58 Fun Facts About Bagel

Bagels originated in the Jewish communities of which country?

Poland. Jewish emigrants carried the bagel from there to New York, where they hawked it from pushcarts for decades before most Americans had ever heard of one.

In which New York sitcom does a character end a 12-year strike and return to work at H&H Bagels?

Seinfeld. Kramer goes back only because the minimum wage has finally risen, then walks out on strike again when his manager refuses him time off to celebrate Festivus.

Which two seeds are the traditional toppings baked onto a bagel's crust?

Poppy and sesame remain the two standard choices at Montreal's bagel shops, while American bakeries branched out into cinnamon raisin, chocolate chip and far stranger flavours.

The classic New York bagel brunch tops a bagel with capers, red onion and which cured fish?

Lox. The name is simply Yiddish for salmon, and traditional belly lox is cured in salt and never smoked, which is why it tastes so much saltier than smoked salmon.

What is the traditional shape of a bagel, in the language of geometry?

A torus. The hole is practical: street sellers in Eastern Europe could thread dozens of bagels on a stick or a string, which made a day's stock easy to carry and to show off.

In tennis, what score in a set is nicknamed a 'bagel'?

6-0, because the loser's zero looks like one. The slang came off the 1970s tour, where Eddie Dibbs and Harold Solomon are each credited with it, and broadcaster Bud Collins made it stick.

A bagel is the doomsday device at the heart of which 2022 film?

Everything Everywhere All at Once. Its villain has piled everything in the multiverse onto a single bagel, which becomes a black hole she hopes will let her stop existing in every universe at once.

The Montreal-style bagel is boiled in water sweetened with what before baking?

Honey. It goes into the dough as well, along with egg, which is why a Montreal bagel comes out sweeter and denser than its New York rival.

The 1990s Bagel Bites jingle 'Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening' reworked which 1950s hit?

Sugartime. A sister trio took it to the top of the American charts in 1958, and the ad simply swapped the song's sugar for pizza at every meal of the day.

Which bagel spread was 'married' to a giant Lender's bagel in a 1984 publicity stunt?

Philadelphia cream cheese played the bride, Phyl: the Lender brothers walked a giant bagel groom named Len down the aisle to announce that the family firm had been sold.

In 1956, Lender's began selling frozen bagels to resort hotels in which mountain region popular with Jewish holidaymakers?

The Catskills. Cooks at the Concord Hotel there found thawed bagels so awkward to cut that they kept slicing their fingers, so Lender's began cutting every bagel before it was frozen.

Which bagel cousin has an onion-filled depression instead of a hole and skips the water bath?

Bialy is short for Białystok, the city whose Jewish bakers made it; after the Holocaust destroyed that community, the roll survived mainly in the bakeries of New York.

Bagels sliced like a loaf of bread are named for which Midwestern city, where Panera began as a bread company?

St. Louis. Panera started out there as the St. Louis Bread Company, and when a local tweeted a box of its bread-sliced bagels in 2019, bagel lovers elsewhere reacted with outrage.

Traditionalist New Yorkers insist a fresh bagel should never be what?

Toasted. A fresh bagel is already warm and crusty, purists argue, and the counter staff at Manhattan's Ess-a-Bagel have cut off the request with a gruff 'We don't toast!'

Legend says the first bagel copied the shape of which item of a king's cavalry gear after a 1683 victory?

A stirrup, baked for Jan Sobieski after he lifted the siege of Vienna. Historians call the tale apocryphal: Jewish community rules mention bagels in 1610, decades before the battle.

The Yiddish word behind 'bagel' derives from a German dialect word meaning what?

Ring or bracelet. Behind it lies an old Germanic root for bending, which is just what a baker does: a strip of dough is bent round into a circle until its two ends meet.

To win over Middle America, Lender's sold the bagel as the 'Jewish' version of which breakfast staple?

English muffin. The idea was to lift the bagel out of the ethnic aisle, so the family urged shoppers to top it with jelly, peanut butter, even bacon.

When a 1951 strike shut most of New York's bagel bakeries, The New York Times called the shortage a bagel what?

Famine. The state sent in a mediator who had made his name settling a strike over another deli-counter staple, yet New Yorkers still went short of bagels into February.

The Thompson machine of the 1960s automated which hand skill that New York's bagel union had guarded for decades?

Rolling. Daniel Thompson, a teacher who had already invented the folding ping-pong table, finished the machine his baker father had spent decades trying to build.

Beside New York's handmade bagel of a century ago, today's typical bagel is roughly what?

