Stories told at My Mother's Recipe

Sunday Bagel Sponges

When I was one year old, my parents moved across the country from New York City to the suburbs of Kansas City to be closer to my mom’s parents.

My dad had been a New Yorker through and through - raised on the Upper East side, he spent his younger years sneaking into jazz clubs, playing in a trio around town, and starting out his writing career at various magazines he secretly hated, while staying up late to write his own novels.

Mom arrived in New York City at age 18, having left Kansas City to pursue a career in dance and writing. She did - and found herself dancing, acting, writing, and teaching yoga in New York for 17 years.

I’d hear their stories about New York as I grew up in Kansas. My parents bemoaned the early dinner times of Midwesterners (who eats at five?), the lack of stores open after 6pm, the challenges of finding weirdo creative types in the suburbs that they used to so easily make friends with on the subway, and the local stores’ lack of a good assortment of black clothing to complete my mom’s signature look.

But on Sunday afternoons, the thing I heard about most was the bagels. Our weekly routine of lunchtime bagels was unshakable. And yet, every Sunday we’d come home and unpack our variety of bagels, lox, and schmear and Dad would inevitably start monologuing on what a real bagel should taste like - nothing like these “bagel sponges” that were available to us in Kansas. He’d fix his bagel up the best he could and toast it to fool himself, but it could never compare to a true New York bagel.

I have to admit that I didn’t see what the big deal was until I moved here about five years ago. Truthfully, I was never very adventurous with my bagels in Kansas - the plainer the better - so the first time I sunk my teeth into a toasted whole wheat everything bagel with lox spread, I finally understood what Dad had been missing this whole time. And now, whenever I treat myself to a New York bagel, it reminds me of my Kansas home.

Grace Townley-Lott 

2018 May 4