The new Apple bagel emoji is all wrong – Quartzy

Mangoes, molars, mosquitoes and moon cakes: all these things will soon be able to be expressed on your camera in the form of an image. With iOS 12.1, Apple adds more than 70 new emoticons to its arsenal of around 240, which allows you to ask your wife to pick up more toilet paper, to remind your babysitter of your child's teddy bear or push your colleague on these receipts without charging fees. the ignominy of spelling things into real words.

But there is a problem. In the middle of all these beautifully bright images is a bagel. And it looks completely inedible.

In fact, it's not even a bagel. It seems to be a year and a half – a complete bagel perched awkwardly over a sliced ​​half-bagel, in a configuration that seems improbably useless. The outside is tanned; the interior is colored boiled. It's as homogeneous as a Dunkin 'donut. A good bagel should not look like the one coming out of a factory, as all New Yorkers know – and it certainly should not look like a frozen donut.

According to Grub Street of New York Magazine:

The disappointment is really overwhelming. Look at that clearly machine-cut monstrosity with its rigid and shiny interior, which could not be exchanged in a few minutes in a toaster. And let's talk about this extremely painful crust. What Midwestern bagel factory is it out of? And is it really a bagel if there is not a disgusting amount of cream cheese to clean with a towel before you can consume it?

As one could expect, Bagel-Twitter reacted to pixelated well with a roar of contempt without limit:

But the sad truth is that many bagels look like the aberration generated by Apple. And the reason they do this goes back several decades, starting at a time when making bagels was an extremely ardent and dangerous task. This is the story of how automation has introduced Jewish food to the general public – repackaged, transformed and reconfigured for a general audience. And it's a story that ends with a paste bagel story, like this emoji.

Why are bagels so special?

First, why are New Yorkers and other bagel connoisseurs so obsessed with this product? How is it different from other rolls?

Making a very good bagel is more complicated than you think. It's not just a baked dough ball with a hole in the middle. This requires many hours of kneading and shaping, "retarding" and fermentation, cooking and baking. In the days before bagel machines, handling the dough alone can take months to master.

Once shaped, raw rounds of dough should sit for hours in a cool room, developing their flavor like a good wine, rather than swelling like country bread. They are then immersed in a large pot of boiling water for a little less than a minute, cooled and dried. Finally, they are cooked.

If you do not follow these steps, you might have something quite edible, but probably not a bagel. Each step is crucial to achieve a crisp, "correct" and chewy consistency and lactic acidity.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt de Serious Eats has a few rules for a good bagel. It must be eaten within half an hour of cooking, should not need to be grilled, he writes, and should have "a thin, shiny, cracked crust dotted with … micro-bulbs." Apart from nature, only a few flavors are acceptable: "everything"; salt; garlic or onion; poppy seed; Egg; Sesame seed; pumpernickel; cinnamon raisin.

You wonder about this last? "I'm adding cinnamon raisin to this range only because my wife likes to eat them with shallot cream cheese." Cynthia Nixon would agree.

A history of dough, fire and work disorders

Like many immigrants, the bagels made their US debut in New York. It was at the end of the 19th century, and the Jewish population soared as families fled the pogroms from their homelands in Eastern Europe. Kosher food was being demanded, resulting in the expansion of Jewish-owned restaurants and stalls, including bakeries selling challahs and bagels.

They were dangerous underground settlements, infested with cockroaches and cats that hunted them. The ovens were heated with charcoal, with burning naked flames and boiling boiling water tanks. The apprentice bakers worked 18 hours a day, napped in the stacks of flour and tried to avoid losing their eyebrows in the fray. Their clients, like them, were Jews.

With time, the labor laws hardened. Yiddish-speaking bakers have formed a formidable union with a great barrier to entry, sometimes plunging New York into so-called "bagel famines" in work stoppages during negotiations on their pay and benefits. Between the 1930s and 1960s, bagels went from an "ethnic food" to a New York staple.

In her book The Bagel: The Surprising Story of a Small Bread, Maria Balinska cites a 1950 Bakers and Confectioners' Journal article describing the sacred New York City establishments in which bagels were made. Without machines of any kind, 'getting into a bagel bakery gives you the feeling of entering another century … The air is loaded with the taste of the old world because modernism It does not belong in an establishment producing this ancient Jewish bread. "

In 1960, the Times reported, the city had become "the center of the free world bagels, and will no doubt be maintained in this way by the hundreds of thousands of locals who find that a bagel makes the little one lunch almost worthy of being lifted.

Bagel today

But between 1960 and today, many things have changed. Modern bagels hardly resemble their ancestors. The bagels of yesteryear were about half the size, had a lot less fillings and would break their teeth if they were not eaten a few hours after cooking.

The change of product has everything to do with the change of process of making bagels. As public taste for bagels grew beyond Jewish immigrant communities, technological innovations and services began to emerge. It was primarily rotary kilns, increasing production rates and allowing customers to buy fresh bagels. Then, it's the freezers that allow traders to sell the bagels of yesterday, tomorrow or in three weeks.

But the real knockout for the New York classic bagel came first in California (a bit like Apple's emoji bagel). In the late 1950s, Daniel Thompson, a California-based mathematics professor turned inventor, created the "bagel machine", which omitted many key milestones, including boiling water. The slices of dough that this machine had revealed were neither crispy nor tangy, but they still had a hole – and they were much, much less expensive to manufacture.

When Lender, a bakery in New Haven, Connecticut, bought one of the machines to increase the number of bagels it could sell to locals, that was the beginning of the end handmade bagel. Americans, both near and far, have fallen in love with these ultra-convenient sliced ​​frozen bagels. They had a taste of cinnamon and raisins, rather than lactic acid; you can put them in your toaster even weeks after the purchase; they were small enough not to sit on their belly like a rock during the rest of the day.

Crucially, as Murray Lender said in a 1969 interview, the ethnic identity of the bagel should be reduced to nothing. "When most people call it a Jewish product, it hurts us," he said. "It's a roll, a roll that has personality." When he suggested toppings, Lender was keen to avoid cream cheese and lox (smoked salmon): "It limits them. Think of the toasted bagels and jam, if you will.

And so the bagel became mainstream, but in a form that barely resembled its original glory. According to Balinska, in 1986, total domestic bagel sales reached $ 500 million. Some 40% were frozen. Most American bagels are still produced by this type of machine.

The secret of New York high quality bagels has nothing to do with the minerals in their water, as many say. Instead, this is the process – that people still stick to the rituals of cooling and retarding, boiling and cooking, albeit with a little help from machines . Factory-made bagels, which tend to run out of steam, simply can not produce the same result.

That's why it's such a shame that Apple's bagel emoji is so obviously a supermarket bagel. Emoji should be the platonic ideal of what you are trying to express: the most elegantly set dumpling, the most succulent mango, the largest napa cabbage. Emoji as the fibrous shell of the coconut reveal the possibility of details and nuances.

The emoji bagel is nothing like that. It is the degradation of an iconic baked product and the erasure of its difficult immigrant experience. We deserve better.