Twice as heavy. The union-made original was a small, dense three-ounce ring with a crackling crust, which is why purists complain that today's big, soft bagels are just ordinary bread in a ring.

London's 24-hour Beigel Bake stands on which East End street?

Brick Lane. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled the street in the 19th century and hawked beigels from pushcarts; the bakeries outlasted the community, whose synagogue is now a mosque.

In Jewish tradition, bagels are served to mourners after a funeral because their ring shape stands for what?

The cycle of life, a ring having no beginning and no end. Other round foods carry the same meaning, which is why hard-boiled eggs often share the mourners' table.

What is a 'flagel'?

A flat bagel. The ring is boiled as usual, then squashed just before it goes into the oven, so it bakes up thinner and crunchier, with more surface for the toppings.

Montreal-style bagels are the only bagels known to have gone where?

Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who grew up in Montreal, took three bags of sesame bagels on the shuttle and to the ISS.

Which two rival Montreal bakeries have fought what the BBC called the city's 'bagel war'?

St-Viateur and Fairmount. Fairmount's owner calls his neighbour 'the upstart' because, he says, St-Viateur was opened in 1957 by a man who had once worked for his grandfather.

Food historian Gil Marks traced New York's classic loaded bagel to a 1930s kosher answer to which brunch dish?

Eggs Benedict was the brunch hit of 1930s New York but broke two kosher rules at once, pork and meat with dairy, so, on Marks's account, Jewish cooks rebuilt it on a bagel.

Which bagel chain did Boston Chicken, now Boston Market, create in 1995?

Einstein Bros. Bagels. The chicken company bought up regional chains far from the bagel's heartland, in Fort Lauderdale, Kansas City and Salt Lake City, then put one new name over all their doors.

Noah's New York Bagels, despite its name, began with a single shop in which California college town?

Berkeley. Noah Alper built that one College Avenue shop into a chain of 38 before selling it for $100 million, then wrote up what he had learned in a book called 'Business Mensch'.

Which skateboarder fronted Bagel Bites' early-2000s marketing push aimed at tween boys?

The partnership was credited with a 32 percent jump in consumption.

Bagel Bites, the frozen pizza-topped snack, were invented in the 1980s by two men from which sunny state?

Florida. Bob Mosher and Stanley Garczynski of Fort Myers sold their mini pizza bagels to a Canadian food group, and in 1991 Heinz bought that group's American arm, Bagel Bites included.

Which grocery giant bought Lender's Bagels from the Lender family in 1984?

Kraft Foods. It kept the Lender brothers on to front the brand and two years later built a vast bagel bakery in the prairie town of Mattoon, Illinois, home of an annual Bagelfest.

Lender's began in 1927 in which Connecticut city?

New Haven. The bakery's mixed neighbourhood taught the Lenders early that Irish and Italian customers liked bagels as much as Jewish ones, the hunch on which they later built a national brand.

The Lender family's tireless bagel salesman took his pitch onto which host's Tonight Show?

Johnny Carson. Television suited a salesman whose stated aim was to get the bagel out of the ethnic marketplace and into every American kitchen.

Which Turkish street-food ring is sometimes sold abroad as a 'Turkish bagel'?

Simit. Turkish street sellers wheel it about on trolleys or carry it stacked on trays balanced on their heads, and the classic way to eat one is with a glass of tea.

Jerusalem's oblong bagel, ka'ak al-Quds, is traditionally dipped in which herb-and-seed mix?

Za'atar, the wild-herb blend of the Levant. The ring itself breaks the bagel's first rule: it goes into the oven without being boiled, so the crumb stays light and soft.

Which bagel does David Gussin say he invented as a teenager around 1980, by saving the seeds swept out of the oven?

The everything bagel. Writer Seth Godin answered that a bagel factory where he worked was already making them in 1977, his point being that common things get invented in many places at once.

In 1999 columnist William Safire declared that the bagel had overtaken which rival breakfast treat in American popularity?

Doughnuts. Safire put bagel sales at three-quarters of a billion dollars a year against half a billion, and called the winner, unlike its sugary rival, 'serious, ethnic and harder to digest'.

With so little water in the mix, bagel dough ranks where among bread doughs?

Among the stiffest: it is so tough that it quickly wears out standard bakery equipment built for softer doughs.

One theory holds that the bagel descends from which German bread, carried east by migrants in the Middle Ages?

Pretzel. Historian Maria Balinska calls the two close cousins, baked in similar ways and first recorded at similar times; in her telling the knotted loaf was simply reshaped into a ring.

In Austria, the thin salted ring called a beigl is traditional fare in which season of the church year?

