According to other version of information, the bagel was a staple bread in the villages around Krakow and was created as a competitor to the bublik (a lean wheat flour bread designed for Lent in the early 1600’s).
Bagels were very popular with Jews in Poland. In 1610, the community of Cracow Poland, states that "beygls" will be given as gifts to women in childbirth.
During 1700’s Bagels eventually made their way to Russia, where they were called bubliki and sold on strings. As with other ring-shaped objects, they were said to bring good luck and have magical powers.
The bagel arrived in America thus as a comforting street food, reminding immigrants of their homelands. It was sold by multiple vendors in New York’s Lower East Side alongside traditional Jewish items like herring, pastrami, latkes, and challah bread.
New York City vendors used the bagel's hole-in-the-middle shape to their merchandising advantage by threading them onto dowels and selling them on street corners throughout the city.
In New York in the early 1900s, the new idea came out to replace lox for the ham and cream cheese for the sauce. Bagels were also then topped with poppy seeds, kosher salt, onion, garlic, sesame seeds, caraway seeds or a combination of all six (the “everything” bagel) for the first time in the early 1900s.
In 1907, 300 bagel bakers formed the International Beigel Bakers Union. Only boys who had father who made bagels were allowed in.
In the late 1950s, Daniel Thompson, a California math teacher turned inventor, created the “bagel machine” and quickly homogenized what had been an artisanal product. Thompson’s bagels lacked the lactic crustiness of the original, but they could be produced almost four times as cheaply, and by workers with far less bargaining power.
The invention ushered in the sale of packaged bagels in supermarkets and made bagels a staple of fast-food restaurants.
Lender’s, a bakery in New Haven, Connecticut, led the charge in mass-producing bagels, and then selling them bagged and frozen to supermarkets.
After the bagel machine was invented, the bagel makers were not needed, this union became the representative for grocery workers.
History of making bagel
