A properly made bagel is chewy without being dense, and has a smooth shiny surface which is
caused by its being briefly immersed in boiling water before being baked. The bagel originated in Central Europe, probably in Poland. A 1610 document from Krakow mentions beygls given as a gift to women in childbirth. This is often cited as the earliest known reference to the bagel, but the document is not clear what a beygl is. It may be what is now known as a bagel, it may be something related to the word for stirrup (beugal), or it may refer to something else whose meaning is lost.An oft-repeated story states that the bagel originated in 1683 in Vienna, Austria, when a local Jewish baker created them as a gift for King Jan III Sobieski of Poland to commemorate the King's victory over the Turks that year. The baked good was fashioned in the form of a stirrup (or horseshoe, tales vary) to commemorate the victorious cavalry charge. That the name bagel originated from beugal (stirrup) is considered plausible by many, both from the similarities of the word and due to the fact that traditional handmade bagels are not perfectly circular but rather slightly stirrup-shaped. (This fact, however, may be due to the way the boiled bagels are pressed together on the baking sheet before baking.) More prosaically, the name bagel may simply originate from the Yiddish and German word bügel, meaning “baleâ€? or bow, sometimes used to refer to a round loaf of bread (see Gugelhupf for an Austrian cake with a similar ring shape).Ashkenazi immigrants in the 1880s brought the bagel to the Lower East Side New York City, where it continues to flourish as a local cuisine popular not only with one ethnic group but as an icon of the city. The same phenomenon has happened to the Montreal bagel. Until the 1920s, bagels were rare in other parts of the United States other than a few cities with large Eastern European Jewish populations. The bagel came into more general use throughout North America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Today, bagels are enjoyed all over the world, and have become one of the most popular breakfast foods.
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