OBSERVATIONS : The Bagel’s Beginnings : Following This Humble Roll Around the World

NO ONE KNOWS when the first baker decided to take a pile of gluten flour, add water and yeast to make a dough, fashion the dough into doughnut shapes, dunk them in boiling water and then bake them until they were browned on the outside and chewy beneath the crust. It’s still a mystery; the only sure thing is that fire came first. There are those who even challenge the most commonly held bagel notion--that the bagel’s origins are Jewish.

Cookbooks and encyclopedias generally credit an unknown Viennese baker with the bagel’s beginnings. According to that history, the first bagel rolled into the world in 1683, when a local baker wanted to pay tribute to the king of Poland, Jan Sobietsky. King Jan had just saved the people of Austria from an onslaught of Turkish invaders. Because the king was an avid and accomplished horseman, the baker decided to shape the yeast dough into an uneven circle that resembled a stirrup. The theory has merit on two counts. First, the traditional hand-fashioned bagel remains less than perfect in shape. Lacking the doughnut’s symmetry, it skews into a shape aptly described as stirrup-like. Second, the Austrian word for stirrup is beugel .

Another theory? Well, there’s the fact that beugen means “to bend” in German; therefore, bagels were invented in Germany.

The Polish explanation sets the birth of the bagel in 1610, in Kracow, Poland, where it was created as a delicacy for Kracow’s impoverished Jews, usually resigned to a diet of black bread. Leo Rosten, author of “The Joys of Yiddish,” sets the creation of the bagel in 16th-Century Poland. But, he says, bagels then were first made to be given to expectant mothers for good luck during childbirth. The idea was that the bagel signified the never-ending circle of life.

In the book “Menu Mystique,” Norman Odya Krohn, discussing Russian bubliki , writes: “This is the name for the original bagel that was made famous in Russian song and rhyme.” Held together by string, they were said to have been sold at Russian fairs and were believed to bring good luck.

Wherever it might have first appeared, the bagel’s name as we know it today evolved slowly; based on the Yiddish verb beigen , meaning “to bend,” the roll with the hole was called a beygel .

The bagel persevered and flourished in Europe for a few centuries before heading for foreign shores. In the United States, the bagel first appeared at Ellis Island, brought by Jewish refugees leaving Eastern Europe shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. However, the destination for most emigrants was New York City, and here the bagel settled. From the Lower East Side to the farthest reaches of the Bronx, Jewish bakers set up shops. Their customers were, for the most part, fellow refugees, whom they provided with the traditional, beloved baked goods from the Old Country: eggy challah , unleavened matzot and, of course, the hardy bagel. Here was born the bagel’s reputation as an ethnic deli food.

The bagel baker’s life in the old days was far from an idyllic existence. Most of the brick hearth ovens in which the bagels were baked (often at temperatures of 500 degrees) were set up in dark, poorly lit tenement basements that turned into steamy sweatshops as the bagels were dipped in caldrons of boiling water.

The bagel bakers finally moved to street level years later to attract shoppers and expand their businesses, which had been wholesale operations. And in moving up to street facilities, they got added benefits. As one baker put it, “No more floods, no more rats, no more mice.”

Making bagels by hand called for hard work and long hours. The average trained benchman, the man who kneaded the dough and made the bagels, could twist them out at the rate of a dozen bagels every minute. Then the oven men took over for the actual baking process. In 1960, a 37-hour week paid about $150, with the chance to earn another $100 in overtime. At 12 bagels per minute, a 37-hour week meant twisting about 25,000 bagels.

The men who made the bagels at that time, according to Ben Greenspan of the Beigel Bakers Union, a local of the American Bakery and Confectionery Workers, were “college students, teachers, lawyers and other professionals” drawn by the plentiful overtime. Young Americans, and not old-world refugees, were learning the bagel trade.

In the early ‘60s, a bagel sold for 7 cents retail, and a decent-size bakery such as the Tri-Boro Bagel Co. in Fresh Meadows was turning out 140,000 bagels a week. The bagel was still basically a New York City resident at that time, but a family named Lender was already laying the groundwork

that would soon have the bagel available throughout the country.

HARRY LENDER was a baker in Lublin, Poland, in the early 1920s with a wife, Rosie, and children. He decided that there had to be a better world than the one in which he lived, and the United States sounded as though it might be the place for him.

