Universal Truths:
A bagel is a ring of leavened dough cooked for a few seconds in boiling water and cooled before it is baked to obtain a golden crust and a tender inside. This peculiar preparation is what distinguishes it from simply being “a roll with a hole.” They should be larger than your hand but only just. Any bagel that can be enjoyed untoasted 24 or more hours after being baked is an unnatural thing.
Claudia Roden and Joan Nathan agree that while the exact origins of the bagel, whether French, Spanish, or German, are unclear, it achieved global success in the hands of Polish bakers fleeing Europe in the second wave of Jewish immigration to America. The commercially produced frozen and grocery-store bagel has been available since the 1960s, and thus through the great power of food conglomerates and Americana, a product resembling The Bagel has become ubiquitous, or at least recognisable, to innumerable communities around the world.
New York:
New Yorker-ness is measured in many ways. One of the more ridiculous is the passion with which you assert that New York City is the only place possible to find an acceptable bagel, and the way(s) you eat it is the only acceptable way(s). Why the former is true has many “explanations,” the most popular being the unique mineral makeup of city tap water in which the bagel is boiled. Whatever your pet theory, Peter Kotchev (New Yorker since the age of 6 after stints in Sofia, Bulgaria, and St Louis, MO) articulates the underlying belief: “People who say they’ve had a good bagel outside the city are deluding themselves.”
To declare a bagel “good” is to not only assert what is empirically provable i.e. taste (malty and a little sour), texture (well defined but not crunchy crust, toothsome but not necessarily dense), and preparation (see above; hole not an afterthought), but to put up your cultural identity as collateral. This cultural identity used to be primarily ethnic, that is, Ashkenazi. While bagels still carry this association, though to a much lesser extent than bialys (rolls with thumbprints filled with onions, poppyseeds, or the like) and knishes (baked pastry-wrapped potato or kasha mixtures), they have been successfully integrated into the city’s cultural entitlement as a whole. They are such a flashpoint that they won a spot in the annals of botched political food pandering as recently as 2018, when gubernatorial hopeful Cynthia Nixon’s Zabar’s order (specifically her use/abuse of a cinnamon raisin bagel) earned articles in The New York Post, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic.
So now, for your edification, I will lay my own cultural credibility on the line and weigh in on the subjective aspects of the bagel. By the authority bestowed by my lifelong residence in Manhattan and extensive bagel-eating experience, I, Helena Kirkland Gelman, declare the following:
The correctly fully-dressed bagel, which may be plain, salt, poppyseed, sesame, pumpernickel, egg, or everything,* wears lox or nova**, cream cheese, and onions, and one may add tomato, dill, or capers. Smoked sable and whitefish salad are also respectable; herring should be reserved for rye bread. My personal preference is a lightly toasted poppyseed bagel with nova, red onion, thinly sliced cucumber and dill. It is also acceptable to have a bagel with just cream cheese, just butter, either of those with jam (though not on an everything bagel), or scrambled eggs with cheese. While I acknowledge among others the excellent quality of Zabar’s, Absolute Bagels, and Russ & Daughters, my loyalties lie bread-wise with Kossar’s and Orwasher’s, and appetizing***-wise with Sable’s. While fully reserving all my rights as a snobby New Yorker, I endorse Montreal**** bagels as entirely delicious – an equal but not equivalent foodstuff.
*coated in salt, poppyseeds, sesame seeds, and granulated garlic
** lox is heavily salt-cured salmon, unsmoked; nova is cured, cold-smoked, strictly-speaking from Nova Scotia; “smoked salmon” in this context is generally nova-style but with a different provenance eg. Scottish, Irish, Gaspe
*** Appetizing stores are like delicatessens for fish and dairy products.
**** Black Seed in NYC; Fairmont in Montreal
Los Angeles:
The cuisine of Los Angeles can be separated into two categories: food that is very simple, and always faithful to original ethnic cuisines to the point, and food that is experimental, and takes steps further from those cuisines, and is often pricier, and decorated with microgreens. Personally, I (Coco Goran) prefer the former. Tacos sold out of trucks and tiny restaurants always taste better and kinder than tacos sold in restaurants where you have to make a reservation. This applies to The Bagel as well. Indeed Jewish cuisine in Southern California was mostly grounded by delis like Freidman’s and Canter’s, both very traditional Jewish bakeries and delis. While there are delis that stay very faithful to the New York Style bagel, others have committed to the California style, and established a West Coast bagel. Motifs include open faced sandwiches, bright colours, avocados, and other non-traditional toppings. Two key Bagel shops in central LA, Maury’s and Courage bagels, represent two sides of how Los Angeles has interpreted bagels.
I shall start with Courage Bagels. Courage is a little fancy. They bake in smaller batches I believe, and are more faithful to the Montreal bagel, with a thinner and less uniform body, crisp and crunchy exterior, and a slightly denser interior. The dough is also fermented with sourdough. Sometimes the bagels are purposefully burnt in their woodfire oven, a choice that is a little baffling to me yet the people of LA seem to like it. While the bagels themselves at Courage are delicious yet slightly unconventional, the real star of the show is the toppings. They paint their bagels with only the brightest and sweetest of tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, capers, and other varieties of vegetables. Other untraditional and fancier toppings Courage has added to their menu is salmon roe, sardine fillets, cheddar slices, jamón, and even caviar. Courage has a notoriously long line (I once waited an 40 minutes just to order) and high prices, but the quality of vegetables and fish is outstanding, and the flavour of the bagels is a beautifully crisp vessel for soft cream cheese, lox and veggies.
Maury’s is a personal favourite of mine. I am a little biassed, as I worked the counter at Maury’s this past summer, so I have tried many many things on the menu. Maury’s was opened by Jason Kaplan in 2014, bringing his native New York bagel to SoCal. His bagels are a little crisp on the outside and chewy and soft on the inside. He’s a big fan of a little flat edge on the bagels where they ‘kiss’ in the oven, it’s very cute. Maury’s keeps it very simple; they serve a couple different kinds of fish, a couple different kinds of vegetables, and a couple different kinds of schmear. Customers asking for gluten free options are laughed at and promptly banished from the premises. Those who have a craving for a bacon egg and cheese or avocado are similarly sent away for their bougie sensibilities. (The only thing is that they have vegan cream cheese and serve oat milk, they’re not complete animals.) Maury’s isn’t as strict as traditional New York delis; it still retains play with its flavours. Everything, poppy seed, and sesame bagels are the most popular, but the Za’atar bagel is still herbaceous and delicious. Pickled red onions are the perfect brightness, and both scallion and spicy pepper schmear are available upon request. My personal favourite dish is a sesame or an everything bagel with scallion schmear, kippered salmon with cucumbers and tomatoes.
WORDS: Helena Gelman and Coco Goran
