Her own theory of the bagel’s origin, she said, is that it is a cousin of the pretzel  it may already have been a staple among Jewish bakers before they migrated to Poland from Germany in the Middle Ages, or it may have developed alongside the obwarzanek, which was a favorite at the Polish royal court, a court that was frequented by the Jewish elite.

The first known reference to the bagel among Jews in Poland, she said, was found in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow. They outlined how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy  “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious,” she said, “and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.” (The origin of the word bagel is ultimately unclear, but many experts agree, she said, that it comes from the Yiddish word beigen, to bend.)

There were many surprises along her road of discovery, she said. While in Poland on business, her husband, Wojtek Szczerba, found an old pretzel tin with the name Beigel on it. It turned out that a family named Beigel had dominated Jewish baking in pre-Nazi Krakow and made bagels as well as many other breads.

Ms. Balinska is less than happy when it comes to the United States and its love affair with bagels in recent decades, made possible largely by machine rolling and the public’s eager acceptance of frozen food. “Lots of things have happened to bagels now that have very little to do with bagels, or certainly what I think they should be,” she said, mentioning ubiquitous phenomena like giant bagels, many-flavored bagels, many-colored bagels and other unbagel-like bagels. “So many are simply bread rolls in the shape of a ring, in the shape of a bagel.”

Mimi Sheraton, a former New York Times restaurant critic and the author of “The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World” (Broadway Books), agrees about the modern bagel. “Their current state is completely deplorable,” she said. “They should not look big and swollen, they’re tasteless, and they stay forever soft.”

Image Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“You used to be able to eat a bagel that would give your facial muscles a workout,” Ms. Sheraton added.