Lender docked with the shipload of other emigrants in New York Harbor, but it wasn’t long before he’d found a job at a bakery in Passaic, N.J. It was only a matter of months before he purchased a baker’s lease and equipment in New Haven, Conn., for $1,500. He converted the 800-square-foot conventional bakery into one specializing in bagels.

By 1929, Lender sent for his wife and children, putting them to work in the bagel factory. The Lenders did well enough to be able to buy a 1,200- square-foot factory in New Haven by 1934. And yet when Harry thought about the future, he worried. His prospects were limited, with only about 15,000 Jews living in New Haven. He knew he had to come up with a way to cross ethnic lines and get everyone eating bagels. In his words: “It was either that or go out of business.”

In 1955, Lender’s bagel took its first steps out of New Haven, headed toward the American public at large. Six bagels were put into a plastic bag and the bags delivered by a bread distributor to supermarkets throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. Supermarket sales climbed, resulting in a heavier workload for the family and indirectly leading them to the key to successfully shipping bagels nationwide--freezing.

Lender, unfortunately, didn’t live to see his dream come true. He died before the first frozen bagels were shipped for sale outside the local delivery area in 1962.

THOUGH THE BAGEL’S growing popularity overseas still can’t compare to the reception it has received here, the European bagel does have the distinction of being one of few foods, if not the only one, that was ever actually banned in a foreign country. It happened in 1960 in Poland, one of the major contenders for the title of the bagel’s birthplace. Most of the Jews had departed from the Polish town of Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, but the Gentiles who remained still loved a good bagel. What they didn’t like was paying taxes.

Polish bakers, who were required to pay a tax on each different bakery product they purveyed, no longer officially baked bagels. Why then, the government began to wonder, were so many citizens of the town of 36,000 seen noshing bagels in public places throughout the day? They had to be getting them from scofflaw bakers.

Local agents of the Police Militia, frustrated by their vain attempts to crack down on the non-taxpaying bakers, were driven to a desperate measure: They banned the bagel. Not surprisingly, the ban on bagels worked about as well as Prohibition had in the United States.

The bagel’s fame has spread far beyond its old stomping grounds of Eastern Europe. Until the late ‘70s, the bagel was scarcely seen in the United Kingdom, except in London’s East End Jewish neighborhoods, where they were still called biegels , pronounced “bye-guls.” These rolls bore little resemblance to the American bagel and, in the words of one British aficionado, bore little resemblance to “decent bagels.”

David Margulies, a New Jersey businessman relocated to London, was that fellow, and his opening of the American Bagel Factory on London’s Edgware Road in 1977 did much to speed the bagel’s popularity among the Brits.

The United States brought a second bagel wave to England in 1983. The time was right for bagel expansion in England as the British began embracing everything American--from hot-fudge sundaes and burgers to barbecued ribs and thick shakes--with almost un-British enthusiasm. Ron Stieglitz produced six kinds of bagels--plain, onion, salt, sesame, poppy and pumpernickel--and the British fancied them all.

They’re more than a bit out of the ordinary in China, where Sidney Shapiro, a former Brooklynite who had become a Chinese citizen, had to create his own recipe--based on Chinese bun dough--to be able to satisfy his fathomless bagel cravings.

Bringing recipes for baked goods across international borders is never a simple task because of the ingredients involved.

One reason Italian bread tastes better in Italy, brioche tastes better in France and bagels taste better in the United States is because it’s impossible to guarantee consistency of ingredients too far afield. Jack Sugarman, bagel consultant to Margulies, found that making a bagel abroad taste as good as the real thing was a stiff challenge. “It’s not easy,” he says, “to bake a good bagel when you wind up in a country where things like flour and water--all the available ingredients except the salt--differ chemically from those in New York.”

And yet, foreigners want the same foods available in New York. Lyle Fox, an ex-Chicagoan now living in Tokyo, believed that the Japanese would be eager to try his bagel when he set up shop in Japan in 1982 because, he says, the “Japanese associate it with New York, and they associate New York with fashion.”

The Japanese taste in bagels also varies from the American standard in that they like their bagels smaller, rounder and softer than the New York City version. Though Fox has competition from other bakers (and Tokyo’s Jewish Community Center makes its own), he is serving as many as 6,000 bagels a day, with cinnamon-raisin the hands-down favorite.

From “Bagelmania,” by Connie Berman and Suzanne Munshower. Copyright 1987 by Price Stern Sloan Inc., Los Angeles. Published by HPBooks, a division of Price Stern Sloan Inc. Reprinted by permission.