In 1989, hungry Houstonians learned they could buy "New York deli" without leaving town--at the newly opened Guggenheim's Delicatessen. The restaurateur offering bagels, rugelach, herring, corned beef, and cheese cake at Guggenheim's was Ghulam Bombaywala, an immigrant from Pakistan. Bombaywala had already worked for years in a Houston steakhouse and a local Italian restaurant and had also operated a small chain of Mexican restaurants. Before opening Guggenheim's, Bombaywala went to New York to do his own research, eating in different delis three meals a day for five days. Back in Houston, Bombaywala sought partners, and he borrowed the recipes for Guggenheim's from one of them, a Mrs. Katz.1 Bombaywala did not seem to know that Germans, not Eastern European Jews, had opened New York's first delicatessens. And needless to say, most Houstonians devouring Guggenheim's New York deli were neither Germans, Eastern Europeans, Jews, nor New Yorkers. But then neither was Bombaywala.
The same year, three transplanted easterners with suspiciously Italian-sounding names--Paul Sorrentino, Rob Geresi, and Vince Vrana--opened their own New York Bagel Shop and Delicatessen in Oklahoma. Bagels packaged by Lender's had been available for years in local frozen food compartments, as were advertisements offering recipes for "pizzels," made of frozen bagels topped with canned tomato sauce. As business men looking for a market niche, Sorrentino, Geresi, and Vrana wagered that the most knowledgeable and sophisticated of Oklahoman consumers would enjoy freshly baked "New-York-style" bagels, which were chewier than their frozen counterparts. Like many retailers in the South and West, however, their New York Bagel Shop and Delicatessen offered bagels with sandwich fillings everything from cream cheese to "California- style" avocado and sprouts.2
Meanwhile, in far-off Jerusalem, a New Yorker, Gary Heller, concluded that Israelis too could appreciate bagels, given an opportunity. Importing frozen dough from Manhattan's Upper West Side H & H Bagels (begun in 1972 by the brothers-in-law Helmer Toro and Hector Hernandez), Heller did the final baking of his bagels in Israel. He quickly acquired orders from a national supermarket chain and from Dunkin' Donuts, which was about to open its first Tel Aviv franchise. After a long journey from Eastern European bakeries through the multi-ethnic delis of New York and the factories of a modem food industry, the bagel had arrived in the new Jewish homeland.
Heller knew that Americans transplanted to Israel would buy his bagels, but to make a profit, he had to sell 160,000 of them to native consumers, in competition with a local brand under license from Lender's Bagels. As Heller noted, Jews born in Israel (sabras) "think bagels are American, not Jewish." Israelis knew "bagele"--the closest local products---only as hard, salt-covered rounds, unlike Heller's product, or as soft sesame ellipses. And these, ironically, were baked and sold by Arabs.3
A grumpy cultural observer pauses at this point, well-armed for a diatribe on the annoying confusions of postmodern identities in the 1990s. It is easy to harrumph, as Octavio Paz once did, that "the melting pot is a social ideal that, when applied to culinary art, produces abominations"--bagel pizzas and bagels topped with avocado and sprouts surely qualify.4 Paz would find a typical American's eating day an equally abominable multiethnic smorgasbord. The menu might include a bagel, cream cheese, and cappuccino at breakfast; a soft drink with hamburger and corn chips, or pizza and Greek salad, at lunch; and meat loaf, stir-fried "vegetables orientale" (from the frozen foods section of the supermarket), and apple pie for dinner. Wasn't eating better when delicatessens served sausages to Germans, when Bubbie purchased bagels at a kosher bakery, and when only her Jewish children and grandchildren ate them, uncorrupted by Philadelphia cream cheese? When Houston savored chili from "Tex-Mex" vendors? When only Oklahomans ate their beef and barbecue? And when neither pizza, tacos, nor bagels came from corporate "huts" or "bells," let alone a Dunkin' Donuts in Tel Aviv?
As a historian of American eating habits, I must quickly answer any potentially grumpy critics with a resounding no. The American penchant to experiment with foods, to combine and mix the foods of many cultural traditions into blended gumbos or stews, and to create "smorgasbords" is scarcely new but is rather a recurring theme in our history as eaters.
Consider, for example, the earlier history of the bagel. It is true that in the 1890s in the United States only Jews from Eastern Europe ate bagels. In thousands of nondescript bakeries--including the one founded in New Haven around 1926 by Harry Lender from Lublin--Poland-Jewish bakers sold bagels to Jewish consumers. The bagel was not a central culinary icon for Jewish immigrants; even before Polish and Russian Jews left their ethnic enclaves or ghettoes, their memories exalted gefilte fish and chicken soup prepared by their mothers, but not the humble, hard rolls purchased from the immigrant baker. As eaters, Jewish immigrants were initially far more concerned with the purity of their kosher meat, their challah, and their matzos, and with the satisfactions of their sabbath and holiday meals, than with their morning hard roll. They and their children seemed more interested in learning to use Crisco or eat egg rolls and chicken chow mein than in affirming the bagel as a symbol of Jewish life or as a contribution to American cuisine.
