Plain Talk on the Bagel
Without sesame seeds, poppyseeds or other surface seasonings, a bagel reveals its malty sweetness and quiet inner beauty.
There are two famous bagel bakeries on London’s Brick Lane and only a lone Georgian building stands between them: The older Beigel Shop, at number 155, is recognised by its yellow sign. The busier Beigel Bake, at number 159, is distinguished by its white sign and, in a pinch, the 24-hour queue.
When I first visited these bakeries I was immediately struck by two throwbacks to another time: First, the beloved roll-with-the-hole introduced over 100 years ago by Polish-Jewish immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side, Montréal’s Mile End and London’s East End wasn’t a bagel, after all. It was a beigel, a more faithful transliteration from the original Yiddish בייגעל, pronounced “bye-gel”: Replace the second B in “bible” with a hard G and you’ve got it.
Proud London Jews and East End romantics may regard the word “bagel” as an abomination not of Anglizisation, as New York Times On Language columnist William Safire suggested, but of Americanization. Revenge colonialism, if you will. Transatlantic cultural tyranny.
More archaic than the spelling was the lack of variety. The Brick Lane "beigels” may have been boiled and baked, in the two-step cooking process that sets in the distinguishing glazed shell of real beigels and bagels alike and secures their chewy interior. But none of the surface seasonings familiar to North Americans were applied. No sesame. No poppy. No onion. Nothingness was part of its identity.
The absence of a sesame bagel, my baseline bagel, that alone was unsettling. Not being offered the option of flirting with poppyseed bagels now and then, or onion bagels here and there, that was unthinkable.
Where, I wanted to ask the beigel loyalists of Brick Lane, was the allure to be found in a plain bagel? When I looked at a plain bagel I didn’t see temptation. I only saw a zero. A 6-love score in tennis. No point to it. Back in New York, the only people who praised plain bagels were dentists: No tiny things to get caught in your teeth, apparently.
When I moved to London end of 2004, I was relieved to discover that most of the bagel bakeries in North London had joined the world of automobiles and telephones. They were offering sesame bagels as well as a handful of other varieties. And theirs were bagels, not beigels. The American corruptors had prevailed.
The two institutions on Brick Lane have persisted with the b-e-i-g-e-l business and, between us, I am glad of it: Why shouldn’t these vibrant remnants of the Jewish East End stay true to their origins? But about three years ago, the Beigel Bake did join the age of color television, introducing a seeded option with so few sesame seeds and poppyseeds it could easily be dismissed as a production error.
A Plain Reawakening
One morning this spring, I joined the queue outside Absolute Bagels in New York. When I reached the counter, I asked the man if any of the bagels were still hot. He said a batch of plain ones had just been removed from the oven and were too hot to handle. I ordered a half-dozen.
Back in the day, the signs outside New York’s bagel factories, as we called them, promised HOT BAGELS. If they weren’t hot, there was no assurance they were fresh. Times have changed. In the age of sell-by dates, rather than sell-by-temperatures, the hot bagel is a rarity. So when someone at Absolute Bagels tells you the plain bagels are hot, you have plain.
Absolute’s plain bagel was a revelation. There were no fragrant seeds on the surface to mute the mild, cereal-like sweetness of the dough’s malt component – presumably barley malt syrup or malt extract. There were no pungent onion flakes to mask its toasted aroma with the slightest hint of caramel.
If you wish to acquaint yourself with the essence of true bagel flavor, plain is the way. It’s my new default bagel: I’ve consumed more plain bagels in the past three months than I have in the prior 30 years.
I’m not arguing against seasoned bagels any more than I am opposed to layering their cut sides with lox, smoked whitefish salad or spreads a good deal stronger than unsalted butter. This is all a matter of personal taste. But it is important to remember the bagel is not merely a vehicle. It has its own subtle beauty.
By savoring plain bagels I became more attuned to their fundamental flavour. The experience has only increased my appreciation of the sesame bagel, or a bagel of any persuasion topped with a schmear of cream cheese, a slice of tomato, lox, onion, dill and capers.
If you follow a regime of plain bagels long enough, that sweet-malty component gets locked into your taste memory. You’ve trained your palate.
In food as in music, it can be rewarding to master the quieter notes before you send in the trumpets.
To pronounce it "bye-gel" on the basis of the transliteration of the Yiddish word בייגעל reflects a fundamental error. The vowel sound '' is pronounced "ay" not "aye". It is, was, and has always been correctly pronounced "bay-gl"-- the Brits have got it wrong.