This Spring 2022 seminar series taking us from Seminar #29 through #34 starts with an in depth look at the history of written bread recipes starting with Ancient Egypt and ending in the late 19th century. There are three talks in my “close reading” series where I read from historic texts and then talk about…
Galen (129 – c. CE 216) The Key to Early Modern Bread Recipes
Galen was the most important medical writer prior to the modern era. All of the Early Modern health manuals and medical texts relied on his work. The shadow of his writings on bread influence us still. When one goes to a bakery and fails to find barley bread, rye bread, and flatbreads one is seeing…
Thomas Cogan: Frumenty is Natural, while Bread is Artificial (1584)
I am working through the Thomas Cogan (1545?-1607) bread and grain sections from his influential work, Haven of Health (1584). Like the author of health manuals today, Cogan declares himself academically qualified to write on medical matters. He had two Oxford degrees, a Master of Arts, and a Batcheler of Physicke. He was a working…
Maison Rustique 1619 Markham Edition
I want to start our entry into this astonishingly amazing text with the following paragraph. As you see, it is not the first paragraph of this chapter. It is the most all encompassing poetically written description of what bread meant in Early Modern European culture that I have come across. Amongst many of us, the…
The Coarse Cheat, Maison Rustique, 1619, Gervase Markham, ed.
(Notes for my talk on the Markham edition of Maison Rustique March 31, 2022) ” the next to this is course cheate bread, the which is made of the coursest meale as being boulted as cleane from the branne as it can possibly be got, and the boulter which is for this purpose must bee a…
Markham on Manchet, 1616
Gevas16e Markahm is well known in the world of culinary history for the bread recipes he published in his English Housewife, 1614. An insightful summary of his manchet recipe was published by Markham in his 1616 edition of Maison Rustique. “Besides these breads made of these seuerall cornes, you shall vnderstand that generally the breads…
A Taste of Insights from the 1616 Edition of Maison Rustique
This is is an exact transliteration of the text for the 1616 edition of Maison Rustique, which was revised and edited by Gervase Markham. As a exact transliteration, some words like wet are written vvet. In this period, if the typesetter ran out of the w letters, they could improvise by using vv instead. All…
Bread Recipes to Practice Working out the Recipe in Bakers Math.
I am posting these recipes to be used as part of my talk on recipes, March 17, 2022. However, anyone coming across this page at any time are encouraged to take a stab at converting these recipes to bakers math. In bakers math, flour is always 100%. The other ingredients are expresses as a percentage…
Hannah Glasse French Bread
Hannah Glasse wrote her brilliant The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in the 1740s. She is the first author to make the promise we know so well—I will show you how easy it is to make good food! Her 1740s work remained in print well into the following century. Through multiple editions, and…
Eliza Acton Household Bread, 1857, a bread of today
HOUSEHOLD BREAD By the time Eliza Acton began writing bread recipes, there was a very established bread recipe tradition. The tradition was to write the bread recipe out as a narrative. Basically, bread recipes were texts answering the question, how do you make bread? While this recipe is primarily a narrative, the ingredients are pulled…
“Cheat Bread”—Gervase Markham’s Everyday Loaf from 1614, an Urtext
“Cheat” bread is a bread that would be in great favor today. It is a bread that was made with a slightly less refined flour than the super white manchet, or even than the more workaday period standard white bread. Manchet flour was, ideally, bolted twice—sifted and then sifted again to only retain the whitest,…
William Rubel 