Honor.

A mass market for bagels, sadly, has meant distortion and diminution of the product. Order a bagel in Sarasota or Sioux City (or buy a package of frozen bagels in the supermarket) and what you'll get is not so much a spin-off of the original as the Antibagel itself: a fluffy pillow of cotton, sometimes as large and round as a softball, with a crust like packaged sandwich bread—a hamburger roll with a hole in the middle. And as if this metamorphosis weren't bad enough, these impostors come in more varieties than doughnuts, flavored not just with pumpernickel or onions but with spinach, blueberries, sun-dried tomatoes, chocolate chips, and jalapeños—and accompanied not by the classic schmear of plain cream cheese but by processed spreads, some of them "lite", flavored with strawberries or "veggies".

Ten years ago, food writer and bagel purist Mimi Sheraton was kvetching about the "obscene" practice of warming or toasting bagels before eating them; now, heaven knows, anything goes. One U.S. outfit with 300 franchises (none in Manhattan) features a dish seemingly designed to break every Jewish dietary law at once: The Manhattan Bagel-Style Bacon & Egg Sandwich (w/Cheese). The virus has apparently spread to other countries as well. Tiring of the traditional strawberries and Devonshire cream at Wimbledon last summer, I came across an establishment not two miles from Centre Court calling itself "Beaux Beigels"—an interesting spelling, perhaps a nod towards the bagel's putative German roots. Or maybe it's just a Cockney's idea of how bagel is pronounced. Beaux's featured offering, at a quid and a half, proved to be an abomination called the Hot Bacon and Mushroom. Bubie, Zeyde, I'm glad you didn't live to see this.

CONNECT

One of the first life lessons I picked up in college was this: The secret to the shiny crust and chewy bite prized in New York bagels is boiling. Any other way of cooking them, my Brooklyn born-and-raised, freshman-year roommate told me, is simply unacceptable.

Now, many years later, it turns out she was pretty much right. In a new video, the American Chemical Society breaks down the chemistry of what makes New York bagels superior to the also-rans — the disappointing "bagels" you often encounter outside of New York that merely taste like bread with a hole in it.

CONNECT

A tight, perfect crumb. Honor it with a smear of cream cheese, a layer of lox, and a thick slice of a juicy, ripe tomato. Be sure to use instant or quick-rise yeast (available in most supermarkets)—not active dry.

CONNECT