Well ..... I think we probably had bagels in the UK earlier than the US as the influx of Jews after the pogroms arrived. Many of the people arriving in the Uk and Ireland thought they'd arrived in New York but they soon found their way to the East-end and Manchester. In fact I think I recently ate one of those original bagels.

The onion platzel is ... or was not really a flat anything. It was a crusty roll with a dimple in the top in which cooked onion was inserted. It was baked on stone and it had a sort of crunchy crispness to the rest of it as though some steam had been injected a bit like the crackling effect you get with a baguette.

This version doesn't look right because it's sort of high and batch baked and the ones I'm yearning for were seperate lower and had more crust surface - although the surface of these look nearly right. These look a bit better .... perhaps it's more a cross between the two.

They certainly aren't a variant of a bagel - an onion bagel has several variants one being onion seed and the other fried onion inside the actual dough mixture - sometimes with some dark onion little bits on the surface - so is completely different. The platzel has the onion just on the top in the dimple - pizza like.