Bagels & Bialys: New York Food Staples with Polish Roots
Bagels with cream cheese and lox are an iconic New York brunch. Along with hot dog carts, cheesecakes and Manhattan cocktails they make up the culinary landscape of the Big Apple. Another baked good which, although less known, has a rightful place on that list is the bialy. How did these classic bakery staples make it to the New World?
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Bialy (with avocado, white fish salad, capers, red onions and tomato) at Bullfrog Bagels, photo: Dixie D. Vereen / Washington Post via Getty Images
Often known as an onion roll, and short for Bialystoker Kuchen, a bialy is a chewy yeast roll with a depression in the middle, filled with lightly caramelised onions. It was brought to the United States by Polish Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s. Since then, it has become a staple in the bakeries of the north-eastern United States along with the pletzl, knishes, challah and, the most popular of them all, the almighty bagel. In the early 1990s Mimi Sheraton, esteemed American food critic and James Beard award winner, came to Poland in search of the elusive origins of the bialy. Her first stop was the formerly multicultural city of Białystok in the North-East – to learn about the roll and, most importantly, to taste it in its place of origin. As with pizza in Naples and Sachertorte in Vienna, she had hoped for a truly original experience.
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Józef Piłsudski Street in Bialystok, 1918-1939, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
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We rode through what seemed like an endless flat countryside, bland and drab on that sleet-drenched day. Here and there were sagging carved wood cottages that must have been antique craft treasures and, every so often, a small, bustling town with a supermarket and brightly dressed children waiting for school buses. The terrain became more interesting as we neared the outskirts of Bialystok with shadowy gray-brown forests streaked with silvery white birches, suggesting a ghostly stage set. The only signs of human life were a few intrepid wild mushroom hunters at the roadsides, selling their finds of the season’s boroviks, which are among the world’s most esteemed cèpes. Janusz explained that this area of Poland was known as the Podlasie, meaning ‘under the trees’, and he described Bialowieza, a large forest outside of Bialystok that is still home to elk, bison, and the famous ‘buffalo grass’ that flavors the highly prized Zubrowka vodka.
Little did she know, she would find no trace of the bialy in Białystok.
The speciality completely disappeared from its birthplace along with its Jewish community during the Holocaust, yet its history did not end. Traces led the journalist further to various places inhabited by Polish Jewish immigrants. And so Sheraton travelled to Paris, where she talked to esteemed lawyer Samuel Pisar (‘I can feel and smell them now as I talk to you and search for them with a passion everywhere I go’) and to Jerusalem where, among others, she meets Arieh Shamir (‘No one born in Bialystok can forget kuchen. It was the most important and popular food, like a hamburger in your country’). The onion roll’s complete disappearance from Białystok is a painful reminder of a culture and a world that was lost. The book Sheraton wrote about her search is called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World.
What is still known and loved in Poland itself, and bears most resemblance to the bialy, is the cebularz (cebula means onion in Polish), which is mostly associated with the city of Lublin and its pre-war Jewish community. Its first written descriptions come from the 19th century, when it gained popularity as Jewish bakers sold them all over town. Although it looks quite similar to a bialy, its dough is much richer – a bialy is only made with strong flour, yeast and water, while baking a cebularz involves butter and milk as well.
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Cebularz, photo: Arkadiusz Ziółek / East News
To this day the most traditional Bialystoker Kuchen can be found more than 6000 km away from Białystok at the legendary Kossar’s Bagels and Bialys, established in 1936 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan by Isadore Mirsky and Morris Kossar. As the current owners say:
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We are the oldest operating bialy bakery in the United States. More often than not, anything that hangs around that long simply runs out of steam. Not so with Kossar’s... We’re getting better. […] All of the same authentic ingredients and care that you’d expect from a heritage of excellence dating back generations to 17th-century Eastern Europe. We use the highest quality natural wheat flour, fresh eggs, premium brewer’s yeast, fine kosher salt, pure malt syrup, and our not-so-secret ingredient, good old New York City tap water.
Bialys – traditional ones with onions or garlic and Mediterranean variations such as olive and sundried tomato – are sold in Kossar’s alongside their more famous Jewish cousins: bagels.
