A New York Times review of Bagel articles brings to light a rich history of compliance.
The definition of a bagel is an obvious start.
A bagel is a round bread, with a hole in the middle, made of simple ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.
I dare you to find a specimen that meets even a few of these seven rules of bagel-ness. A true bagel is few and far between. I further dare you to put on a QBA (Qualified Bagel Assessor) hat and ask a bakery….
But wait, there is more. The first reference to a bagel, by Jews living in Poland, also came from compliance.
It is found…in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow outlining how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy — “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious, and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.”
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s bagels.
And last, but not least, fast forward to the American bagel. It was tightly regulated by a union of New York bakers.
The rise of the bagel in New York is inextricably tied to that of a trade union, specifically Bagel Bakers Local 338, a federation of nearly 300 bagel craftsmen formed in Manhattan in the early 1900s.
Local 338 was by all accounts a tough and unswerving union, set up according to strict rules that limited new membership to the sons of current members.
Something tells me that a rule of hereditary bagel-making is not related to the quality of the bagel. Even if it was, it obviously did not work; today’s bagels do not comply with that or any of the above regulations.