On our walk across 46th Street, when the absence of the Intrepid forced us to talk about bagels (Twelfth Avenue, Part Two), I said, "Bagels are first mentioned in municipal records in Poland in 1610. The same year that Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was produced. They have nothing to do with each other!" Then I moved on to discussing the Hudson. Had no choice.
But back to bagels!
A month or two ago I heard an interview with Maria Balinska, the author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, who discussed the role of bagels as a fasting bread in Poland.
Recently, I found a great review of the book at Moment Magazine by Joan Nathan, author of seven books on Jewish cooking. In the review, Nathan offers up two reasons why bagels came to be:
"Remarkably, Balinska found evidence from the 9th century that might explain why bagel dough is boiled before it is baked. A Polish decree of the time forbade Jews to bake bread because of the connection between bread and the body of Jesus Christ. But if dough was boiled first and then baked, it didn’t fall into the same category as bread and could be made and consumed."
"An alternative explanation that I heard from a member of the Beigel family holds that Jewish merchants from Krakow who traveled the countryside to sell their wares needed to take food with them to keep kosher on the road. According to Jewish law, eating bread at a meal requires a ritual washing of hands and a blessing over the food before eating. But in the countryside, that was difficult because of the risk of contracting typhus from impure water. The Beigel family, aware of this predicament, ingeniously decided to first boil the dough and then bake it, thus putting it in the category of noodles."
Read the review for more information on the bagel and the book...and to learn what city's bagels Joan Nathan believes are "probably the best...in the world." (It's not New York's!!!) Follow the link.
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