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Bagel with salted salmon, beet sprouts, avocado and scrambled egg on ceramic tile over white stone table, photo: Natasha Breen / Reda&Co / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Similar to taralli baked in the Italian region of Puglia and the Tuscan ciambelle, as well as to a Uigur specialty from north-western China called girde and the Finnish vesirinkeli, the bagel – or some form of it – has been a staple in many cuisines all around the world, yet it’s New York that we most associate them with. The name ‘bagel’ was first used in 17th-century Poland. As linguist Leo Rosten writes in The Joys of Yiddish, the word derived from the Yiddish word beygl used in the Community Regulations of the city of Kraków in 1610. The document stated the baked ring was given as a gift to women at childbirth.
The bagel itself bears a resemblance to (and still gets confused with) the Polish obwarzanek – a staple from Kraków – which was mentioned for the first time even earlier, in royal documents from 1394. It’s possible that the bagel may have made its way to Kraków along with Jewish craftsmen from German cities. Polish American researcher Maria Balinska in her monography The Bagel: The Surprising History of the Modest Bread writes:
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The bread was made especially for the queen Jadwiga […] who was known for her charity and her piety. During Lent, for example, she would wear a hair shirt, and [...] eat obwarzanki. For the obwarzanek was a lean bread, made without fat and therefore appropriate fare for Lent or any other fast day.
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Obwarzanek Krakowski, photo: Wojciech Matusik / Forum
As mentioned above, the first document which mentions the bagel comes in the form of a 1610 sumptuary law, yet one of the most popular – and at the same time completely fictitious – legends connect the bread with Polish king Jan III Sobieski for whom the bagel was supposedly baked after his defeat of the Turks in Vienna in 1683. While – as we can easily guess from the confusing timeline – this can’t be true, we can assume that the bagel’s origins stem from the ‘golden age’ of Poland, owing largely to two factors: a massive grain production on large areas of land (at the time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest countries in Europe), and tolerance which allowed Jewish merchants, craftsmen and, obviously, bakers to conduct their business here.
But how did the yeasty wheat dough, which owes its unique texture to the technique of first boiling and then baking, become a symbol of New York City? As Balinska explains:
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The bagel arrived in America together with hundreds of Jewish bakers who were part of a massive wave of immigration into the United States between 1881 and 1914, and soon made its presence felt in Jewish immigrant literature. […] Now millions of bagels are consumed every day across the United States and sales are estimated to be worth over $900 million annually.
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Ben Gerstein of Manhattan drops bagel dough into a kettle of boiling water before placing the bagels in the oven to bake, Hempstead, NY, 1964, photo: James O'Rourke / Newsday RM via Getty Images
Soon after the II World War the ‘bagel brunch’, which consists of a bagel topped with lox (smoked salmon), cream cheese with tomatoes, capers and onions became a NYC favourite, but – contrary to the bialy – the bagel is not confined to Manhattan alone. Montreal is another city famous for its bagels, which are smaller, sweeter and denser than their US counterparts. In the Brick Lane district in London, bagels (which are locally spelled ‘beigels’) have been sold since the middle of the 19th century. Two competing places – Beigel Bake and Beigel Shop, which are still local favourites – are some of the most authentic and cheapest places to eat bagels in the English capital. Contrary to NYC and Montreal, where bagels are mostly eaten with either lox or ‘shmears’ (spreadables), the most famous London beigel is filled to the brim with salt beef and mustard.
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Holidaying at the beach, where a boy is selling bagels, 1929, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)
In her fascinating book, Balinska describes a curious turn of events: while strolling along what she calls ‘the closest equivalent Warsaw has to New York’s Fifth Avenue’ (which we can assume to be Nowy Świat) in the early 1990s, in the window of the elegant Blikle Cafe she saw an ad for an expensive ‘New York breakfast’, which consisted of salmon, cream cheese and bagels. While bialys were completely erased from the food culture in Poland, bagels were actually re-introduced not long ago as something exotic. Since then, they have started to appear in Polish bakeries and are now a pretty popular sandwich roll (we enjoy them with egg salad, cream cheese or even vegan lox made with smoked carrots), yet we rarely see them as a speciality from this very land. Just as other Jewish baked goods, they are a part of Poland’s diverse, multicultural history which is so vital to remember.
Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, June 2020
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