A Brief History of Bagels

In 1976, Associated Press reporter Jules Loh shared his advice for Southerners traveling to New York for that year’s Democratic National Convention. After explaining that New Yorkers say youse instead of y’all and can’t pronounce pecan correctly, he described their exotic cuisine. “They call breakfast breakfast, but ordering it will be a problem for you,” he wrote. “Forget grits, which are unheard of. They eat something called a bagel, which is as hard to describe as it is to chew. Don’t send it back—it’s supposed to be that hard.”

Around this time, bagels were transforming from a regional specialty item to a mainstream breakfast staple in the U.S. In 2020, more than three in five Americans reported eating bagels, and according to a survey from 2022, the average person consumes 38.7 bagels per year. The baked good can be found in supermarkets, fast food chains, and office break rooms across the country—though whether the frozen, pre-sliced version truly qualifies as a bagel is a matter of debate. 

The bagel’s success is undeniable, but its path to breakfast dominance wasn’t straightforward. The journey was long and winding, much like the line at your local bagel shop on a Sunday morning.

1. What Makes a Bagel a Bagel
2. The Unclear Origins of the Bagel
3. New York vs. Montreal
4. How the Bagel Gets Made

What Makes a Bagel a Bagel

People have been rolling dough into rings for centuries. The shape serves a clever purpose: Foods with holes can be hung up on a rod or string, making them easy to transport and display in large quantities. Italian taralli and Middle Eastern ka’ak are all examples of this design—but technically they’re not bagels. The doughy rings most Americans are familiar with are distinguished by their cooking method as well as their form. 

Making bagels takes some complicated science. After the dough rings are shaped, they have to rest for up to 48 hours in a refrigerator. This process is called “retarding,” and it helps flavors develop in the dough through fermentation [PDF]. It’s also essential for those tiny blisters that form on the crust during the baking stage.

Before they go in the oven, bagels are traditionally boiled. A brief dip in a hot water bath gelatinizes the starch on the surface of the dough. The starch granules swell with water until they dissolve, which unlocks the starch molecules and allows them to absorb additional water. This increases the moisture content in the bagel and contributes to its chewy texture. Parboiling the bagels also deactivates the yeast on the surface of the dough, which can’t survive at high temperatures. 

This step gives the bagel its crust, which is also responsible for its unique consistency. The water molecules on the bagel’s outer layer become bound, meaning they’re less prone to evaporate during the baking process. In a regular loaf of bread, evaporation is what makes the crust, well, crusty. Because a bagel’s crust sets early in the cooking process, the dough doesn’t rise much in the oven. This keeps the crumb dense and chewy.

It’s sometimes suggested that poaching the dough was more than a matter of taste. There’s a popular story that because bread was associated with Christian communion, Jews were banned from baking it, and bakers skirted the bans by tweaking their recipes to include boiling. Bagel researcher Maria Balinska describes this as a folk tale, though. 

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America gives another theory. Jewish dietary law requires that before bread is eaten, hands need to be washed and a blessing said. But clean water wasn’t always available, so observant Jews might not have been able to eat bread while away from home. So, this theory goes, by boiling the dough first, it’s somehow been loopholed into being kosher without the blessing and hand-washing.

The Unclear Origins of the Bagel

One of the most common parboiled treats to come out of Jewish bakeries was obwarzanek—a ring-shaped Polish snack that may have derived from pretzels brought over by German immigrants in the 14th century. According to one story, they rose to prominence when Poland’s first female ruler, Jadwiga, gave up fine breads and pastries for Lent. Instead of abstaining from carbs altogether, she made obwarzanek her slightly less indulgent bread of choice for the holy season.

Another legend traces the bagel’s origin to 1683. That year, the Polish king Jan Sobieski allied with Austria to achieve victory against invading Turkish forces. A Viennese baker reportedly celebrated the feat by baking dough in the shape of a stirrup to honor the king’s love of horses. The circular baked good was named beugel, or “stirrup,” in German. Plenty of experts are dubious about the veracity of that story, too. There’s evidence that bagels may predate that time period, and the tale is suspiciously similar to a popular origin story for croissants. 

We might never learn the exact origin of the boiled and baked good, but considering a similar Germanic word can mean “ring,” the word bagel likely has roots in German. From there it morphed into the Yiddish beygl, which turned into the anglicized term used today.

