Adieu, croissants! Adios, tacos! Make way for the ethnic sandwich vehicle of the moment. The bagel has gone mainstream. Dense and chewy, with a shiny golden brown crust and a center hole, this round Jewish-Eastern European roll has long been a breakfast favorite primarily in New York City and along the Atlantic seaboard. Now it is increasingly appearing on fast-food menus and in the freezers of supermarkets well beyond its ethnic boundaries. Two giant firms have moved into the frozen-bagel business in recent years: Kraft, which owns Lender's, the first and largest producer of frozen bagels, and Sara Lee, which has a line of its own. But primary credit for the yeasty assimilation goes to Burger King, the Pillsbury-owned fast-food chain, which last summer began featuring the bagel nationwide as a breakfast sandwich.
As always happens when specialized foods are mass-merchandised, however, the bagel has been altered to broaden its appeal. As a result, there is a very real question of whether many of the versions now being sold are spiritually and aesthetically still worthy of the name. So far, all are made of the conventional yeast dough, and most are boiled before being baked, thereby taking on the characteristic moist chewiness. But because the classic bagel had a grayish color, was tough to chew and had a shelf life of about two hours, bromate dough conditioners and softeners have gradually been added to new products in the past 20 years. Burger King has added to the acculturation process with such fillers for its bagel as eggs, cheese, ham and bacon. All are far cries from the fillers cherished by bagel mavens: "Novy" (smoked Nova Scotia-style salmon) or lox (brine-cured salmon) and cream cheese (known colloquially as a schmear).
Even traditional bagel bakers have trivialized the product by adding such flavors as pumpernickel, onion, poppy or sesame seed, and even cinnamon and raisin. The Big Apple Bagels shops in the Chicago area offer among their variations, incredibly enough, one with banana and nuts. Lender's has just introduced Big 'n Crusty, 50% larger than its regular product and looking like a sort of dimpled Superdome modeled in dough. Brothers Murray and Marvin Lender have recently expanded their Connecticut-based chain of bagel restaurants, S. Kinder (a play on the Yiddish Ess, Kinder ((Eat, children))), into Manhattan, where they offer a blueberry-studded bagel. Says Murray Lender, son of the company's founder: "The Brooklyn traditionalist would probably break out in hives at the mention of a blueberry bagel."
Convinced that most of the specimens distributed nationally are imposters, Big Apple Baking Co. in Brooklyn (no connection to the Chicago shops) last spring began marketing what it considers to be more authentic New York-style bagels. Vows Company President Allen Kent: "We will not prostitute the bagel." Despite that promise, Big Apple's version, which substitutes steaming for the boiling process, turns out to be soft and spongy.