Breads, Bagels and Baked Love
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Bread is ridiculously overrated. Brioche – too buttery. Sourdough – disguised mediocrity. And no scone can transform a staunch stoic into a poet. Regardless, the glutinous substance we call ‘bread’ is praised alarmingly often. It is decent, occasionally tempting, but not particularly interesting.
This rather unorthodox opinion was mine, but what had shaped it? There was no enmity between me and bread. Burnt toast had not been shoved into my mouth. A baguette had never beaten me bloody. Bread existed, but so did lice, and hogweed, and garlic breath.
I was disillusioned. Gravely disillusioned.
Let me take you to 2023, on one fateful day in May, when I opened a door my inner eye had adamantly shut. This door was in New York, very far from the small Swedish town wherefrom my bread scepticism had emerged. The serene city on the west coast, where I would choose potatoes over ‘knäckebröd’ (Swedish crispbread) any day, any time. But in the capital of capitalism, beyond its threshold, lay a revolutionary truth my 20-year-old self could not have foreseen. And it all started with the bagel.
Bagels? Really?
To this Swedish youngling, the bagel meant little and less – it was but an inconveniently shaped piece of bread with non-American origins, adapted to suit its American audience. To a New Yorker, however, this concoction was sacred, like their own constitution. It was rather puzzling, so after three months in the city, I had to know why.
I set out towards the bagel bakery on a sunny morning — a fortunate morning. Irregularity was the lifeblood of New Yorkian weather, but today, the proverbial cloverfield was four-leaved.
As a food enthusiast and bagel virgin, I had researched the phenomenon thoroughly and chosen a suitable target: Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company. Above the entrance hung a black, inconspicuous sign. I opened the door, heard the bell ring, and. . .
Whooof!
Enter Nirvana. Freshly baked bread mingled with wafts of oregano, garlic, thyme and onion. I floated in the dimension of sensorial delights, until the tempo whacked me, hard.
Bagel upon bagel upon bagel was sliced, toasted, smeared, assembled, wrapped, cut in half, and flung to eager customers. The team of ten operated like a frantic machine whose bolts and screws quivered and cried. But do not believe it ever malfunctioned. If the machinery had ever failed, a lawsuit would surely have toppled the workers into a deep, dark, American ditch.
The bakery was a microcosm of the city, fully embodying America’s working spirit: what you do for a living is your identity. Were bagels yet another victim of capitalism, squeezed soulless and hollow by the free market? I would soon get my answer, but first, I had to place the order.
That was an unexpected ordeal.
Not only did you have a myriad of bagel variants – covered in sesame and poppy seeds; baked with plain, whole wheat or multigrain flour; seasoned with cinnamon and raisins; or simply sprinkled with salt – but the number of cream cheeses was surreal. I saw plain cheese; cheese mixed with vegetables or scallions, garlic and herbs, jalapeños, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and even blueberries, strawberries, and walnuts. And then (since I was in the land of excess), you could add toppings, such as lox, vegetables, pickles, and deli meats.
My order was relatively modest: an ‘everything’ bagel, slightly toasted, with scallion tofu cream cheese. Had I not already decided to trust a New Yorker’s bagel recommendation, indecision would have suffocated me.
‘Everything’ sounded awfully intimidating and unnecessarily vague. What was that?
A Jackson Pollock painting, on bread. The bagel’s surface was covered by garlic and onion flakes, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and kosher salt. The result yielded a modern art piece in black-and-white, surreal and unexpectedly appetising.
Yet, my suspicion lingered. The nose-pleasing aromas argued for the bagel, but even overbaked, dry and flavourless bread will smell appealing. Moreover, the rapid, assembly-line production had me presume love was entirely detached from this bakery, replaced with the equivalent of machine-made, plastic-wrapped, flavourless loaves found in every single grocery. Fittingly, my bagel was already cut in half. To ease consumption, I supposed. It was, after all, humongous, something expected from a country chronically diagnosed with ‘supersizing syndrome’.
Opening it did little to challenge my empirical prejudices. Inside, the satisfying cross section – a cornerstone of any superb sandwich – had transmuted into a white-green monster. Better bite before it bites back.
I bit.
BANG!
A spiked sledgehammer hit me, and its force was cataclysmic. I was floored; my entire being, nailed to the concrete. How mistaken I had been. This was not a sandwich. This was a bagel. A New York bagel.
Viciously I broke the crust, through its chewy, springy body, into its light and fluffy and luscious interior. My face was smeared with tofu cream cheese, but I did not care. This was not supposed to happen. I was supposed to be correct. In my hand, I held nothing but bread, but my senses did not lie. The bagel trapped me in its circular paradox. It was no monster – I was. But without my preconceived condemnation, I would never have discovered its true potential.
The United States was plastic and fake – a copy of a copy. But even a fake nation is real. Even a fake nation has treasures. Polish Jews brought the bagel when they crossed the Atlantic in the early 1900s; cream cheese was (supposedly) invented in New York; and lox, the archetypal topping, has Scandinavian roots, making this Swede particularly proud of his heritage. Our modern bagel is thus a marvellous creation of immigration, a symbol of cross-cultural kindness, and a golden gaping jewel my senses admired.
Yet its building blocks were simply flour, water, yeast, a pinch of sugar and a sprinkle of salt. Five components make the bagel, a round, revolutionary piece of bread that immediately impacted my palate and permanently evolved my mind’s eye.
The true revolution is, after all, the evolution of the mind. My mind was clouded with hate and prejudice. Hatred, however, is a unique foundation for change. If we hate with an open mind, that hatred can transform into love. I never hated bread. That is true. But my predisposed notion originated in negativity. And if hatred is not the ultimate form of negativity, then nothing is.
I have not eaten bagels since I left New York. Not in Sweden, in England, nor in any bakery outside the bagel capital. Bagel-shaped mimics, yes. But no bagel. Bread may, occasionally, be overrated. The bagel, however, is baked love.
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Emil Hallqvist is a Swedish writer and journalism student at the University of Portsmouth. He has published articles and essays on Star & Crescent and keeps a digital portfolio, including essays, reviews, analyses, prose and poetry, on his website. His main topics of interests are philosophy, culture, literature, food, cooking, and speculative fiction.