Lent. The fasting-time ring was salted and plain, but in Vienna the same word, Beugel, now means almost the opposite: a buttery crescent stuffed with a sweet nut filling.

The obwarzanek, an older cousin of the bagel sold from street carts, is made of dough strands shaped how?

Twisted into a spiral. A royal decree of 1496 gave a single bakers' guild the monopoly on baking it, and court accounts show it on the queen's table a full century before that.

In 2018, which company redrew its new bagel emoji after critics said it looked like a frozen supermarket bagel?

Apple. A test version of its software soon showed a doughier ring with a schmear added, after one food writer asked which Midwestern bagel factory the first design had come out of.

Which hardware feature distinguishes an authentic Montreal bagel bakery from a New York one?

A wood-fired oven. Purists say the fire is what gives the crust its crunch and flavour, and in the old Montreal shops the baking is done in full view of the queue.

Lender's once baked a batch of custom bagels as a publicity gift for which room of the White House?

The Oval Office, and the bagels were baked oval to match. It was one stunt among many from a firm that also dyed its bagels green for St Patrick's Day.

H&H Bagels, long an icon of the New York bagel, was co-founded in 1972 by Helmer Toro, who was born where?

Puerto Rico. Toro and his brother-in-law Hector Hernandez bought a bagel shop on Broadway and put their two initials over the door, and the business went on to ship bagels across the country.

Beside a New York bagel, a Montreal bagel is smaller and sweeter, with which other difference?

A larger hole. The dough is shaped by hand into a much narrower coil than in New York, so the ring comes out thin, dense and crunchy rather than plump.

Consumer Reports' 2012 bagel tests said a good bagel should show a notable what when bitten into?

Pull, the tug of a chewy inside beneath a slightly crisp crust. The same tests drew scorn in the New York press by rating a frozen supermarket bagel among the best they had tried.

Taralli, crisp ring-shaped snacks sometimes proposed as an ancestor of the bagel, come from which country?

Italy. In Puglia the fennel-scented rings have been a snack for centuries, and bagel historian Maria Balinska puts them on her shortlist for the original ring-shaped bread, beside rivals from Rome and China.

Many fans of the New York bagel put its special taste down to what?

The city's tap water, whose mineral content is said to make the difference. Sceptics call it a myth: in one test kitchen's blind tasting, bagels made with Brooklyn water and with Massachusetts water tasted the same.

Around 1900, Jewish immigrants were baking bagels and selling them from pushcarts in which Manhattan neighbourhood?

The Lower East Side, which by one count had some 70 bakeries by 1900. The bakers' union that grew up there went on to control the city's bagel supply for half a century.

The bagel's first written mention, in Jewish community rules of 1610, allowed bagels as a gift for whom?

Women in childbirth, with the midwife and the women attending also covered by the rule. The bagel came to mark life's other great passage too, as the customary food in a house of mourning.

For decades New York's bagel bakers' union would admit only which newcomers?

Sons of members. At its height the local had about 300 men, every one an original member or the son of one, and it kept its grip on the trade until bagel-making machines let anyone turn out bagels.

London's best-known all-night bagel bakery is famous for filling its bagels with which hot meat?

Salt beef, carved to order from a slab kept warm in the front window and served with a lick of mustard. The ovens run around the clock, so the bread is often still hot.

In which country did American and British immigrants launch Bonkers Bagels in the mid-1990s, selling the bagel as American fast food?

Israel. A bread that America thinks of as Jewish reached the Jewish state as an American import, part of the same 1990s wave that brought the country its first McDonald's.

Which Sex and the City star caused a 2018 uproar by ordering capers and red onion on a cinnamon raisin bagel?

Cynthia Nixon placed the order at Zabar's days before New York's primary for governor, and shrugged off the horrified reaction by calling the mix sweet and salty.

With Lender's only sixth, which brand led US supermarket sales of fresh bagels in the year to January 2008?

Thomas' outsold runner-up Sara Lee almost three to one that year, and the two rivals later ended up under one owner, Mexico's Grupo Bimbo.

Which bestselling book used a bagel seller's honesty-box takings to measure how often office workers cheat?

Freakonomics. Paul Feldman left bagels and a cash box in Washington offices and logged every payment: nearly nine in ten people paid, and small offices proved more honest than big ones.

On which TV show did the sisters behind dating app Coffee Meets Bagel refuse to sell for $30 million?

Shark Tank. Mark Cuban asked the three Kang sisters whether they would take $30 million for the whole company; they said it could grow as big as Match.com and left without a deal.