Bagel Trivia
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This bagel trivia quiz has 58 free questions with answers and covers the whole life of the roll with a hole. It starts in Poland, where Kraków's Jewish community regulations mention bagels in 1610 as gifts for women in childbirth, follows the bread to London's Brick Lane and to New York, where a single union hand-rolled the city's supply for decades, and on to the machine that broke the union's grip and the Connecticut family who froze, pre-sliced and bagged bagels for supermarkets across America. Along the way you will meet the New York versus Montreal argument (honey water and wood fire, or malt and tap water), the St. Louis bagel that is sliced like a loaf, the flagel, the bialy, the simit and the Jerusalem bagel, the many people who claim to have invented the everything bagel, Bagel Bites and Tony Hawk, Einstein Bros., the tennis 'bagel' and the bagel that swallowed the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Easy questions suit a brunch table; the hard ones will test the most devoted deli regular. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and the sentence that backs it up appears under each question once you have answered.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bagels originated in the Jewish communities of which country?
Poland
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.
Q 02In which New York sitcom does a character end a 12-year strike and return to work at H&H Bagels?
Seinfeld
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.
Q 03Which two seeds are the traditional toppings baked onto a bagel's crust?
Poppy and sesame
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.
Q 04The classic New York bagel brunch tops a bagel with capers, red onion and which cured fish?
Lox
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.
Q 05What is the traditional shape of a bagel, in the language of geometry?
A torus
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.
Q 06In tennis, what score in a set is nicknamed a 'bagel'?
6-0
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.
Q 07A bagel is the doomsday device at the heart of which 2022 film?
Everything Everywhere All at Once
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.
Q 08The Montreal-style bagel is boiled in water sweetened with what before baking?
Honey
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.
Q 09The 1990s Bagel Bites jingle 'Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening' reworked which 1950s hit?
Sugartime
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.
Q 10Which bagel spread was 'married' to a giant Lender's bagel in a 1984 publicity stunt?
Philadelphia cream cheese
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.
Q 11In 1956, Lender's began selling frozen bagels to resort hotels in which mountain region popular with Jewish holidaymakers?
The Catskills
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.
Q 12Which bagel cousin has an onion-filled depression instead of a hole and skips the water bath?
Bialy
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.
Q 13Bagels sliced like a loaf of bread are named for which Midwestern city, where Panera began as a bread company?
St. Louis
Q 21London's 24-hour Beigel Bake stands on which East End street?
Brick Lane
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.
Q 22In Jewish tradition, bagels are served to mourners after a funeral because their ring shape stands for what?
The cycle of life
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.
Q 23What is a 'flagel'?
A flat bagel
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.
Q 14Traditionalist New Yorkers insist a fresh bagel should never be what?
Toasted
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!'
Q 15Legend says the first bagel copied the shape of which item of a king's cavalry gear after a 1683 victory?
A stirrup
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.
Q 16The Yiddish word behind 'bagel' derives from a German dialect word meaning what?
Ring or bracelet
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.
Q 17To win over Middle America, Lender's sold the bagel as the 'Jewish' version of which breakfast staple?
English muffin
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.
Q 18When a 1951 strike shut most of New York's bagel bakeries, The New York Times called the shortage a bagel what?
Famine
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.
Q 19The Thompson machine of the 1960s automated which hand skill that New York's bagel union had guarded for decades?
Rolling
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.
Q 20Beside New York's handmade bagel of a century ago, today's typical bagel is roughly what?
Twice as heavy
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.
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.
Q 24Montreal-style bagels are the only bagels known to have gone where?
Into space
Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who grew up in Montreal, took three bags of sesame bagels on the shuttle and to the ISS.
Q 25Which two rival Montreal bakeries have fought what the BBC called the city's 'bagel war'?
St-Viateur and Fairmount
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.
Q 26Food historian Gil Marks traced New York's classic loaded bagel to a 1930s kosher answer to which brunch dish?
Eggs Benedict
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.
Q 27Which bagel chain did Boston Chicken, now Boston Market, create in 1995?
Einstein Bros. Bagels
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.
Q 28Noah's New York Bagels, despite its name, began with a single shop in which California college town?
Berkeley
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'.
Q 29Which skateboarder fronted Bagel Bites' early-2000s marketing push aimed at tween boys?
Tony Hawk
The partnership was credited with a 32 percent jump in consumption.
Q 30Bagel Bites, the frozen pizza-topped snack, were invented in the 1980s by two men from which sunny state?
Florida
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.