Praise for the plain bagel: NPR

Bagels on display at Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan.

Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images

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Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images

Bagels on display at Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan.

Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images

People really identify with what they eat. Our taste buds can even acquire a personality. Seeing strangers on social media eating what we love makes us feel part of a community. We get upset when others misrepresent or denigrate our favorite dish. (Look no further than the passionate foodies behind the evolution of the bagel emoji.)

This societal pressure is why I was ashamed of my order of Plain-Jane bagels. Why, given the exciting and ever-expanding range of flavors, would my choice be the plain bagel, the breakfast equivalent of vanilla ice cream? I must have an unrefined palate that hasn’t matured beyond Uncrustables and Goldfish.

So, to reject any judgment suggesting I might have boring taste buds – and therefore less personality than Wonder Bread – I landed on some pretty airtight logic.

The naked bagel is a litmus test for the quality of an establishment. Just as a true chef must prove his technique with a simple omelette, a humble bagel can also reveal a baker’s flaws without the crutch of seasonings.

Increasingly, variety and flamboyance are supplanting the plain bagel. Sometimes the only options left in the bakery case are poppy seeds and sesame seeds. There might be an errant rainbow bagel, jalapeño cheddar, or maybe a mystery flavor that I’m pretty sure disqualifies the food as a bagel. If there are plain bagels, there’s always the risk that the plains have become too comfortable with all-in-one bagels. Worse still, some dare to corrupt the plains by extracting their soft insides.

There is no religious, geographic or cultural precedent that explains my preference for the bagel. I crave a dense carb as much as the next serotonin-deprived human. But I don’t like my bagel to come with distractions. How can we appreciate the integrity of a doughy round of bread when tiny sesame or poppy seeds compete for attention? It’s simply impossible to disguise or improve a bagel that isn’t quality to begin with.

Cream cheese is loaded onto a bagel at Pick a Bagel in Manhattan.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Cream cheese is loaded onto a bagel at Pick a Bagel in Manhattan.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

This purist makes the sliced ​​bagel the perfect blank canvas for whatever comes next with butter, schmear or saltfish.

In fact, the plain bagel rule doesn’t just apply to boiled bread. Sauce on a burger? You don’t need it if the cake is too pretty to mask.

We owe the bastardization of bagels to Connecticut businessman Harry Lender and his sons, who understood the power of branding. To help sell a hole-shaped loaf widely decried as an “ethnic food” and favored by Eastern European immigrants, lenders introduced cinnamon, raisin, onion and eggplant bagels. garlic to the general public when they “bagelized” America in the 1970s.

It was Murray, Harry’s son, whose antics in marketing the frozen product eventually made him the face of Lender’s Bagels. According to bagel historian Maria Balinska, Murray Lender “will stop at nothing to really get his bagels known.” His publicity stunts included jumping on his desk and pulling down his pants to reveal “Buy Lender Bagels” on his underwear, dyeing bagels green for St. Patrick’s Day, and serving an oval-shaped bagel to Lyndon B. Johnson, Oval Office resident. .

The lenders’ twisted ideas were a far cry from the bagels of Krakow, Poland, as first described in 1610. At the time, bagels – considered a descendant of the pretzel – were an integral part of Jewish culture, as they are today. But the center hole of the bagel was larger and the dough was harder.

There was no need to stifle something that was already special to begin with. Alluding to the luxury status of the simple bagel, the ancient Jews of Krakow had passed down instructions on the appropriate time to consume bagels: they were to be eaten as part of the ceremonial birth and birth rituals of a baby boy .

Over time, America has doubled down on its food maximalism with its pollution of perfectly good culinary staples. KFC’s revival of the sodium-laden Double Down perverts the classic fried chicken sandwich. Now you can get ice cream on any bagel. This elaborate fare is undoubtedly a stunt dish designed to draw animated lines outside and for Instagram likes and TikTok virality. And we reliably swallow it for the experience, the selfie, the irony, the sense of belonging – or all of the above. Are our taste buds bored? Or are we bored of ourselves?

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