Don't Fear the Bagel
To 'scoop' or not to 'scoop'? That isn't even a question.
I was at a bagels-and-lox brunch one day when I observed the most remarkable thing. A grown man was sitting with a bagel on a plate, and he was quietly but determinedly pulling out all the insides of the bagel, rolling them up into little balls, and putting them on his plate. He looked like a child playing with his food. No one else seemed to notice this was happening or to say a word about it. Once he had denuded the bagel of all its doughy filling, he got up and went into the kitchen and tossed all the bagel-innards into the trash. He returned to the brunch table with just the sad shell of the bagel – a kind of bagel ghost or bagel skeleton, a mere suggestion of a bagel at this point, and he put the fixings inside the remaining shell – cream cheese and lox, just like what one would put on a regular bagel.
I found the destruction of that bagel to be rude and wasteful, and I did not understand what it was about, because the outside shell of the bagel is made of the same stuff as the inside. I asked my wife what the fuck was up with that. She explained to me that where the man came from it was common practice to “scoop” a bagel, in the belief that only eating the shell would be “less fattening.” In his shtetl of origin – which was also my wife’s shtetl of origin – this was such a widely accepted practice it was de rigueur to order a bagel in a restaurant and ask for it to be scooped and lightly toasted.
This wanton destruction of the very baked good one was ordering in a restaurant or selecting from the brunch spread at someone’s home boggled my mind. It was on the order of some kind of desecration. It made no sense. What of the gobs of fat in the cream cheese or butter that were loaded into the bagel shell? How could one believe that scooping the dough out of the bagel would somehow make eating it to be “healthier” or “less fattening”?
But even more than that was the unanswerable simple question: Why? Why bother even eating the bagel – which with cream cheese or butter and Nova smoked salmon or lox (n.b.: these are not the same things, which is a whole other food thing I find intensely problematic) is not on anyone’s list of “healthy” or “low-fat” food options. Why not just skip the bagel entirely and go for the fish and sliced onions and fruit salad and just leave the rest behind – the bagel and its toppings -- if you are going to have to deconstruct it within an inch of its very essence, to destroy its very “bagelness”? What is the point? I guess it’s a case of having your bagel and eating it, too. But stripped of its doughy essence, it is really no longer a bagel. It’s merely a delivery vehicle, an edible utensil. Plus, you also risk deflating the hearts of those who care about the essence of things, to say nothing of the feelings of the person who bought the bagels in the first place.
Ultimately, I felt sorry for the bagel destroyer, who in this case was a tall, slim, physically fit middle-aged man who really had no reason to deny himself the pleasure of eating the bagel as God intended it to be rather than a pale simulacrum of a bagel.