The Bagel
By Maria Balinska
Yale £10, 220 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8

In Balinska’s anecdotal history of the Jewish roll with a hole, first references to the food appear during the flourishing of Jewish culture in 14th-century Poland. Balinska tracks the bread’s festive, religious and secular significances through the canon of Jewish folklore up to the Nazi horrors of the Warsaw ghetto.

Jumping to immigrant America, she describes how this quintessentially Jewish bread “would come of age politically” in New York, where it “played a role” in the city’s harsh labour struggles.

The gossipy erudition of her earlier narrative gathers pace as Balinska records the innovations of a few bakers who, after late mechanisation in the 1960s, broke out of the ethnic Jewish market to mass appeal.

Balinska’s lofty claim that “the bagel emerges as an eloquent metaphor for east European Jewry” is slightly cheeky, but her eclectic, engaging and sympathetic account offers plenty to savour.