Brassados

No bread form is so complety identified with Jews as the bagel, which came from eastern Europe with immigrants, mostly from/Lód´z, Poland, at the turn of the last century. Unlike American bagels, French bagels were rather like rolls that were baked but not boiled. When Euro Disney and the United States Army in Europe wanted bagels in the late seventies, they asked Joseph Korcarz, whose family ran a bakery in the Marais, to go to the United States to learn the commercial technique of boiling the dough before baking. Two older bread forms, however, might shed new light on the origins of the bagel. In the mountains of Savoie, near the Swiss border, an area with few if any Jews today, there is a specialty of the region—an ancient anise-flavored bread called riouttes, which were boiled before baking, a technique that kept the bread fresher a longer time. Riouttes might have come to the mountains with Jews or with Arabs, who make ka’ak (“bracelet” in Arabic), small, round, crispy rolls with a hole, flavored with anise and sesame seeds. Probably the oldest bagel-like roll in France, however, dating back to antiquity, is the Provençal brassado, also called brassadeau. Sweet and round, with a hole in the center, they are also first boiled and then baked, much like bagels. The word brassado is related to the Spanish and Portuguese words for the physical act of an embrace or a hug. The unusual inclusion of floral scents like orange-flower and rose water could be the influence of Jews involved in the perfume industry in Grasse. This particular recipe is an adaptation of brassados found by Martine Yana in her Trésors de la Table Juive.