Some Twin Cities Bagel History

The bagel quest is heading to the Twin Cities this weekend.  I know next to nothing about Minneapolis and St. Paul and my Google research on its bagel bakery and Jewish history wasn't getting me anywhere interesting. So I got in touch with Kate Dietrick, an archivist at the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives. If she had just replied to my random email query by saying, "This is by far my favorite reference question in a long while," dayenu. But she also sent me the link to a 'bagel' search in the digitized copies of the American Jewish World newspaper. The newspaper was published from 1915 to 2007, and we found 996 bagel entries throughout its 92 years.

Skimming through close to a century of this newspaper, I saw the tagline change over time from "A Weekly Journal of Modern Jewish Labors" in 1922 to "A Weekly Journal Devoted to Jewish Interest" in 1950 to "Voice of Minnesota Jewry" in 1987.  American Jewish World consistently covered the Jewish news and events it believed to be of interest to Jews living in the Twin Cities. 
 Gaza 
The bagels: The first bagel entry was in 1922 as part of the publicity for a fundraising bazaar: "...bagel, strudel and other Jewish delicacies will be sold." Next we hear of the bagel is at the 1928 annual food bazaar of the Women's League of the Adath Yeshurun synagogue and that Mrs. Zalkind will be bringing the strudel and bagels.  Bagels were mentioned as the food of choice in countless gatherings and meetings, were mentioned in classified dating ad profiles, and were used as a reference point in reflections on the general state of Judaism. There  were almost no articles about the bagel bakeries themselves and no real commentary on the bagel situation in the Twin Cities. Since most of the entries were ads for bakeries that sold bagels, I could see that many places sold real bagels, but I couldn't learn much about those places. Even with a Google search. But the ads were a delight and definitely revealed a great deal about how Minnesotans understood the bagel. If these ads tell the full story, the Twin Cities had the most bagel shops in the 1960s and 1970s and used very different bagel selling points than I have seen in other cities.​

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First, let me just say that I appreciate when Jewish folks use 'bagel' as a shorthand to describe ourselves.  The Bagel Squadron (1949) is the perfect name for Jewish aviators who want to fly to La Crosse, WI to spend an afternoon fishing. There was also a Bagel Club, formed in 1947 for WWII aviators, which isn't quite as good a name.  I am pretty sure that after eating great bagels, one of the reasons for this quest  is to chip away at my Jewish NY-centric orientation. I have lived in Wisconsin for 28 years, my daughter just moved to Minneapolis...it is time. Learning that there were enough Jewish pilots in the Twin Cities in the late 1940s to start several flying clubs did its part to erode some of this geographic snobbery.

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Leah W. Leonard's regular column, 'Foods to Remember' was a delight to read. One of my favorite features was the food travel story letters people wrote to her. This one was a bit of a mind bender for my born and raised in NY brain.  Mrs. Lee Gross of Iowa drove to Omaha and stopped to buy some bagels.  Then she gave some to the Minister in her town for his family and they loved them so much they wanted the recipe. So she wrote Leah Leonard and begged her to print a bagel recipe in her column, which Leah promised to do as soon as she could figure out how to scale down the bagel recipe she got from a commercial baker in St. Louis.  There are so many surprising elements in this column for me, and at the top of my list is that in 1949 Omaha was a bagel destination...at least for Jewish folks in Iowa. I might need to visit Omaha and see what bagels I find there. 

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In 1960, the New York Times described the bagel as "an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis", for its readers that didn't yet know what bagels were.  In the Twin Cities, The North Side Bakery opened in 1961 and their ad campaign through much of the 1960s portrayed the rigor mortis aspect as a selling point. 'HARD BAGELS' featured prominently in the ad copy.  

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​Bagelville opened in 1970 at the Texa Tonka Shopping Center and I think lasted only until 1972. (This shopping center seemed to be a natural habitat for bagels since "The Bagel" who had its grand opening as the Twin Cities newest Jewish Bakery in 1964 was located there from 1964-1966.) Bagelville had some amazing and kinda bewildering ads during their time. Each ads touts the fact that they are water bagels - which as far as I can tell just means they are boiled in water - which is basically a defining characteristic of a well-made bagel. They were very serious about mentioning how low calorie the bagels were, but then most of the ads have recipes similar to this Bagel French Toast recipe.  

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The Lincoln Del was a popular Jewish Deli that opened in 1935 in N. Minneapolis. I learned about them because for a period of time in the late 1960s and early 1970s they created a lot of bagel ads -- ads that go against everything that defines a self respecting NY-style bagel. I think it is safe to say that traditionally a NY bagel is not toasted. My theory on why New Yorkers are strident on this bagel point of pride is because it there are so many bagel shops. If you want a great bagel all you need to do is walk a few blocks and you are standing in front of a store that has hot out of the oven bagels. If they are made correctly with a crispy exterior, there is no need to toast them. Now you might want to toast them if you are eating them the next day, but in NYC the need to toast a bagel is the opposite of a bagel selling point.

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When I first appointed myself to this bagel quest, a colleague of mine, a 30something Jewish Madisonian told me his favorite place to get bagels in Madison. When I questioned how he could think this bagel shop had good bagels, he said that New York Jews don't get to define what is Jewish. I agreed with his point, but I said that we do get to define what is a good bagel. I mean bagels originated in the U.S. when Polish Jewish immigrants brought them NYC.  This was before food could be mass produced and by 1900 the Lower East Side of NY had 70 bagel bakeries. To make the NY-style bagel you needed four bakers: a 'mixer' to form the dough, a 'shaper' to roll the dough and form by hand into a round with a hole, a 'boiler' to give the dough a bath in malt water, and the 'baker.'

While I understand that a case can be made for the toasted bagel, that you can't buy fresh out of the oven bagels in every city and a toaster might be required to get back the crispy exterior, there is no case to be made for a bagel without a hole. 

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 I have always struggled with the idea that being Jewish requires me to be a Zionist. I started this bagel quest in January, at a time where Zionism and anti-Semitism are volatile, and I have worried that it was frivolous for me to be off on my Jewish cultural connection quest. I thought about this a lot while reading through American Jewish World newspaper.  After noticing how stridently Zionist the articles were I Googled the newspaper and learned that one of the goals of the paper was to promote Zionism and unite Minnesota Jews behind the cause. The articles told one story and the ads told another. I'm going to end this Twin Cities bagel history piece with one of the kinda odd and kinda funny Israel current events bagel ads that 'New York Bakery and Bagels' placed in the paper in the early 1990s. 


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