WOULD BIALY BY ANY OTHER NAME TASTE THE
SAME? A BIALY IS NOT A BAGEL
I was recently engaged in one of our long
conversations with my dear friend Dr W of Miami, at Bagel Bar in North Miami.
We talked about Bagels and then I mentioned to him about Bialys.
When he asked me the difference, I thought
of an old anecdote I had heard when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia
If Bagel went to University to study, you
could say Bialy went to the Yeshiva.
Melbourne was home to a lot of exiles from Bialystok
in Eastern Poland (some of them would say, Russian Border!) after Germans
marched into the predominantly Jewish City of Bialystok in 1939. I remember
hearing about Bialystocker Landsmanschaft, much like the village associations
we have in Miami of Cubans who left Cuba (of course under different
circumstances) to get together and eat and reminisce about the land and the
culture, talk in Yiddish and eat some of the favourite food of that region.
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| BIALYS FROM KOSSAR'S IN GRAND STREET, LOWER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK CITY, USA |
The yeshiva-bucher, Bialy is Jewish whereas
the University educated Bagel was more like an American Jewish Mix, devoured by
both Poles and the Jews.
Now the question is, can you get a Bialy in
Miami?
Or in the United States for that matter?
A little research revealed (thank G-d for
Internet) that the Bialy is no more in its birthplace which paradoxically now
host a café called New York Bagels!
Go back to those lazy Sunday wanderings
along Acland Street in St Kilda in Melbourne, where my encounter with Bialy
began. Now once again the search begins.
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| ACLAND STREET OF SUCH GOOD MEMORIES, LUNA PARK WOULD BE ON YOUR RIGHT |
Good Place to look for a Bialy might be
New York
Buenos Aires
Melbourne
I would have added Cape Town to that list,
but most of the Jews in South Africa are Litwaks and they came before 1939! So
they may not have been exposed to the delicacy of a Bialy.
Kossar’s Bialy I am told is an institution
in New York’s Lower East Side in Grand Street and one of the last places where
they sell Bialys! If New York cannot support Bialy bakeries in every corner,
misfortune has fallen upon us, unless of course there is a renaissance of Bialy
making and eating in America.
But I am certain, that in Melbourne,
Australia one can still get a good Bialy!
Bagel is now as American as Nova Lox or
shall we say as American as a Fajita?
But Bialy is not a Bagel!
From Tablet Magazine:
While bagels have become a standard part
of the American—for Jews and non-Jews alike—the bialy, the bagel’s relative in
the Polish bread world, has seen a steady decline in popularity. One of the few
places in the world (perhaps the only place, claim its owners) where true,
traditional bialy-making survives is Kossar’s Bialys on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side.
“The bialy, which comes from Bialystok,
Poland, is a lost bread of a lost world,” explained David Zablocki, who
purchased Kossar’s a year ago with Evan Giniger and a third partner who has
since sold his stake. “If you were to go to Bialystok today you would find no
remnant of that bread or the people who made it.”
That’s why Zablocki says, “The bialy is
an endangered species.”
“Even within its own environment, within
its own culture, it is becoming less and less known, less understood,” he told
me in a recent interview. “Most people who do a bialy today use the same
ingredients and the same kitchen as they do for bagels, and although bialys and
bagels are cousins, they’re not twins; they can’t survive on the same equipment
and ingredients.”
To begin with, bialys are just baked,
not boiled and baked like bagels, and the ingredients are different. “A bialy
has no fat, it’s got no sugar in it of any kind, it’s not fried, and it doesn’t
have any oil,” Zablocki said. “It is a pretty healthy bread, designed to be
eaten fresh and to be eaten daily, while a bagel is loaded with calories.”
For Zablocki, preserving the bialy—which he describes
as a “Jewish English muffin”—is about more than just keeping a convenient
alternative to the bagel alive; it’s about saving a link to the past. It may
sound dramatic, but he’s not the only one who thinks that way. New York
Times food critic Mimi Sheraton begins
her nonfiction book The Bialy Eaters (one of the only works in
the bialy literary canon) with a quote from Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor
and prominent lawyer who marveled as a group of ethnically diverse workers ate
bialys: “To each of them, it was simply a tasty snack. How could they know they
were partaking of something sacred—a bread that evoked the bittersweet memories
of a cultured and tragic corner of Eastern Poland?”
Nice to think of these things, like the title of the
book by A Vanished World by Roman Vishniac, this Sunday morning sitting at the
home of my sister in Miami, after being fed that non Jewish of all delicacies
from Jamaica: Ackee and Saltfish, Bammy and Festival.
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| ACKEE AND SALTFISH, BAMMY |
גוט
אַפּעטיט
This blog dedicated to my good friends Dr W and Auntie G
Food Friendship and Schmooze, a beezl wine!
