In reviewing a new book, The Bagel, Joan Nathan offers a capsule history of the “modest bread”: Bagels originally had holes in them so they could be easily transported on sticks, and one probably apocryphal story has them originating in Poland with a seventeenth-century Jew who, allowed to bake bread within the walls of Krakow for the first time, honored the king with a roll in the shape of his stirrup and called it a beugel (the Austrian word for stirrup). The origin of scooping remains a mystery. [Slate]