How long do you have to wait for a bagel?
So much waiting around for such a simple, humble, and serious food item.
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Bagels are simple.
“A bagel is a round bread made of simple, elegant ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast, and malt,” wrote Ed Levine in 2003 in the New York Times. “Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it instead of a whoosh. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.”
Bagels are humble.
“Bagels, it turns out, are very much a bread thread that pulls through hard times, dreams, visions, organizational development, good luck, and good food,” wrote Ari Weinzweig in 2009 in The Atlantic.
Unlike their doughnut counterparts, bagels are serious.
"Although these baked goods are similar in shape, they are wholly different in character,” wrote William Safire in the New York Times in 1999. “Doughnuts are sweet and crumbly, with over 10 grams of fat; bagels are chewy and low in fat. Doughnuts are fun, with sugary smiles, sales peaking at Halloween; bagels are serious, ethnic, and harder to digest."
How then does such a simple, humble, and serious food item inspire the kind of fervor and demand that we see today? How is it that a tiny roll of bread with a hole in it would inspire this newsletter to exist? To say nothing of the lines that wrap around city blocks just so people can order one?
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