Russ & Daughters

Feeds.

I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

Hilaire Belloc

A spring of merriment in the soul ...

Joy.

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant.

Jack London, from The Call of the Wild

Maneuvers.

Firchau, Self-Portrait, 2022

That flash was procured at Singing Dog Records while on "college visitation maneuvers" with Orsie in the Spring of 1981.  Lunch was my first experience at Bernie's Bagels and Distillery.

Splendor.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Franz Kafka

Crafted.

“The problem with the machines is their bagels are too perfect. They all look the same. So everything winds up looking like a Krispy Kreme donut, this perfectly round thing,” he says. Machines also need soft dough. “So you get a softer bagel, which is not what you want, you want a firm bagel.” The bagels prized by New Yorkers, with their puffy insides and shiny exteriors, are still best crafted by hand.

Jewish immigrants continued to operate and staff independent bagel shops well into the 2000s, but the dissolution of Local 338 opened up the bagel-making labor pool to non-Jewish workers. Like much of New York’s food-service workforce, many bagel rollers are Mexican. But many are of Thai descent. In How to Feed Friends and Influence People, Milton Parker, the late author and co-owner of Carnegie Deli, writes that the Thai government invited members of Local 338 to come to Thailand in the 1990s to train local residents. Government officials hoped to develop a local bagel industry; instead the newly minted bagel rollers immigrated to New York in search of work.

Due to their ability to work swiftly and efficiently, bagel rollers can earn a sizable salary by working for several shops at once. The fastest produce upwards of 500 bagels in an hour, hopping from store to store and handling as many as four yields daily. Fuentes, an immigrant from Mexico who has been rolling bagels since he learned from a Jewish-American boss 20 years ago, prefers the stability of working at one shop. But he understands why peers prefer otherwise.

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Only.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors ...

... but today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Kahlil Gibran

Joy.

As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.

Madeleine L'Engle

Joy.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

Rumi

Master.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between work and play, labor and leisure, mind and body, education and recreation. There is no distinction. The vision of excellence is pursued through whatever is done, leaving others to determine if it is work or play. It always appears to be both.

Francois Rene De Chateaubriand

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.

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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.

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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.

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