It's National Bagel Day and National Pizza Day, so we expect you to eat a week's worth of carbohydrates in 24 hours.
In honor of the two foods that New Yorkers like best, we took a look back at some of the earliest references to bagels and pizza (and pizza bagels) in the New York Times' archives.
Bagels, "small, hard Jewish rolls with holes in the center"
► Remember the good old days, when a one cent price increase was something to write home about? In January 1945, "bakers in the Jewish trade" announced they were raising the price and weight of bagels, by two ounces, the Times reported.
► A year later, the Times published a story about a Bronx woman who sent three bagels to Washington as a means of protesting the increased cost and decreased size of bread loaves.
Bagels, the Times explained, were "small, hard Jewish rolls with holes in the center."
Helen Harris sent the rolls to three federal administrators, including the then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, with notes warning that all bread loafs would resemble them if the government permitted bakers to skimp on size.
► New York "addicts of the bagel" panicked in December 1951, when a "bagel famine" threatened to consume the metropolitan area, according to the Times.
A labor dispute between the local union for New York bagel makers and the Bagel Bakers Association had closed 32 of the city's 34 bagel bakeries; the two bakeries that remained open struggled to keep up with market demand, which the Times placed at 1.2 million bagels in one weekend.
The paper also provided a helpful pro-tip for the uninitiated: "bagel" is "pronounced 'bay-gle.'"
Pizza, "a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes"
► In a 1944 "News of Food" column, Margot Murphy, writing under the pseudonym Jane Holt, described a "pie popular in southern Italy" and the process of making one as something entirely foreign to the paper's readers.
For Murphy, who visited a pizzeria on West 48th Street, the now-clichéd image of a pizzaiuolo spinning a circle of dough with his hands to prepare the crust appears to have been a novel one.
But it's worth noting that the city's first pizzeria actually opened way back in 1905, at 53 1/2 Spring St.
► In 1947, the Times printed a how-to article that said "pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew more about it."
Let's not forget pizza bagels, a snack "symboliz[ing] an unusual country club that openly pursues a 50-50 balance between Jews and gentiles"
► A 1976 profile of a Long Island country club introduced Times readers to the notion of an "appetizer called 'a pizza bagel.'"
It represented, for the article's author, the absence of religious barriers at the Mill River Club.
It represents for us the ideal chimera of New York's best culinary offerings.
