Traditionally, a real Jewish bagel is made from dough rolled by hand, coiled into rings and boiled in a kettle before being baked in a wood fired oven. It was said to symbolize the circle of life. A traditional baker could turn out 120 bagel in an hour. As late as 1960 the NY Times described it for its national readers as "an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis." But around that time an outlier invented a bagel making machine that could produce 400 per hour which provoked purists to say "It denatured the soul of a cherished cultural artifact." As a former New Yorker I'll take mine with a "schmear". And remember the plural of bagel is bagel.
tjs
(A bow to M. Fox the obit writer of the NYT)
No comments:
Post a Comment