Bagels in Childhood
What poppyseed bagels from East Rock Breads make me think of.
There was a bagel source in Waterbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, and I can’t remember the name of the place—or actually, two places; perhaps they had one storefront I never went to, then later moved to a plaza on the East End—that had until yesterday never been found again or duplicated or even approached near to in taste and texture and size, chewiness and amenability to the toaster, the right relationship with Philadelphia cream cheese as opposed to Stop n Shop’s generic brand. Not all bagels are equal under the transformation of being frozen fresh to feed microwave-to-toaster-oven before-school breakfasts for the week. Unfortunately, the poppyseed bagel of East Rock Breads is too good to make it to any of those presentative endpoints. I ate three of them, unadorned by any cheese, untouched by any oven broiler element, throughout a lazy Saturday that got sidetracked and reprioritized into a series of pauses in between sneaky returns to the aromatic brown bag sitting on the kitchen counter. Three times, three bagels. Daring, even, in gluttonous revelry, to lay in bed and to collect all the orphaned seeds on my shirt lap afterward, collected with a wetted finger, in such a way that I might as well have rubbed the seeds against my gums, full-circling around to the cultural culinary esteem-slash-notoriety that the poppy holds in our world, not at all an alien experience to the opiatic stupor of gluten satiation.
The culmination of a decades-long search for a bagel equal to the nostalgic perfection of childhood food memories is over.
P.S. They soak the bagels on both sides with poppy seeds. There is no topside/underside preference or bias. Every bite lives up to its name. Thank you, East Rock Breads, for this joy.