I was on a foreign website and spotted an ad for Bohemian Bagels in Prague. If not for the URL, Czech language link, and prices, you’d swear this shop was in any big city USA. It also made me wonder where these little round breads come from. Are they an American immigrant invention? An evolution of a Jewish bread? I found two Ivy League links with historical explanations of the genesis of the bagel. Here are “The Round Role with a Hole” and an excerpt from “We Are What We Eat”. There apparently is no consensus, as various “old country” baked goods resemble early bagels, and could claim ancestry. It is easier to trace the bagel’s history after it hit America, as it became firmly associated with the New York deli and also had a following in Chicago. And once Lender’s started mass production, bagels rolled out to the rest of the U.S. And now many areas on the West Coast have Noah’s Bagels, and I assume other bagel chains are dotting the rest of the country, or at least the urban areas. Plus many supermarket bakeries sell bagels. I’m not content with Lender’s inferior bagels, and I was surprised to find out that after the Lender brothers sold out to Kraft, they went back to the restaurant business and produced “real” hand rolled bagels once again. Kellogg bought Lender’s from Kraft and then sold it to Aurora Foods.