It's Sunday, Grab A Bagel (Beigel/Baigel)

Sometimes, the NYTimes can be pleasant reading:

A bagel is a round bread, with a hole in the middle, made of simple ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.

The Jewish bagel’s probably birthplace is Poland. A story popular in the United States, that the bagel was first produced as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, king of Poland in the late 17th century, after he saved Austria from Turkish invaders at the battle of Vienna in 1683, is just that – a story, according to Maria Balinska, the author of “The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread” (Yale University Press).

The first known reference to the bagel among Jews in Poland, Ms. Balinska writes, precedes the battle of Vienna by seven decades. It is found, she says, in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow outlining how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy – “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious, and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.” The origin of the word “bagel” is ultimately unclear, but many experts agree, she says, that it comes from the Yiddish beigen, to bend.

Eastern European immigrants arriving in the United States at the turn of the 20th century brought the bagel with them to the streets of the Lower East Side. The rise of the bagel in New York is inextricably tied to that of a trade union, specifically Bagel Bakers Local 338, a federation of nearly 300 bagel craftsmen formed in Manhattan in the early 1900s.

Local 338 was by all accounts a tough and unswerving union, set up according to strict rules that limited new membership to the sons of current members. By 1915 it controlled 36 bagel bakeries in New York and New Jersey. These produced the original New York bagels, the standard against which all others are still, in some manner, judged.

What did they look like? At a mere three ounces, about half the size of the bagel you'll find at a corner coffee cart in Midtown Manhattan, union bagels were smaller and denser than their modern descendants, with a crustier crust and a chewier interior. They were made entirely by hand.

Local 338 held its ironclad grip on the bagel market for nearly half a century, until industrial bagel-making machines were introduced to the market in the early 1960's. The introduction of industrial bagel machines meant any retailer or retail-bakery owner could make bagels with nonunion help.

America’s current mass bagel consumption is all the more surprising because until the 1960s, bagels were little known outside large Jewish communities in major cities. In 1951, The New York Times, in an article about a bagel bakers’ strike (“Labor Dispute Puts Hole in Supply,” the headline noted) felt it necessary to provide a pronunciation guide (“baygle”) and a definition – a “glazed surfaced roll with the firm white dough.” And a 1958 article in the Saturday Evening Post suggested that readers try “a happy new taste experience” – “a sandwich of cream cheese, sliced tomato and lox on a buttered bagel.”