No Bagel For You!

One of the things that I carry with me from my 40+ years of living in metropolitan NYC is my love for bagels. I had had bagels during college since Cornell is basically an outpost of NYC in some ways, and the biggest bakery/eatery/hang-out spot in Ithaca is called Collegetown Bagels. But it was my lime living in NYC and Long Island that made me love bagels. My favorite bagel is an Everything Bagel, which is not so unusual since our FOMO culture makes it imperative for everyone to have everything including all the seeds and spices on their bagels. The alternative name for the Everything Bagel is a Long Island Bagel. That must mean it was invented in the heartland of NYC’s Jewish-centric bagel country of Nassau County, where I lived for a dozen years in my early career. So, I didn’t just FOMO my way into the Everything Bagel, I lived it out there in the belly of that particular beast. I first saw the wooden paddle wheels and boiling water for making bagels the old-fashioned way at a little hole-in-the-wall bagel store on the South Shore where the bakers were all wearing yarmulkas and talises and they slung the bagel dough here and there. So, I am very happy to have found a great old-world bagelry out here that is run by a man of German extraction that has the full Germanic accent and makes the experience all seem very authentic (even without the yarmulkas and talises).

The origins of the bagel date back to the Jewish communities in Poland in the 1600s. So they were brought to America by Eastern European Jewish immigrants (late 1800s-early 1900s), mostly centered in NYC’s Lower East Side tenement district. Bagels were an ethnic/religious food, and were not initially mainstream…even in. NYC. They were hand-rolled, boiled, then baked in coal ovens. There was even a Bagel Bakers Local 338 union that controlled production and was very exclusive (i.e. very ethnically so). They became more mainstream in the 1960s-70s as they spread beyond Jewish communities. Given that I started at Cornell in 1971, I think its fair to say that I was there for the start of the phenomenon of the bagel going ballistic. Like all good things in America, enough is never enough, and the 1980s-90s saw the advent of national chains of bagel makers (Bruegger’s, Einstein Bros., etc.). That’s about when they started to become a standard American breakfast food and especially so in NYC. Of course, the legendary NYC bagel shops, with their water-boiled and hand-rolled technique, and tradition, were not so often replicated in the larger mass-produced varieties. I have long felt that the supermarket pre-packaged bagels are really no the same product and are bagels only in name on the package. Bagel-making machines were invented by Lender’s, who was trying to automate production. Lender’s Bagels started selling frozen bagels in supermarkets nationwide and that mostly when non-Jewish Americans discovered them. They were still considered somewhat exotic and “ethnic”, and when you added cream cheese or lox…oy vey! “Bagel and schmear” became common vocabulary (I can still hear Robin Williams saying it…) as cream cheese became the default topping (not in any small part without the help of Philadelphia Cream Cheese marketing campaigns).

Bagels are not exactly a low-calorie choice. The nutritional breakdown for bagels with and without cream cheese are daunting. A plain bagel (medium, ~105g) has 290 calories, 1.7 grams of fat, 56 grams of carbohydrates, 11 grams of protein, and 2.4 grams of fiber. Add you cream cheese “Schmear” and there are an added 51 calories in 1 tablespoon of cream cheese . Two tablespoons of Philadelphia Original Cream Cheese (a proper “Schmear”) contain 80 calories, 7g fat, 2g carbs, and 2g protein. So, a typical bagel with cream cheese (using 2 tablespoons) would be ~370 calories** (290 + 80), ~8.7g fat (1.7 + 7), ~58g carbs (56 + 2), ~13g protein (11 + 2), and ~2.4g fiber. Add to that that bagel sizes have increased over the years – just 20 years ago bagels were about 3 inches wide and 140 calories, while today the average bagel is about 6 inches wide and about 350 calories . So if you’re getting a bagel from a bakery or deli, it could be significantly larger and have more calories than these standard measurements. They may have been seen by America as a healthier alternative to donuts, given that donuts are calorie-dense with limited protein and fiber to keep you satisfied, but one donut is not to different calorically than a bagel with a Schmear. There are now a massive variety of bagels available. Besides the normal plain, onion, sesame, poppy and everything (Long Island), there are blueberry, cinnamon raisin, and especially popular out here in Northern Mexico… asiago, jalapeño and all sorts of interesting local adaptations.

In terms of Pop Culture, bagels got a lot of attention on Seinfeld in the 1990s. In fact, New York’s H&H Bagels featured prominently since Kramer worked at H&H Bagels (a fictional job, like most of what Kramer did). The multiple bagel references throughout the series really helped bring bagels into the consciousness of Americans and cemented bagels in their minds as quintessential NYC food. Sex and the City in the late 90s-2000s brought “Brunch culture” with bagels and lox to the audience and even portrayed them such that the sophisticated NYC lifestyle involved having bagels on Sunday morning. I’ve learned that dieting culture included the cliché, “I’ll just have half a bagel”, and people were scooping-out bagels (removing the inside bread) to bring down the calories. Bagel purists were horrified. Strangely enough, on my Zepbound program, Kim and I are sharing a bagel, so I’m actually using that tactic…except without scooping out the best part. Now you can even get bagels at Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks (I cannot vouch for their quality) but it certainly has added bagels to menus nationwide, making them available everywhere, anytime and further normalized them.

In some ways, bagels are the perfect convenience food and that probably helped them become iconic. To begin with, they are bread, which is always popular. They eat like a sandwich and you can have them pretty much at an any meal, not just breakfast. Like any good bread, they are a good vehicle for an endless selection of toppings. They have horizontally integrated with things like pizza bagels (a kid favorite) or bagel chips (my current go-to carbohydrate snack of choice). And as happy as I am to be living out here on this hilltop rather than the hills of Manhattan, the bagel’s NYC affiliation makes me feel at home and adds a touch of authenticity to my daily fare. There is even a Montreal bagel adaptation. Montreal bagels are smaller, sweeter, boiled in honey water, wood-fired. These differences have created quite an intense rivalry with NYC bagels. There is also a bit of a toasting controversy with bagels. Purists say NEVER toast a fresh bagel, others say always toast. Tomato, tomato.

Bottom line… bagels went from niche Jewish food to frozen supermarket novelty to ubiquitous American breakfast staple to cultural icon and tourist destination draw, all within about 50 years. Pretty impressive for a ring of dough!