The Bagels of my Childhood

Continuing my investigation into the European roots of the bagel, I trekked over to East London, where one block of Brick Lane contains the city's few remaining "beigel" bakeries.

This part of London was an immigrant neighborhood, like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not an area populated by native English Jews. (Now it is a mixture of Bangladeshi immigrants and gentrifiers.) Here the bagels resemble the New York bagels of my childhood: small and very dense and chewy, not like the pretzel-style ones you find in Paris or Krakow or the modern, crusty/sweet New York kind.

They serve the bagels with smoked salmon or with "salt beef," which has the flavor of corned beef but the texture of pastrami. But I also saw a woman order one with nothing but mayonnaise on it. No doubt this comes from the same culinary tradition that created the "chip butty," a sandwich of french fries on buttered bread.

Cream cheese, as far as I can tell, is a wholly American concept.