Pizzas and Bagels

What Do Pizzas and Bagels Have in Common?

   I’m not looking for the obvious answer that pizzas and bagels both consist of a bread-like dough, though that fact surely has something to do with the answer I have in mind. Let me begin with the ways I first encountered those two foods.

   First bagels, in New York City where I then lived with my parents. They were in early middle age when they arrived in that city as Jewish refugees and probably had never encountered a bagel before coming to the States. And in our new home, bagels were monogamously married to lox as the partner and cream cheese as the mediator. I’m pretty sure (no one talked about it) that lox was the attraction, since my father who had frequently traveled to Holland while in his German business, had become very fond of  such fishy dishes. For reasons I did not research, lox and bagels became a feature of some New York Jewish restaurants, attracting my parents now and then with me tagging along—now and then.

   As far as I can recall, I first encountered pizza in Italy during my sojourn there (on bicycle) in early 1951. If I recall correctly, pizza was then the very occasional pasta course in a proper meal, at least in the South of the country. To my knowledge there were then no establishments just serving pizzas—or only a few. I liked pizza from the first I tasted one. (I’ve been told that there are bread persons and potato persons. I’m of the former species.)

   After returning to New York, I found that there was a splendid pizza place in Greenwich Village, called “Frank’s” as I remember it, no doubt owned by a Franco. It was a big deal to go Pizza eating at Frank’s; it happened, but not often.

   Now, dear reader of 2016, can you remember—did you even know—that there was a time when bagels and pizza were special dishes?

   Well, no more. What those two types of food have in common is that they managed to escape from their narrowly local origins to become well-nigh if not altogether ubiquitous. And like so many changes, these are both a good thing and a not so good a thing. In these explosions, so to speak, bagels have fared better than pizzas. The reason is obvious: bagels are constituted of a single mass calling for some special moves in preparation; but it’s get it right or it isn’t a bagel. Pizzas come in a large variety, especially in the many different kinds of “toppings.” Not only do they differ from one pizza-maker to another, but they can readily take on the flavors of their broader culinary environment. Pizzas I have eaten in Mexico have been influenced (I would like to say: infected) by the spicy flavors of their home. The crusts, too, vary greatly from each other. Those who are created in a pizza oven resemble each other closely. But that’s not their only origin, with all kinds of frozen concoctions pretending to be the real thing. Popularity exacts its price.

   Bagels, even though they have escaped from their homeland, vary much less from one to another. They basically look the same: a torus four inches in diameter, composed of shiny light-brown dough. Still, resemblance to the real thing can on occasion be deceiving. One specimen might be great, while another just doesn’t make it as a genuine bagel.

   Both of these species of food, as I have said, are fairly unusual in that they escaped from their provincial origins, to be found on many spots of the globe. My favorite, rather lugubrious piece of evidence of the bagel’s ubiquity is that every New York emergency room attendant knows the source of a patient’s injury when he shows up on Sunday morning with a cut across the inside of his palm. Warning: take care when you slice a bagel!

  PS  When I asked friend Patrik about other examples of food that has spread beyond its provincial origins. He immediately came back with French fried potatoes. They were invented, he told me, in the early nineteen hundreds in Belgium, where he was born. I did not follow up on these remarks; but if he is right, that dish is at least as successful in escaping from its birthplace, if not more so, as either of the examples in the above comments.