New York vs. Montreal

The bagel underwent a transformation in the 19th century. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were arriving in the U.S., and they brought with them culinary traditions from the old country. Thousands settled in New York City, which quickly became the bagel capital of not just America, but the world. Early Polish bagels were tough with wide holes in the center that made them unsuitable replacements for sandwich bread. Jewish bakers adapted their recipes to suit American tastes by shrinking the holes and softening the texture without sacrificing the chew.

At the same time, Jewish immigrants from across Eastern Europe were mixing elements of their cuisines to create new Jewish American dishes. A number of cured and smoked fish, which were essential to surviving long winters in Europe, were paired with bagels. These types of fish, like lox, continued to prove practical in the new world, but for different reasons. Families packed into tenement buildings without stoves or running water often struggled to cook at home. Even if Jewish families did have access to a functioning kitchen, they would have abstained from using it during Shabbat, instead picking up prepared foods from local businesses during the day of rest. Smoked salmon and bagels purchased from the local bakery and appetizing store therefore became a quick and accessible meal. Newly-invented cream cheese wasn’t a traditional Jewish ingredient, but its rich fattiness made it the perfect pairing for salty cured fish. Soon, other toppings like tomatoes, capers, and red onions entered the picture to make bagel and lox a fully-contained meal. 

Across the Canadian border, bakers in Montreal were experimenting with different bagel styles. Though the exact origin of the Montreal-style bagel is debated, historians agree they first appeared around the turn of the 20th century as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were settling in the city. Unlike New York bagels, the Canadian version is smaller, denser, and sweeter thanks to the honey-flavored water it's boiled in. The two styles are often pitted against each other, but it’s more of an apples and oranges—or New York slice and Chicago deep-dish—situation. Eat one of each and then regret and/or celebrate your decision as you see fit.

How the Bagel Gets Made

Bagels were a convenient choice for customers in the early 1900s, but making them was laborious. The process of making one batch—which included kneading the dough, fermenting it overnight, boiling it, and baking it—could easily take 24 hours or more. That work was often done in dirty, underground rooms in front of scorching hot ovens. It wasn’t unusual for the cellars to reach ambient temperatures of 120 degrees. 

These rough conditions gave rise to one of the strongest labor unions in New York City history. Founded in the 1930s, Bagel Bakers Local 338 consisted of around 300 Jewish bakers. You had to have a family connection to be considered, and even then a three-to-six-month apprenticeship and a minimum rolling speed of 832 bagels an hour were required to become a member. The exclusive membership came with an enticing upside. In 1960, the starting pay for oven workers was $150 for 37 hours of work a week, which is the equivalent of more than $80,000 annually today. Additional benefits included healthcare, dental, vision, overtime, 11 holidays, three weeks vacation, and 24 free bagels for every full work day. 

The union drew up new contracts each year, and as the controlling force behind New York’s favorite breakfast item, they had a lot of negotiating power. When Local 338 went on strike, they forced the city into “bagel famines,” shuttering the majority of bagel shops for weeks at a time. Faced with throngs of hungry customers and no way to feed them, employers were eventually forced to grant the workers’ requests. 

The union dissolved in the 1970s in the face of a rapidly-changing industry. For decades, bagels were an artisan product that could only be made by hand. New innovations in food production—such as preservatives, revolving ovens, and rolling and shaping machines—made them easier and cheaper for businesses to produce, thus taking away the workers’ bargaining power. The machine-made bagels were softer and closer to regular bread than traditional recipes, but companies had little problem selling them.

One of the biggest changes to the bagels world came from father-and-son-team Harry and Murray Lender. Harry owned a wholesale bagel shop in New Haven, Connecticut—one of the few outside New York. The Lenders realized that freezing bagels preserved their texture and flavor, making mass distribution possible for the first time. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, packaged bagels began appearing on supermarket shelves across the country, and by the ‘90s they were as mainstream as fast food. In some cases, they were fast food. An LA Times article from 1993 describing the bagel as “America’s Newest Food Craze” reported on Burger King serving limited-time bagel breakfast sandwiches—a fairly new phenomenon at that point. 

These were discouraging times for old-school bagel makers. As the process became easy to automate, and the product became cheaply and readily available, it was easy to see how making bagels by hand could become a lost art. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. Many bagel shops in New York City and beyond continue to roll and shape their dough the old-fashioned way, and their hard work is often rewarded. The most popular bagel places can attract lines of people willing to wait for a fresh, high-quality version of something they can otherwise just pick up at the grocery store. In many cases, these artisan products haven’t changed from what was served a century ago—though if you prefer a bagel that’s soft, rainbow, or cinnamon raisin, that’s available, too.

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This story was adapted from an episode of Food History on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe to Mental Floss for new videos every week.