My Life in Bagels

The smell of bagels is permanently lodged in my olfactory memory bank.  It is a smell that I have been neglected of since I moved to Chicago from New Jersey years ago. A few months ago my girlfriend brought home some bagels. I had grown to loathe bagels and I ignored the bag she plopped on the kitchen table...thinking it was a batch of Chicago bagels...essentially an inedible and tasteless mass of Wonderbread shaped in an "O". But soon a familiar smell wafted past my nose. It was a smell that brought back waves of memories and a healthy rumble in my stomach...those are BAGELS! REAL BAGELS! It is a very distinctive smell- doughy, slightly sweet that's always accompanied by the scent of a well-worn paper bag.

I have a very nostalgic and emotional relationship to bagels. In high school, I had a group of girlfriends that worked at my town's bagel shop. It was a dumpy little strip mall storefront that just had the bare essentials- bins of bagels, a couple pots of coffee and a small deli case of lox, cream cheese and butter. Customers rarely came in- giving us free reign of the place to use as our little clubhouse. Every day after school I would hang out and stock up on bagels., breeding a ridiculous fanaticism. I always had a paper bag of them in my backpack, eating them as I spent hours roaming around town and exploring the woods. Pumpernickel! Sesame Seed! Even a plain bagel was enough for me. I ate at least five bagels a day. A surplus would often accumulate in my school locker, many of them hardening into a concrete that would smash into many pieces when you threw them against the wall.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Chicago and bit into the region's bagel! A bagel shop underneath the El tracks by Wrigley Field came highly recommended, and I immediately hopped on the train to hunt it down. Unfortunately, what my mouth was greeted with was a puffy and elastic ball of dough. I should have known better when I saw that they offered chocolate chip, blueberry, and pumpkin varieties. A bagel is not a muffin! A bagel is not simply a surface to smear cream cheese upon! A bagel is the product of a highly refined recipe and cooking process passed down through hundreds of years- resulting in a bread product that has a rich and simple flavor, and a texture that is always challenging. I don't need a goddamn thing on my bagel and honestly, I find bagels most delicious when they are a couple days old and slightly hard.