You say beigel, I say bagel
The origins of one of London's iconic snacks, the salt beef bagel, are intriguing - but it's under threat with the closure of a key shop. Plus: what I've been drinking this week
LONDON’s East End was rocked by the news last month that one of the two legendary Brick Lane 24-hour bagel joints had closed. The Beigel Shop (aka “the yellow one”, for the colour of its sign) had for decades been in competition with Beigel Bake (“the white one”) a few doors up. People are said to have an allegiance to either one or the other: I’d deride this as hyperbole, except it’s true that I’d never even considered going to the one that just closed.
But it’s fair to describe both as London institutions, with bleary drinkers queuing for a fix of salt beef bagel into the early hours, along with reported sightings of various celebs. And the surviving shop is also a window into an almost-disappeared London Jewish culinary world.
Bagels – or beigels, as they are traditionally known in England (see note below) – first came to London with East European Jews in the nineteenth century. The first mentions of Jews’ consumption of this unusual bread roll date from the early seventeenth century, though the earliest English reference to them in London was in 1919. The immigrants also brought the tradition of salt beef – brisket brined and slow-roasted to soften the toughness of this cheap cut.
By World War I, the Jewish East End was thriving, swelled by the arrival of around 150,000 refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia between 1880 and 1914. Until the 1930s they supported more than 100 synagogues, four Yiddish theatres and several Yiddish newspapers there – for Yiddish, with its roots in ninth-century German, was the language of the majority of the newcomers. And signs in Yiddish, written in the Hebrew alphabet, would have advertised fresh bagels at many of the area’s bakeries.
Jews started to move out of Whitechapel and Spitalfields after World War II: much of the area has been badly bombed. Meanwhile some children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants had succeeded enough to make the “north west passage” to more affluent north London neighbourhoods like Hendon and Finchley.
The East End still had a large Jewish population until the 1960s: the city’s most famous kosher bakers, Grodzinski, was at its most successful then, with 24 branches spreading into the northern neighbourhoods (they now have just two.) But the heart of the East End community was moving on. The Spitalfields Great Synagogue on Brick Lane was sold to the burgeoning Bangladeshi community in 1976 (it continues to serve as the Jamme Masjid mosque; it was built as a Huguenot protestant church in the 1740s, before the Jews arrived in the neighbourhood.)
Still, a few Jewish holdovers remained – including the two Brick Lane bagel stores. Despite the Beigel Shop’s sign claiming to have operated since 1855, the store started in its current incarnation in the early 1960s. Beigel Bake began on its current site in 1974, though originally selling only bread and bagels rather than sandwiches.
Today, Beigel Bake reportedly produces around 3,000 bagels a day in the busy kitchen behind the spartan serving area. After being left to rise, the dough, with includes sugar and malt, is shaped, then boiled, then baked. This is the process (slow rising and boiling rather than industrial steam-baking) that gives London bagels their trademark, satisfying chewiness over the dense texture of their far-inferior American cousins. Beigel Bake shape theirs by machine; elsewhere, it’s still done by hand, as I watched a baker doing at the Shalom Hot Bagel Bakery in Gants Hill, one of the Jewish communities now scattered towards London’s periphery.
Still, while bagels, salt beef and pickles are thoroughly Ashkenazi fare, it’s open to question how traditional it is to serve them all together in a sandwich. Salt beef was long saved for special occasions; cream cheese and smoked salmon would originally be more likely to accompany a bagel.
And rye is the more traditional bread for a beef sandwich, as still served at North Finchley’s Salt Beef Bar. There it’s part of an unashamedly heimishe (homely/homestyle) menu including chopped liver and kneidlach (matso ball) soup, served at lunchtime to old-timers (I was the youngest customer.)
Does it matter if salt beef bagels aren’t really traditional? As regular readers will know, the invention of tradition, to use the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, is a favourite theme of this blog. Most traditions are invented to a degree, often – thought not in this case – with a political overlay. But even if bedraggled drinkers, clubbers and nightworkers have been wolfing mustard-spiked salt-beef bagels on Brick Lane for only half a century or so, that still makes it a longer tradition than, say, making a fuss about the annual arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau, or reckless Conservative privatisations of public assets. And a much, much tastier one.
*Note: the pronunciation of “bagel” vs “beigel” is a subject of some dispute. Bagel is a Yiddish word, meaning a ring, spelt בײגל, transliterated as beygl or beigel. That – rhymes with “bible” – was the standard London Jewish pronunciation until at least the 1970s. But meanwhile the word had been Americanised, reportedly in the early 1930s, as bagel (“baygel”). It’s not clear why, though Yiddish itself is inconsistent in the way it has changed the German-originating “ei” (“eye”) sound over time. About half of the Yiddish words spelt with a ײ (“ei”) are in fact pronounced “ay” (and occasionally transliterated as such) eg פלייש (“fleysh”, meat), צװײ (“tsvey,” two).
What I’ve been drinking this week
Domaine de Chevilly “La Licorne d’Or” 2022, Quincy - truth be told, I’m not a huge Sauvignon Blanc fan, but this one from a lesser Loire appellation is gloriously fruity, bright, rounded but balanced - just lovely (Perfect Cellar, Woodwinters, Palmers, from £16.95.)
Viña Ardanza Rioja Reserva 2016 - an old-school Rioja from legendary producer La Rioja Alta, and it shows just how good that can be. Spicy red berry fruit, fresh and elegant; plenty of American oak but it’s not at all overpowering, more just there in the vanilla and cedar notes in this complex wine. This has a long life ahead of it (Four Walls Wine, R&B Wines, Corney & Barrow, Slurp and elsewhere, from £23.30.)
Santa Venere Cirò 2021 - from the most famous (though still not-very-well-known) Denominazione of Calabria, the “toe” of Italy, this is good value for the quality it delivers: at the price, I can’t think of anything this interesting from Tuscany, for instance. From the local Gaglioppo grape, here grown organically, this is spicy, herby, earthy with a trademark Italian touch of bitterness. Very good (currently N/A UK though the Wine Society regularly stock it at around £10.95.)
Transparency declaration: the Quincy was a free sample.
I lived in Cheshire Street in the early 00s and I never went to the yellow one either. Not once.