Still, the bagel did become an icon of urban, northeastern eating, a key ingredient of the multi-ethnic mix that in this century became known as "New York deli." The immigrant neighbors of Eastern European Jewish bakers were among the first to discover the bagel and to begin its transformation from a Jewish specialty into an American food. Unconvinced by the turn-of-the-century arguments of home economists that Americanization required them to adopt recipes for codfish and other New-England-inspired delicacies, consumers from many backgrounds began instead to sample culinary treats, like the bagel, for sale in their own multi-ethnic home cities. In New Haven, by the mid-1940s, for example, the Lenders' bakery employed six family workers, including Harry's sons Murray and Markin, who still lived at home behind the store. Hand-rolling bagels and boiling them before baking, two workers could produce about 120 bagels an hour, enough to allow the Lenders to meet expanding demand from their curious Italian, Irish, and Russian neighbors. The Lenders soon produced 200 dozen bagels daily.
No one knows who first slathered bagels with cream cheese--a product introduced and developed by English Quakers in their settlements in the Delaware Valley and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century. The blend of old and new, however, proved popular with a wide range of American consumers. With a firm grasp on regional marketing, Harry Lender's sons reorganized the family business in 1962 and decided to seek a national market. They purchased new machines that could produce 400 bagels an hour. The machines eliminated hand-rolling and substituted steaming for boiling. Flash-freezing and packaging in plastic bags for distribution to supermarkets around the country soon followed.
When union bagel bakers protested the introduction of the new machines, bagel manufacturers responded by moving production outside the Northeast. Along with the manufacturers of "Jewish" rye bread and other products common to deli display cases, the Lenders had learned "You don't have to be Jewish" to purchase and enjoy Jewish foods. With mass production for a mass market, they learned "You don't have to be Jewish" to produce them, either. In the late 1970s, Lender's was still family-owned and managed, but it employed 300 nonunionized and mainly non-Jewish workers.
In 1984 Kraft purchased Lender's as a corporate companion for its Philadelphia brand cream cheese. All over the country, consumers could now buy a totally standardized, mass-produced bagel under the Lender's label. A bagel, complained Nach Waxman, owner of a New York cookbook store, with "no crust, no character, no nothing."5 This was a softer bagel, and--like most American breads--sweetened with sugar. Following in the tradition of the long-popular breakfast muffin, bagels emerged from factories in a variety of flavors associated with desserts and breakfast cereals--honey, raisin, blueberry, cinnamon.6 Sun-dried tomato bagels followed in the 1990s, along with other popular flavors inspired by Mediterranean cuisines. Broney Gadman, a Long Island manufacturer of bagel-steaming equipment, believed that American consumers wanted a bland bagel. They were "used to hamburger rolls, hot-dog buns and white bread," he explained. "They prefer a less crusty, less chewy, less tough product--You needed good teeth" to eat hand-rolled and boiled bagels.7
Waxman and Gadman made a sharp distinction between mass-produced factory bagels (or cinnamon and sun-dried-tomato bagels) and "the real thing." They preferred authenticity, as defined by their memories of bagels in the Jewish ghettoes of the past. As millions of Americans with no bagel eaters in their family trees snapped up Kraft's Lender's brand, and as sabras came to appreciate American bagels at Dunkin' Donuts in Tel Aviv, Bubbie's descendants, along with a multi-ethnic crowd of well-educated Americans fascinated with traditional ethnic foods, searched elsewhere for their culinary roots and a chewier bagel.
Some of them found authenticity with Bombaywala's renditions of Mrs. Katz's recipes. Others discovered they could buy "real" bagels again from the Lenders. For Murray and Markin Lender chose not to follow their family brand into employment with corporate Kraft. Instead, they opened a suburban restaurant that offered, among other things, a bagel of crust and character, ideal for Nach Waxman. A host of small businessmen like Bombaywala and the Lender brothers revived hand-rolling and boiling, sometimes in full view of their customers.
The history of the bagel suggests that Americans' shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be "New York," and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development--and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture.
It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It highlights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities--for foods and eaters alike. Looking at bagels in this light, we see that they became firmly identified as "Jewish" only as Jewish bakers began selling them to their multi-ethnic urban neighbors. When bagels emerged from ghetto stores as a Jewish novelty, bagels with cream cheese quickly became a staple of the cuisine known as "New York deli," and was marketed and mass-produced throughout the country under this new regional identity. When international trade brought bagels to Israel, they acquired a third identity as "American." And finally, coming full circle, so to speak, the bagel's Americanization sent purists off in search of bagels that seemed more authentically "New York Jewish."
Notes
1. Lisa Belkin, "A Slice of New York (On Rye) in Texas," New York Times, September 6, 1989.
2. Terri L. Darrow, "Cowboys and Bagels," Restaurant Hospitality 73, 5 (May 1989): 30.
3. David B. Green, "Betting that Lots of Israelis Will Take to American Bagels," New York Times, July 31, 1996.
4. Octavio Paz, "At Table and in Bed," in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1987), pp. 68-99.
5. Molly O'Neill, "Bagels Are Now Fast Food, and Purists Do a Slow Boil," New York Times, April 25, 1993.
6. See Foreword by Murray Lender in Nao Hauser and Sue Spitler, Bagels! Bagels! and More Bagels! (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979).
7. Daniel Young, "The Bagel's New York Accent is Fading," New York Times, September 6, 1989.
