Instructions: See Recipes:
Jewis Rye Bread, Levys Real
Bagels, Part 1 and Bagels, Part 2

The Way They Were

Special to The Washington Post

My first bread memory and my first teething ring are one and the same: the beloved bagel. My mother, who was a dentist, considered it the ideal natural teething ring because of its firm yet forgiving texture. But it was my father who brought home the bagels on a string every Friday afternoon after he made his weekly delivery of peels. A peel is a flat wooden tray with a long handle, designed for transferring bread to the oven. Peels for bagels are only slightly wider than the bagel itself. The bagels, after being boiled in salted water, are lined up on this piece of wood, that has been lightly sprinkled with cornmeal, and thrust from it directly onto the hot oven shelf.

In the 1940s after the war and the early 1950s, when times were hard, my father, Robert Levy, a skilled cabinet-maker, turned to bagel peel production and laid claim to the exclusive bagel peel business in the greater New York area, which included the five boroughs and all of New Jersey. This did not make us rich, but we had all the bagels we could eat. Nowadays, bagel appreciation has permeated the world, but they are not the bagels of my childhood. Those were dense and chewy, plain golden brown-no poppy seeds, onion or "everything" and certainly no boutique blueberry bagels with the texture of cake. (The first time I heard about those I felt as if the world as I knew it was coming to an end.) My bagels were served cut in half vertically so that to my childish imagination they delightfully resembled telephone receivers, and each cut half was spread with a big lump of sweet butter. As I bit off each piece, a new lump of butter would be applied by my attentive grandmother.

When I got older, I ate bagels the way the grown-ups did, cutting them in half horizontally, digging out the soft centers and toasting them before filling the cavities thus created with butter.

I havent had a bagel that has pleased me as much in all these years: The texture of bagels has become ever more compromised in the direction of an airy bread. I was afraid to make them myself because I somehow believed a homemade bagel could never come close to my memory. Happily, I was proven wrong by following the directions of a great baker, Lauren Groveman. Not only did the bagels match my memory, they exceeded it.

The other bread dear to my memory is Jewish rye. Since Levys was the most popular brand and that was our family name, I always felt a special connection to it though the bread we ate was a less commercial variety produced by a small bakery in the Bronx. Both my parents were born and raised there, but when I was growing up, we lived in Manhattan. Whenever my father had an excuse to return to the Bronx, he never came home without a freshly baked loaf from his favorite bakery. Sometimes it was dense, moist corn bread, other times coarse pumpernickel, neither of which interested me. My choice was the rye bread, studded with constellations of caraway seeds. (I always complained when he brought home the seedless variety, which he would only do when they sold out of the caraway one.)

My grandmother, who lived with us, would serve it to me spread thickly with unsalted butter, the top paved with rounds of sliced red radishes, lightly sprinkled with kosher salt, crushed fine between her thumb and index finger. To this day it is my favorite way to eat rye bread, except that I now use fleur du sel instead of kosher salt.

It has taken me years to get my rye bread to taste and feel just right. I like a wheaty flavor with not so much rye that it becomes bitter and a chewy texture that is not so dense it becomes pasty. I love using La Cloche, a large, unglazed, earthenware platter with a dome-shaped top, in which to bake the bread. During baking, the bread rises to fill the dome, which gives it a lovely shape, moist texture and very crunchy crust. The bread is still delicious and beautiful when made free-form or in two half-size loaves.

I prefer making both the bagels and rye bread entirely by hand because half the pleasure lies in the feel of kneading the dough. But the quality will be equal if either is made with a heavy-duty electric mixer.

My husband enjoys the extra caraway-sour flavor provided by the small amount of rye flavor, which reminds him of the Jewish deli rye. Either way, this is a very satisfying bread.

If you believe in the value of anticipation, there is only one thing that possibly is better than eating either of these delicious breads: Smelling them as they are baking. Eating them still warm from the oven is another decided advantage to making them yourself.

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