It’s well accepted in Ashkenazi Jewish culture that one eats round challahs for Rosh Hashanah as a symbolic invitation to have a full and complete new year. I’ve always been curious though why round challahs are so symbolically significant in this way, but the other obviously culturally important round bread—bagels—seems to be off the holiday repertoire. Maybe this year, I’ll suggest a shift: how about making Bakehouse bagels with the Creamery’s amazing handmade Cream Cheese into a Rosh Hashanah routine for a metaphorically meaningful New Year’s breakfast offering.
Cream cheese’s origins go back to the 1880s, the same years in which the biggest waves of Jewish immigration to the U.S. were getting underway. It was invented in upstate New York, by one William Lawrence in the town of Chester. At that time, cream cheese was the “cream of the dairy crop,” one of the most prestigious and pricey cheeses you could put on your table. Historian Rabbi Jacob Marx writes, In 1889, a pound of Muenster sold for thirteen cents, Parmesan for twenty-three cents, while cream cheese cost thirty cents. In 1893, domestic cheese went for fifteen cents a pound, while cream cheese cost twenty-five cents; and in 1909, cottage cheese retailed for twenty cents a pound, while cream cheese went up to forty cents. Making cream cheese by hand, much as Mr. Lawrence would have done nearly 150 years ago, is in essence, an effort to return cream cheese to its original lofty place in the American food world.
When it comes to bagels, their beginnings are far less clear. Ted Ownby, retired head of the University of Mississippi’s Center for Southern Studies, taught me many years ago that “origin stories are always disputed.” Bagels are on that list. It’s fairly clear though that they likely came to the U.S. with some of those Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and became a staple of American Jewish eating. Like so many foods brought by immigrants, they were eventually embraced much more widely, and of course, nowadays there are bagels in the freezer section of every supermarket. Twenty years ago, we began making our own here at the Bakehouse, an effort of the sort we always make, to go back to the old, opting for traditional boiling and stone hearth baking for a more flavorful, chewier, and denser bagel. I’m particularly partial to the Sesame Street and the Grand Poppy.
I grew up eating a bagel and cream cheese literally almost every day for breakfast. Of course, what we were eating in Chicago all those years ago wasn’t even close to the quality I get to enjoy now! While commercial cream cheese and supermarket bagels may sort of fill the emotional bill, from a flavor standpoint, the Bakehouse and Creamery offerings are at a whole ’nother level. If you’ve bought the bagels at the Bakehouse that morning, they will be great eaten fresh as is. If they’re older, I take them to the toaster. Spread cream cheese, eat, and enjoy! Maybe better still, back when I was a kid, my favorite way to make them was to toast, then spread with butter, and then cream cheese after that. Done with the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter, it would be marvelous, maybe even miraculous!
