Bagels Beyond Mecca
I hope I don't have to go all the way to Kraków
Today’s Inspiration
One of my favorite Substacks is
. It is fun, quirky, and creative. I think if I read about bagels it is as good of a place to look as any. Today I want to talk about food I wish I could eat more often. A bagel with a schmear is a perfect food. You can carry it and eat it. It will taste great even when it cools off (if it starts warm). A good bagel often leads to outsized pride and praise. A lot of it doesn’t make sense. A secret handshake seems appropriate when someone reveals where they got their bagel (not Dunkin or Brueggers — Starbucks confirms rubes are willing to pay extra for something worse). The intensity of the food chat implies the talker had some hand in their creation. For the car culture, it is like the advocates for Chevy, Mopar, or Ford.About CAFÉ
Cafe Anne is one of a small handful of Substacks I always read. It is fun and endearing. If you are writing a Substack centered on NYC, you will find yourself returning to specific topics — an outlier Mayor, bagels, hot dogs decomposing in tepid water boxes, and best of all — the incredibly wide array of people who inhabit the five borough zoo.
I submitted a well-crafted Google Search for the word bagel in the CAFÉ. I know I could use Apple Spotlight or Bing. Use Yandex or Baidu if you maintain a soft spot for authoritarians like Putin and Xi. I gave up counting after fifteen DIFFERENT posts with bagels in the body!! If you live in NYC it is impossible not to cordon off a section of your brain and just believe the market has been cornered for pizza, bagels, rats, Reuben sandwiches, Steakhouses, etc. All that said, here is an example of why reading the CAFÉ is a great plan.
When someone gets animated about their bagel or their car, I want to tap them on the shoulder with a gentle reminder. Um, you didn’t bake the bagel or make the car.
In the United States, NYC and to a lesser extent Los Angeles (as well as Miami / Fort Lauderdale) are places to consistently find a good bagel. Bagel is even fun to say — it sounds a lot better than bread (rhymes with dread). All of this of course leads to a bagel hierarchy — NYC bagel story YES, LA bagel story MAYBE, Omaha bagel story NAH. None of this makes sense, it is just silly expectations that have little to do with reality. There is no reason an artisan in Omaha can’t make a great bagel. It is not a “dark art” cloaked in mystery passed on orally through the generations.
The same observation applies to American car manufacturers who received a stern comeuppance when people started buying Corollas and immediately noticed that Japanese cars had an extra digit on the odometer. They were built and assumed to last 200K and beyond! The secrets behind building a Ford LTD or a Dodge Monaco were not particularly insightful or actionable.
Life Is Short — Eat Decent Bread
My Dad’s parents were a first-generation Irish-American Dad and his Mom was an Irish immigrant. My Mom’s parents were a Polish immigrant Dad and a first-generation Polish-American Mother. There are not a ton of food trucks peddling Irish or an British Isles food. No one is wondering if the blood pudding truck is near. Polish food is another matter. Buffalo NY was loaded with bakeries and a diaspora of different ethnicities. Even though we only had one car, Mom somehow prioritized buying bread at a bakery instead of the grocery store. Mom was not a typical customer. She didn’t buy baked goods at the bakery. My brothers and I were spoiled as Mom baked a lot. I wrote about what cookies mean to me a while back. It is all about memories of Mom.
What Mom favored for our daily bread was Polish bakery fare like sour rye with caraway seeds, pumpernickel, and even an occasional challah. You see, despite the protestations, all of these beautiful breads were quite popular in Poland, Southern Germany, and Austria. It is Poland that remains the ancestral home of the bagel and all sorts of multi-ethnic excellent bread. Europe for centuries pushed Jews out of Western Europe and many made their homes in Poland before bands of migration to the US. So much great bread (and bagels) arrives in the United States from Poland and much via Jewish tradition.
I wonder if Kraków natives tout their bagel prowess? Bagels have been made in Poland since the 13th Century. Since emulation is the sincerest form of flattery, a Christian take on the bagel is still popular in Krakow. It is called the Obwarzanek which is Polish for parboil. They are more of a cross between a bagel and a pretzel. Of course, you must boil them before baking or they won’t be shiny! If you want to eat consistently good bread of all sorts, there are always great options in Polish or Ukrainian bakeries. For the record, I prefer the original bagel. Sometimes it is a fools errand to try to improve on the original.
So what was up with the idle meandering about Omaha, NE? One of our sons and daughter-in-law lives in Omaha. It is a wonderful city. It is also the likely originator of the Reuben sandwich. As for the steakhouse, my sense is cities that have built an aura of the home of the steakhouse likely just defrost Omaha steaks. Perhaps other steakhouses deserve the credit for pairing it with creamed spinach. I’m hoping my son will comment on today’s post and his wife will sign up. 🥩 🥯
The Poll & Music
Onto the music!
What a great post! Anything to do with bagels instantly captures my attention. I also enjoyed the link to Café Anne's story about the couple walking marathon distances to sample bagels, as well as your delightful cookie tale. (By the way, did you include recipes in that one? If so, I must've missed it.) I would have liked to take a lesson from your mother on turning out uniform baked goods--or from you on precise measurements! I never manage to make anything exactly the same, even when I try.
My husband grew up in Manhattan, and we've had some mighty fine bagels on our visits to NYC, especially at a place called Tal Bagels. But there really are some excellent bagel places in L.A., including one right in our neighborhood and another, Courage Bagels, that has gotten raves--even from New York Times critics. Of course bagels are best eaten fresh out of the oven, but we always buy extra, then slice and freeze them to toast later--and I think they're still pretty great. I've also made bagels myself. After reading this piece, I'm ready to make another batch--or taste-test a few in New York! BTW, we also ate seeded rye bread and challah at our house when we were growing up! My immigrant parents were pretty finicky about their bread.
I was taught that one should not eat bagels or pizza in a corn state.