Product Description

If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring only one thing to mind, you can count yourself among the world's millions of bagel mavens. But few people are aware of the bagel's provenance, let alone its adventuresome history. This charming book tells the remarkable story of the bagel's journey from the tables of seventeenth-century Poland to the freezers of middle America today, a story of often surprising connections between a cheap market-day snack and centuries of Polish, Jewish, and American history.Research in international archives and numerous personal interviews uncover the bagel's links with the defeat of the Turks by Polish King Jan Sobieski in 1683, the Yiddish cultural revival of the late nineteenth century, and Jewish migration across the Atlantic to America. There the story moves from the bakeries of New York's Lower East Side to the Bagel Bakers' Local 388 Union of the 1960s, and the attentions of the mob. For all its modest size, the bagel has managed to bridge cultural gaps, rescue kings from obscurity, charge the emotions, and challenge received wisdom. Maria Balinska weaves together a rich, quirky, and evocative history of East European Jewry and the unassuming ring-shaped roll the world has taken to its heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #447884 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-03
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
From the Italian ciambella in a 17th-century portrait of a young prince to the 1959 album Bagels and Bongos by pianist Irving Fields, journalist and BBC radio editor Balinska traces the cultural identity of a New York City icon from its humble beginnings in Poland to the freezer section of American supermarkets. Balinska's own interest in the bagel began with a year spent in Warsaw, Poland, as a graduate student, where she learned that her own family history was relevant to that of the bagel. She then unearths a plethora of little-known facts about this breakfast staple, recounting its role in children's nursery rhymes, Poland's economic crisis of 1929, even its place in a McCall's magazine spread in 1963 next to Shirley Temple where the magazine encouraged its readers to Join the stars below in this salute to Manhattan's most popular breakfast—bagels and lox. While the book may be too dry for the run-of-the- mill bagel lover, academics and dedicated foodies will appreciate Balinska's considerable research as well as her forays into the late 19th-century Jewish immigrant experience and American pop culture. Photos. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The bagel may have grown out of its New York insularity to become an American icon, but its origins are not what many people have come to believe. Historian Balinska traces the bagel’s history and discovers antecedents in southern Italy and in Muslim northwest China. Despite the oft-repeated legend, the bagel did not originate as a tribute to Polish king Jan Sobieski after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, for documents citing the ring-shaped bread substantially antedate that event. In the nineteenth century, both Jewish and Gentile bakers sold bagels in local eastern European markets. Jewish immigrants brought the bagel to New York and made it popular. With a keen ear for telling the anecdote, Balinska reports how the bagel entered urban history, how it figured in labor disputes, and how America’s bagel capital may have shifted to Mattoon, Illinois, whose bakery daily turns out three million bagels. --Mark Knoblauch

Review
"'Maria Balinska combines stories, history and hands-on experience with a style as brisk and toothsome as the crust of a freshly baked bagel and content as dense and flavourful as its skilfully handled dough.' Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food"

Customer Reviews

History-Lite.

This short book (195 pages) does not purport to be a definitive history of the bagel. As the author notes, the bagel is a modest bread made of commonly available ingredients, flour, water and eggs. It should not be surprising that many people throughout history have mixed these ingredients into a dough that is boiled and then baked in a circular shape with a hole in the middle. Similar foodstuffs have been found in many places, including China and Italy. This book focuses on the bagels of the Jewish bakers in Poland and in the United States. It is history-lite.

Actually, it is "histories-lite." It presents a series of summary histories. It tells the story of Jan Sobieski's military victory, lifting the siege of Vienna in 1683. It tells the story of the hard-working bakers and the impoverished peddlers of bagels in the cities of Poland for more than two centuries. It tells the story of the Jewish immigrant bakers in the lower east side of New York City. It tells the role of the Polish Jews in the labor movement in the first half of the 1900s, a movement that pitted capitalism against socialism. And it tells how the Lender brothers guided their bagel baking company into a multi-million dollar business.

Together, these summary histories provide clear snapshots of the lives of people who are not usually mentioned in traditional history books. The book is well written and well worth reading.

Delicious Nostalgia
A delightful trip down memory lane for all displaced New Yorkers and a perfect gift book for the hostess next time you're invited for a brunch of bagels and lox.

Yummy!
My daughter, who was a classmate of the author at college, gave me this book for Christmas and I promptly devoured it. It is extraordinary for its breadth and depth of scope, running from the Middle Ages in Poland to New York in the mid-twentieth century. It is as delightful to read as it is erudite; I particularly savored (I can't think of a more appropriate word) the chapters about New York's lower East Side. I bought it as a gift for a Jewish colleague and she concurs with this judgement.