Letter of Recommendation: Bialys

'The dumbest place I ever had a panic attack was at brunch. On a sunny Saturday during a long weekend, sitting at the table with my friends, I took one look at the overlong menu, and it started: rapid heartbeat, sweating, that familiar sensation that I was definitely dying. I reported it to my therapist in detail a few days later, and she told me it was most likely situational stress, triggered by feelings of discomfort.

But her explanation didn’t satisfy me. How discomforted can you really become at brunch? I got to troubleshooting. Before putting myself in another trivial-but-disquieting situation, I would plan ahead: If I’m going out, I decide what I want beforehand. So on subsequent Saturdays, I’ve always gotten the same thing: a bialy with butter.

Most Americans don’t know about the most famous export of Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland that once had a large Jewish population, because bialys have become hard to find outside New York, which does still have a large Jewish population. Bialys are a baked disc with a savory filling in the middle where a hole would be. They’re matte, dotted with brown crunchy onions and an uneven texture that comes from baking. Visually, the bialy is a failed bagel, almost as if all the air had been let out and the glossy sheen stripped away.

The food is an artifact of the Jewish-American legacy: While the sweeter, chewier bagel went national during the latter part of the 20th century — in part because Harry Lender realized in the 1950s that he could sell more if he premade, froze and packaged them — bialys’ presence diminished. Jeffrey Yoskowitz, an author of a cookbook modernizing Ashkenazic Jewish food, contends that bialys just don’t survive as long as their bagel brethren. “They can last for half a day or so,” he says, “but an old bialy is hard and tough to chew.”

As Jewish families assimilated away from urban centers into suburbia, bagels became easy to find in the grocery store, and bialys didn’t make the trip. Accordingly, bialys took on an air of metropolitan sophistication, becoming a staple of the Jewish literati — the former Times food critic Mimi Sheraton wrote an entire book about them, and Philip Roth, according to an essay by the writer Julian Tepper, had one in his usual breakfast order. But now, as prepackaged food continues to proliferate — be it English muffins, biscuits or bagels — schlepping to the deli every morning can seem less appealing. When the oldest bialy maker in Brooklyn at the time, Coney Island Bialys and Bagels, faced major struggles after 91 years in 2011, the founder’s grandson told The Times, “Now, people make coffee at home and have a Pop-Tart.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-bialys.html?