It raised the question: Does the bagel really have Arab origins?
In her book The Bagel, Maria Balinska tracks the origin of the bagel to Bona Sforza, an Italian woman from Bari who arrived in the royal Polish city of Krakow in 1518 to become queen. It’s also in Krakow, according to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, that the first written mention of bagels was found in 1610 Jewish community ordinances. But bagel-like bread was not new to Poland. Food historian Maria Dembinska* traces the first written mention of a ring-shaped bread made of wheat flour that was boiled before baking—referred to as obwarzanek—to Polish royal family accounts from 1394.
Dembińska Maria, and William Woys Weaver. Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
So where could Arab influence fit in? Well, for that, we’ll have to go back to the Middle Ages.
