The Bagel, a HistoryEverything and more that you always wanted to know about bagels.
ByAileen Gallagher
Your Favorite FoodsResults of a poll asking readers for their favorite pizzas, burgers, bakeries, bars, and bagels.
ByDaniel Maurer
History Lesson
Bagels 101A new book uncovers the cultural history of the ‘modest bread.’
ByDaniel Maurer
The In-box
Ess-a-Bagel Customer Demands: ‘Stop the Scooping’A friend of Grub Street has alerted us to a trend among her fellow females that is as disturbing to bagel lovers as the whole “Jack and Diet” thing is to anyone who takes drinking seriously.
NewsFeed
Bagel Claim Laid Bare?When we read in The New Yorker last week of a Long Island man who claimed to have invented the everything bagel 30 years ago in Howard Beach, one line stood out: “So far, no one has contested Gussin’s claim, setting his invention apart from the radio (Marconi vs. Tesla) and calculus (Leibniz vs. Newton). ” A droll enough observation, but one we suspected wouldn’t last long in a city filled with boastful, self-promoting bagel mavens. And sure enough, Serious Eats reports that marketer Seth Godin has already contested the claim. But are we really to believe that the world waited until 1977 for the invention of the everything bagel? Somebody’s zayde in Warsaw is going to be getting a phone call soon.
Who Really Fathered the Everything Bagel? [Serious Eats]
NewsFeed
Ramsay Now an Expert on Lox and Bagels, TooThey say that if you abuse somebody enough, it means that you secretly love them. But in the case of Gordon Ramsay, the man’s insufferable ego, vituperation, bombast, and general skeeviness have somehow made him almost admirable to us. (We say nothing of his food, which neither we nor anyone we know has ever eaten.) But with his latest act of effrontery, Ramsay has gone beyond the beyonds. We now have to either destroy him or marry him, because last night the Surly Scotchman actually presumed, on national television, to teach Larry King how to schmear a bagel.
NewsFeed
New Book Celebrates Talismanic Trash
Food, even of the most exalted kind, is rarely long for this world. Occasionally, some baron of gastronomy will announce that the floorboards in his new restaurant were salvaged from the original automat, or some credulous soul will make the News of the Weird by seeing the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. But food and cooking objects tend toward the ephemeral. Which is one reason we are so enjoying Taking Things Seriously, a new collection of essays about particular treasures. (Another is that we contributed one of its essays, about a damaged but durable old cast-iron skillet and what it means to us.)
