Holey Breads: Difference between revisions

[[File:Narodziny Maryi.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A postpartum meal for a Jewish mother (in this particular case, for Saint Anne, who has just delivered the Blessed Virgin Mary) as depicted in a panel from the Gothic altarpiece sculpted by Veit Stoß for Saint Mary's Basilica in Cracow.<br>Is it bagels in this bowl or some other kind of bread rolls?]]

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 the 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.'', s. 44–46</ref> Whatever the case, one thing is sure: the bagel, just like the ''obwarzanek'', was luxury.

With the legend about how the bagel was invented in honour of King John III Sobieski's victory at Vienna, [[What has the Battle of Vienna given us?|we've already dealt in one of the previous posts]]. Let's just recall here that Jewish bakers were indeed indebted to King John, as he was the first Polish monarch since the end of the 15th century ''not'' to confirm the Cracovian guild of bakers' monopoly on white bread.<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', s. 35</ref> What this meant for the Jews was that they could finally bake their own bagels and sell them within the wall of Cracow. So how exactly did the bagels differ from the ''obwarzanki''? Well, it seems that at the time the only difference was that ''obwarzanki'' was a Polish word and ''beygl'' is Yiddish. It was only later that two different bread products would evolve from the same common ancestor: the gentile ''obwarzanek'' and the Jewish bagel. The former had remained relatively thin, but braided from two strands of dough; the latter has evolved into a roll with a little hole, plump enough to be cut in half and fashioned into a sandwich. The former isn't made anywhere outside Cracow and the two adjacent counties, the latter has spread to all places reached by Cracovian Jews.

In the Russian Empire, for instance, bagels would become the Jewish equivalent of the ''bubliki''. You 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.

{{Video|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwf1Bl_RoiU|poz=right|szer=200|opis=''Bublitchki'' performed by Vladimir Minkin}}

| <poem>Come, buy my bublitchki,

[[File:Artur Szyk, Żydowski piekarz.jpg|thumb|upright=.6|left|A Jewish baker in Poland of yore, baking bread, challah and bagels.<br>Painter by Artur Szyk (1927).]]

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.  

[[File:Obwarzanek, bajgiel, precel.jpg|thumb|upright|Top left: a Cracovian ''obwarzanek'';<br>top right: a New York bagel;<br>bottom: a Bavarian pretzel.]]

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

}}</ref> The choice of sprinkles has grown proportionally to size of the bagel itself; you can now have bagels sprinkled with poppy seeds, caraway, sesame seeds, garlic powder, onion flakes, blueberries, raisins, chocolate chips, cinnamon… and of course, everything at once.<ref>{{Cyt  

And so, divergent evolutionary paths have led to ''obwarzanki'' in Cracow and bagels in America. But in 2001, history came a full circle and the bagels finally returned to Cracow. This was when the American Nava DeKime came to Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Cracow, and opened Bagelmama – the first café in Cracow where you can buy bagels instead of ''obwarzanki''.