Writing about food: The Bagel

Sometime this week I finally finished reading The Bagel: The surprising history of a modest bread, by Maria Balinska. I was surprised at how long it took me to get through the book, considering it’s a rather small-format book with only seven chapters (though it also includes some front and back matter as well). One of the clues I ignored was that the book was published by the Yale University Press, a small indication that this would be more of a scholarly/historical work than a little light reading about East Coast noshes. (Another clue would have been the fact that the book, though compact, has more than 200 pages.)

This book is not a light and amusing food memoir; it’s definitely an elaborate and almost exhaustive food history of a very specific example of food. At times I thought it might be easier to borrow my mother’s copy of Poland by James Michener. That, however, was only when I was finding myself steeped in accounts of Polish military history. When the book moved on to documentation of the struggles of Jewish bakery unions in New York City, at times I thought I could switch over rather easily to The Autobiography of Mother Jones.

That being said (and rather too snarkily, which the book and the author do not deserve),  a book such as this one is a labor of both love and scholarship. The author clearly has a personal and familial interest in bagels, but also is a Princeton graduate and spent a year in Krakow studying Polish language and literature. She travelled quite a bit, did extensive research, and conducted many interviews in order to bring this book together. I learned a tremendous amount about the religious, cultural, and historical events that led to the Continental and American popularity of the bagel.

What did this book teach me, as a baker, about bagels? Well, considering that a 200-page bagel history doesn’t contain a single bagel recipe, I learned a lot about the preparation methods, the texture, and the change in the substance and meaning of bagels from the era of slave-labor handmade production in the underbelly of NYC to the era of the pre-sliced, flash-frozen, mass-market bagels I grew up eating. (Lender’s, I’m talking to YOU.)

These days, a bagel represents a sandwich bun with an ethnic history. It might be plain, a little seedy, or quite cheesy. But less than a century ago it was a symbol of multiple facets of that ethnicity — nourishment, tradition, spirituality, and the economic struggles of generation upon generation. It was a very Jewish history, which seems to have been lost somewhere within the mass-marketing of the bagel to WASPy Midwestern America. We don’t want to call anything Jewish, so it becomes a “cultural” thing, an “Old World” thing, or a “New York” thing. All those things belong to the “other” and not to whatever it is that represents “us.” I suspect that we speak in code so that eating “Jewish” food doesn’t make us become Jewish any more than naming our children Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Hadassah, Jacob, Joshua, Isaac, or Isaiah makes them Jewish when we consider the names to be “traditional” or “Biblical.” We grant the name but deny the meaning.

I digress. But perhaps I don’t. The bagel’s history is a political one, and it’s also a religious and ethnic one. I probably wouldn’t be baking and writing about bagels if I didn’t know a Jew who wanted access to proper bagels. Bagels are fine at worst and terrific at best on their own, but they mean something more to Jews. When I bake bagels, that’s the something I’m trying to provide. I hope that it shows.

Writing about food: Elizabeth Ehrlich

Two weeks ago, I went to my local independent bookstore (yes, there still is such a thing, and it is wonderful) to pick up a copy of Stir I had special ordered. Before I went to the counter to ask for it, I decided to check the food-and-cookbook section to see if there was any interesting food writing I should pick up. The first book that jumped out at me was Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Ehrlich. Originally published in 1997, the volume is a National Jewish Book Award winner. The back-cover summary convinced me to grab it and run to the counter while I was still committed to buying only two books that day. After all, I needed to have a few dollars left over to pick up reference bagels from Bruegger’s, a few doors down in the shopping plaza.

This wonderful, absorbing book is about Miriam, and her kitchen, and her recipes. But it’s also about Elizabeth’s upbringing as a Detroit Jew, about the Holocaust, about Brooklyn, about Yiddish, about Poland, about kashrut, and about Elizabeth’s gradual wonderings, enlightenment, and spiritual journey “back” to a consciously practiced – and now freely chosen – Judaism that she wants to give to her children as their own heritage. This book taught me so much about everything.

Ehrlich is a talented writer, and so many of her topics in this book were independently interesting to me. The combination of them was compelling. As I stated when I previously mentioned the book, it’s organized by the Jewish year and begins with September topics and recipes. I tried in vain to read only a “month’s” worth of short essays a night; every time I put down the book I picked it up again. Each chapter begins with Ehrlich’s journal-like thoughts, then delves into time-hopping stories of interactions with her in-laws Miriam and Jacob, or her husband and children (sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three), or her parents, or her grandparents. The different time perspectives in each short section are no more trouble to comprehend than a collection of old photos in a drawer. What does it matter if one Passover photo is from three years ago and is touching a Passover photo from 1958? They are both images, perspectives, facets of a larger Passover mosaic that only comes into focus, only has a larger meaning, over the longer passage of time.

