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This bagel trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and covers the whole life of the roll with a hole. It starts in Poland, where Kraków's Jewish community regulations mention bagels in 1610 as gifts for women in childbirth, follows the bread to London's Brick Lane and to New York, where a single union hand-rolled the city's supply for decades, and on to the machine that broke the union's grip and the Connecticut family who froze, pre-sliced and bagged bagels for supermarkets across America. Along the way you will meet the New York versus Montreal argument (honey water and wood fire, or malt and tap water), the St. Louis bagel that is sliced like a loaf, the flagel, the bialy, the simit and the Jerusalem bagel, the many people who claim to have invented the everything bagel, Bagel Bites and Tony Hawk, Einstein Bros., the tennis 'bagel' and the bagel that swallowed the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Easy questions suit a brunch table; the hard ones will test the most devoted deli regular. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and the sentence that backs it up appears under each question once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bagels originated in the Jewish communities of which country?
Poland
The earliest known written mention is in Kraków's Jewish community regulations of 1610.
Q 02What cooking step, done before baking, gives a traditional bagel its chewy interior and shiny crust?
Boiling
Each ring gets 60 to 90 seconds in water that may contain lye, baking soda, barley malt or honey.
Q 03Which two seeds are the traditional toppings baked onto a bagel's crust?
Poppy and sesame
Salt grains are the other classic option; garlic and onion flakes joined the mix later and were eventually combined into the everything bagel.
Q 04The classic New York 'bagel brunch' tops a bagel with cream cheese and which cured fish?
Lox
The combination, with capers, tomato and red onion, caught on in New York around 1900 and has never let go.
Q 05What is the traditional shape of a bagel, in the language of geometry?
A torus
The hole is practical as well as pretty: it lets the dough cook evenly and lets bakers string dozens on a dowel for carrying and display.
Q 06In tennis, what score in a set is nicknamed a 'bagel'?
6-0
Win three sets that way and you have served a 'triple bagel'.
Q 07A bagel with all the toppings is a plot device in which Oscar-winning 2022 film?
Everything Everywhere All at Once
In the film the bagel is a black hole with literally everything in the multiverse piled onto it.
Q 08The Montreal-style bagel is boiled in water sweetened with what before baking?
Honey
It also contains egg and malt but no salt, and is baked in a wood-fired oven, which is why it comes out thinner, sweeter and denser than a New York bagel.
Q 09Bagel Bites, the frozen pizza-bagel snack, are made by which food giant?
Kraft Heinz
Heinz picked up the brand in its $500 million purchase of John Labatt Co. assets in 1991; the snacks are still made in Southwest Florida.
Q 10Which bagel spread was 'married' to a giant Lender's bagel in a 1984 publicity stunt?
Philadelphia cream cheese
When Kraft bought Lender's, Murray Lender walked a six-foot bagel named Len down the aisle to a bride named Phyl.
Q 11What did Harry Lender's bakery accidentally reveal in 1956 after two years of secrecy?
That its bagels were being frozen
Customers were angry at first, then realised these were the same bagels they had happily eaten for two years, and Lender's started marketing them frozen.
Q 12Which bagel cousin has an onion-filled depression instead of a hole and skips the water bath?
Bialy
It comes from Białystok, whose Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust, and survives mainly in New York bakeries.
Q 13Which US city names the bagel style 'sliced' vertically into eight thin pieces?
St. Louis
Q 21Which spelling of the word do London's Brick Lane bakeries traditionally use?
Beigel
They have been sold there since the mid-19th century, displayed on vertical wooden dowels up to a metre long.
Q 22For how long is a traditional bagel dough proofed at low temperature before it hits the water?
At least 12 hours
That long cold rest is one theory behind the Yeshivish slang 'sleeping a bagel', meaning twelve hours straight.
Q 23What is a 'flagel'?
A flat bagel
It is credited to Brooklyn's Tasty Bagels deli in the early 1990s and is mostly found around New York, Long Island and Toronto.
The style was popularised by the St. Louis Bread Company, better known today as Panera Bread.
Q 14Traditionalist New Yorkers insist a fresh bagel should never be what?
Toasted
Some Manhattan shops, including Ess-a-Bagel, have had outright no-toasting policies, and critic Mimi Sheraton called the practice obscene.
Q 15In which Polish city do the 1610 community regulations first mention the bagel?
Kraków
The ordinances record bagels being given as gifts to women in childbirth.
Q 16The Yiddish word behind 'bagel' derives from a German dialect word meaning what?
Ring or bracelet
The Polish form bajgiel and the London spelling beigel come from the same root.
Q 17Which Italian-born queen is sometimes credited with bringing the bagel to Kraków in the 16th century?
Bona Sforza
She was from Bari and married Sigismund the Old in 1518; another theory traces the bagel to German pretzels instead.
Q 18Which numbered union controlled New York City's hand-rolled bagel trade for decades?
Local 338
By the early 1910s it represented more than 300 bagel craftsmen in Manhattan alone.
Q 19Who started work in 1958 on the first commercially viable bagel-making machine?
Daniel Thompson
The Lenders leased the very first one in 1963; with three unskilled workers it did the job of eight skilled hand-rollers.
Q 20Roughly how much did the average bagel sold from a Manhattan coffee cart weigh by 2003?
6 ounces
Bagels started at about 2 ounces, reached 3 by 1915 and started ballooning again in the 1960s.
Q 24Montreal-style bagels are the only bagels known to have gone where?
Into space
Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who grew up in Montreal, took three bags of sesame bagels on the shuttle and to the ISS.
Q 25Which two Montreal bagel shops both claim to be the oldest in the city?
St-Viateur and Fairmount
Fairmount was set up by Jack Shlafman in 1919 and St-Viateur by Chaim Seligman and Myer Lewkowicz in 1957.
Q 26Per Gil Marks, the bagel with lox and schmear was a 1930s kosher adaptation of which dish?
Eggs Benedict
Eggs Benedict breaks two dietary laws at once, pork and mixing meat with dairy, so New York's Jews built a bagel version.
Q 27Which company created the Einstein Bros. Bagels chain in 1995 to sell breakfast?
Boston Chicken
It stitched together four regional chains from cities with no bagel tradition, and later became part of Panera Brands in 2021.
Q 28Noah's Bagels, sold to Einstein Bros. for $100 million in 1996, was founded in which city?
Berkeley
Noah Alper opened the first shop on College Avenue; the chain had 38 stores by the time it was sold.
Q 29Which skateboarder fronted Bagel Bites' early-2000s marketing push aimed at tween boys?
Tony Hawk
The partnership was credited with a 32 percent jump in consumption.
Q 30Where did Bagel Bites originate before Heinz bought the business?
Fort Myers, Florida
Inventors Bob Mosher and Stanley Garczynski sold the company to John Labatt Co., and the snacks are still made in Southwest Florida.