced bagels started to show up in supermarkets – also in gentile neighbourhoods. Within a decade, Local 338's war against machines ended with the same result the Cracovian guild of bakers' fight against the "bunglers" eventually did. Today, both the guild and the trade union are gone, just like the idea of a bagel as a local, ethnic and hand-made bread product.

In 1993, a statistical American was already consuming two bagels per month. What's more, by that time, the bagels had become thoroughly Americanized. In America, big is beautiful, so bagels, which weighed only 2–3&nbsp;oz. (70&nbsp;g) back in the times of Local 338, have been supersized to an average weight of 7&nbsp;oz. (200&nbsp;g).<ref>{{ Cyt

| rok = 2016

== To Sum Up ==

A Bavarian pretzel is shaped like a knot with three holes and it's steeped in lye prior to baking. A Cracovian ''obwarzanek'' has the form of a wreath braided from two strands of dough and it's boiled in water with a little honey before baking. An American bagel is also parboiled, but it looks like a plump roll with a hole small enough to allow making bagels sandwiches.

== Recipe ==

Even though Americans have their bagels with all kinds of fixings nowadays, the bagel – cream cheese – lox triade remains the classic combination. It has been the feature of New York Jews' Sunday breakfasts since at least the 1930s. When Kraft Foods, who already owned the Philadelphia cream-cheese brand, acquired the Lender brothers' bagel business in 1984, they even organized a grand marketing wedding ceremony, where the bride was a cream-cheese-filled tub and the groom was an eight-foot (over 2&nbsp;m) bagel. Two years later, just one of the factories Kraft Foods had bought from the Lenders churned out a million holey bread rolls per day.<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', p. 174–176</ref>

My friend first made the dough from wheat flour (450 g), water (250&nbsp;g) and instant yeast (1&nbsp;packet), and after some kneading she left it the fridge for one night. Next morning, she formed the bagels, let the dough rise for an hour under a piece of cloth and then boiled them in water with some honey and salt. All that was left to do afterwards was to sprinkle the bagels with sesame seeds and pop them into an oven preheated to 200&nbsp;°C for some 20 minutes.

File:Bajgle - wyrastanie.jpg | Rising

File:Bajgle - obwarzanie.jpg | Boiling

As for the Jewish lox, it tends to be replaced with smoked salmon today, but the real deal is more like the Scandinavian ''gravlax'', that is, salmon pickled in salt and buried in the ground to marinate. So this is what I did: I mixed equal amounts of coarse salt and sugar, as well as a bunch of dill and a few crushed peppercorns and juniper berries. I spread the mixture on both sides of a salmon fillet and then – no, I didn't bury it; I just wrapped it in plastic foil and left in the fridge for two days. Then I unpacked it, gently brushed away the salt-and-sugar mixture, and cut the lox into paper-thin slices.

Lox w&nbsp;folii.jpg | Salmon getting marinated

Lox.jpg | The lox is ready.

And that's it. All we had to do for breakfast was to slice the freshly baked bagels in half, spread the schmear on them, cover with slices of the marinated salmon and garnish with onion rings and capers. It was delicious!

File:Bajgle, serek, lox.jpg | A typical American breakfast consisting of central European bagels, Scandinavian salmon, English cream cheese and Italian capers…

File:Kanapka z&nbsp;bajgla otwarta.JPG | … combined into one dish by Jewish immigrants.

== Bibliography ==

* {{ Cyt