If Ehrlich will forgive me, here is her intro to the February chapter. You just have to “hear” her words.

We’re not there. We’re miles from kosher. I sorted my dishes, pots, and implements for a trial run, assigned drawers and cupboards. Some of these items can’t properly be kashered, or bear associations that taint them.Throw them in the drawer and pretend. Pretend I will use that barbecue fork to stir pasta with meat sauce from now on, because I’ve committed the pasta stirrer for dairy. Pretend the cheese grater never grated Parmesan.

Must I live without real Parmesan?

Don’t have enough things. Washing up is a nightmare. Pareve things should be washed separately. Dishwasher half-full of the wrong kind. Meat and dairy sponges stacked together. Quick dinner leaves dairy plates; sink is full of previous meal’s meat dishes. Silverware jumbled together in the dish drainer. Spatulas and graters in the wrong drawers, contaminated, pulled out by someone and used the wrong way.

Do I have to stand there clearing the decks after every meal? Washing, drying, putting away, supervising, being preoccupied? Does this force me into a little sphere, the kitchen?

I’m only interested in the symbolism, so what if things get mixed up? I sort them out … but it’s not the same anymore, the object carries a projected burden, projected by me, if not by actual molecules.

She is a honest writer, and this is not an easy journey. Not all of her memories, let alone those of Miriam and Jacob and other Holocaust survivors, are happy ones. Life is not easy in Poland or Israel or New York or Detroit. But as Ehrlich searches for meaning and order in her life, she gains so much. Through this book, she shares it, too, along with Miriam’s stories and recipes. I didn’t count them, but I am very much looking forward to trying them. For January, the only recipe is one for Chocolate Sour Cream Cake with Chocolate Fudge Frosting, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice. It must be somebody’s birthday this month!

Like Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth Ehrlich is one of those excellent writers whose writing persuades you to pick up your own pen. (Or sit at your own keyboard.) My family’s stories need to be told and my great-grandmother’s recipes deserve to be recorded, shared, and cooked; yours do, too.

Writing about food: Laurie Colwin

As part of the preparation for starting this blog (I denied myself the right to buy new and dedicated office supplies for it, so I allowed myself to buy books instead), I read a book that was supposed to teach me everything about writing about food. I’m not going to mention the title or the author of the book here because the editing job was, at times, so poor that I had no idea what the author was trying to tell me (not good in a guidebook for potential professional writers). However, the author did name-drop quite a bit when discussing food writing that was well worth reading.

I do already have, um, perhaps a bit more than my fair share of cookbooks and foodie books and chef biographies, so I recognized quite a few names. I already have a compendium of M. F. K. Fisher’s writing, some Julia here, some Jacques there, and a short stack of Anthony Bourdain’s books lurking in the shadows. But one name unfamiliar to me kept cropping up again and again: Laurie Colwin. And as fortune would have it, I was at my local public library last week and found the first of Colwin’s two food-related books right there on the shelf.

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (1988, reissued 2010) is a real treat. Her writing style reminds me of Peg Bracken, who wrote the classic I Hate to Cook Book, but Colwin loved to cook and was not put off by circumstances that would normally discourage cooking. She begins one chapter: “For eight years I lived in a one-room apartment a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia.” And the chapter titles themselves are gems. They include “How to Disguise Vegetables,” “Bread Baking Without Agony,” “How to Avoid Grilling,” and “Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea.” From my limited sampling, you may be able to discern her tone.

At first I counted out all the chapters — thirty-three! — and wondered how I would be able to read the whole book in a week in order to write about it here between bagel batches. As it turned out, that was not the problem that I would have with Colwin’s book. The chapters are short, her tales are memorable, and the recipes look pretty good, too. I read compulsively, chuckling as I went. I got hungry. I wanted to write. (Those are all good things.) The problem is that, after being persuaded to write this book and another, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, Colwin died in 1992. Two books of essays about food. That’s all. It’s not nearly enough, so you’ll have to savor it. She also produced five novels and three collections of short stories, all of which I will now have to track down and acquire.

Home Cooking is a delight, and it was an easier entrée into reading food writing than plunging right into some dense, pretentious volume on the history of souffléed whatsis. On the other hand, I don’t think I own any of those kinds of books.