The Wonder Seasoning Your Salad Is Missing

For those who don’t know, “everything” is actually well prescribed and rarely goes beyond five things: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, flaked sea salt, garlic or onion flakes or both. Back when bagel bakeries were really taking off in the 1970s and early 1980s in New York, these were each individual toppings. It was poppy or sesame, garlic or onion. The idea to mix them all together — to have one bagel with “everything” on it — is claimed by a few different people, but the name most often cited is David Gussin’s. Around 1980, a young Gussin was at work, cleaning out the ovens at a bagel shop in Queens, N.Y. Rather than throwing away all the seasonings that had fallen to the bottom, he collected them and piled them all onto a bagel. The “everything” bagel — everything Gussin had, crucially, not “anything” that anyone cares to think of — was born.