5,079
edits
Changes
m
Text replacement - "recipe" to "recipë"
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Frau mit Brezel.jpg}}|thumb|upright|A Bavarian woman with a basket of pretzels]]
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 recipë 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.
{{ Cytat
[[File:Artur Szyk, Żydowski piekarz.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A Jewish baker in the Poland of yore, baking bread, challah and bagels.<br>Painted by Artur Szyk (1927).]]
Jewish immigrants would eventually bring both the recipe recipë 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.