Post by Omar Rizwan (@omar@social.omar.website)

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bagels existed in America for decades as a purely
ethnic phenomenon, virtually unknown to society at large. (Though today this seems almost impossible
to believe, as late as 1957 the writer of a New York Times news story felt obliged to inform the paper's
readers that "A bagel is a kind of hard roll with a hole in the center.")

@omar In other deli lore, I’ve also learned recently that pastrami came to NYC via Romanian immigrants in the late XIXth century, made Italian-sounding from “pastramă”

Open thread