A bagel comes with a hole
In my 1989 exposé for The New York Times, I warned that the bagel hole was shrinking. More recently, Instagram fashion has marginalised what little remains of the hole that shapes the whole.
I first sounded the alarm about the disappearing bagel hole back in September of 1989. My exposé for the New York Times ran under the cautionary headline: The Bagel's New York Accent Is Fading.
The old guard maintained that New York bagels had softened some since the pre-war days, when they were baked in coal-fired ovens. Yet it was believed these more forgiving bagels from gas-heated ovens were still too tough on the outside and too chewy on the inside for Americans raised on hamburger rolls, hot dog buns and white bread.
Eating a bagel required physical exertion. To tear off a piece of bagel it was not enough to sink your teeth into it. For a clean break you had to either pull the bagel away from your clenched jaw or pull your clenched jaw away from the bagel. The bagel face-off was a tug of war between your head and your hand.
Seeking to expand beyond the New York Tri-state area and appeal to consumers who might not wish to do battle with a breakfast roll, the entrepreneurial heirs to New York’s bagel kings tenderised their bagels for the soft-play market. In the process or, rather, in the processing, the bagel’s shelf life was extended from three hours to three weeks – or so it seemed. Never again would a day-old bagel be likened to a concrete doughnut.
The change in mouth feel was not sufficient. If the assimilated bagel was going to be a reliable vessel for various fillings, the bakers needed to do something to fill the holes in the market. Customers wanted an unbroken schmear surface. If they ordered a pizza bagel they didn’t want the tomato sauce pouring through the hole and onto their laps. Restaurants and food service outlets were demanding bagels with very small holes, or no holes at all.
The bagel’s glory days, I warned readers of The New York Times, were numbered:
“The hole, its hallmark, is shrinking and could even be extinct soon after the year two-bagel-bagel-bagel.”
A practical benefit of the bagel hole was that bakers and pedlars could hang their bagels from a string. In my grandfather’s day, you could loop a rope through the bagel holes. Nowadays, if you hold a bagel up to the sunlight you’re lucky if there’s a millimetre of daylight shining through. You would need to use dental floss to string up a dozen.
There’s also been a change to the serving format. In my youth, a bagel-and-lox was invariably served open-faced. In this way you could inspect the cut and colour of the smoked salmon, as well as the state of the accessories. There was nowhere to hide unsightly trimmings. You ate half of the bagel at a time, penetrating only a single layer of the bagel’s outer shell. This made it seem to last longer. The closed bagel sandwich, on the other hand, was a mouthful and, as I saw it, an affectation – a cover-up packaged as a convenience.
According to the dictates of Instagram number crunching, bagels must be built up vertically to pile up likes. The overstuffed sandwiches are wrapped in parchment paper, sliced across the middle in a half-moon cut and posed so that the the cut-throughs – and only the cut-throughs – are fully exposed.
Above you see six Insta money shots of flat-sided bagel sandwiches. The distinctive sheen a bagel acquires through boiling and the amber glow its surface gets from the barley malt that was added to the kettle are mostly hidden from view. The surface toppings (poppyseeds, sesame seeds, onion, garlic, salt, everything) are obscured. You see only the Flat Stanley bagel sandwich, a steamrolled wall of deceptively tidy fillings squeezed between off-white bread matter.
In bagel porn, the bagel hole does not feature.
Why, you’re asking, should anyone kvetch about the disappearance of the bagel hole – a lonely and leaky place with zero flavour? Is it that, as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre theorised, “nothingness carries being in its heart?” Or is it simply that, when eating a bagel, you need a comfortable place to plant your thumb and get a good hold?
I don’t have the answer. I can only share the immortal words of the bagel whisperer Abe Moskowitz, spoken to me in 1989 from behind the counter at Bagel Oasis in Flushing, Queens:
“A bagel,” he said, “comes with a hole.”
