Official city designation follows 140 years of excellence; tourists continue ordering with cream cheese on the inside
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Designation
NEW YORK — The New York City Council voted this week to officially designate the New York bagel as a Heritage Food Item, a category established for the purposes of this vote and that city lawyers have clarified carries no legal effect, no funding, no regulatory authority, and no mechanism for enforcement, but that everyone involved agreed felt important to do.
The bagel, which arrived in New York with Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century and achieved its current form through decades of perfection in Lower East Side bakeries, is distinguishable from other bagels by its boiling process, its chew, its crust, and what bakers and bagel scholars describe as a flavor produced by the combination of New York’s water chemistry, the specific techniques of its bakers, and a quality that cannot be fully explained but that is immediately apparent when comparing a New York bagel to a product of the same name produced in a city that is not New York.
The water chemistry argument is real. New York City’s water supply, sourced from upstate reservoirs, has a mineral composition that affects the baking chemistry of dough. Bakers in other cities have experimented with adding minerals to their water to approximate New York bagels, with results that the bakers describe as close and that New Yorkers describe as not the same thing.
The Tourist Problem
The City Council’s designation includes no provision addressing what council members described in debate as the ongoing issue of tourists interacting with bagels in ways that suggest they are encountering an unfamiliar object. Observed behaviors include: ordering a bagel and then asking what it is, requesting a bagel with butter, ordering a bagel sandwich that involves ingredients whose combination was not contemplated by the bagel’s creators, and asking whether the bagel can be toasted when it has already been baked in a process that is its own version of toasting.
According to Dr. Solomon Rabinowitz of the fictional New York Culinary Anthropology Center, tourists’ bagel interactions reveal a cultural gap between the bagel as experienced by those who grew up with it — as breakfast, as ritual, as the specific combination of cream cheese and lox that is itself a complete food philosophy — and the bagel as encountered by those for whom it is a novelty item to be photographed and modified. Both encounters are valid. One of them produces a better outcome.
The Cream Cheese Question
Cream cheese on a bagel in New York is applied with a generosity that reflects both the flavors involved and the spirit of the operation. It is not a thin scrape. It is not a decorative gesture. It is a substantial application that covers the cut surface of the bagel in a layer that contributes meaningfully to the structural and flavor profile of the result. Visitors who request light cream cheese are accommodated and pitied. Visitors who request no cream cheese are accommodated and noted. The New York Daily News has been writing about bagels since bagels were invented, essentially. Gothamist has ranked the best bagel shops in New York every year since its founding and will do so again, because some journalism serves a genuine public interest and some journalism serves an even more genuine public interest, and bagel rankings fall clearly in the latter category.
The Heritage Food designation will be displayed in city literature and on the city’s tourism website. The bagels will continue to be made the same way they have been made for 140 years. The tourists will continue to be tourists. The City Council will continue to designate things. This is New York, which has always operated by doing the important things and the symbolic things simultaneously and treating both with equal seriousness, which is either the city’s greatest strength or its most charming self-deception, and is probably both.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com