One apparently common bread during the pharaonic period was a bread shaped in the form of an equilateral triangle and painted white. The example here is from the the downtown Egyptian Museum. Note the white covering and the areas where the white has chipped off. The equilateral triangle was an important shape in ancient Egypt….
Author: William Rubel
I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.
Egyptian Text: The Inundation
Joy over the Inundation They tremble, that behold the Nile in full flood. The fields laugh and the river-banks are overflowed. The god’s offerings descend, the visage of men is bright, and the heart of the gods rejoiceth. Pyramid Tex circa 2500 BCE. The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Adolf Erman, Ed. Aylward M. Blackman,…
A Rare Egyptian Stamped Bread
This is an important Egyptian bread. While it is rarely reproduced. As far as I am aware, this is the only surviving Egyptian bread whose entire surface is marked with a stamped pattern. I would put this into a class of “stamped breads.” This is the only example I know of of a surviving bread…
A Working Recipe for Ancient Egyptian Bread
Pharaonic bakers made bread with emmer flour and/or barley. Only. This was true until at least roughly 350BCE. Most breads were made with emmer, which is a species of wheat. It is makes a flour that has different properties from that for common bread wheat. Egyptians were aware of common bread wheat as that is…
1893 Comparison of American Bread with English Bread.
I just came across this very interesting comment on the difference between bread in England and the United States in the 1890s. The writer, Helen Campbell, goes to England to look for recipes for a cookbook she is writing. She notes that English breads were dense compared with American breads of the period. The American…
Egyptian Tomb Bread : An example of variety in shape and surface decoration.
This magnificent row of breads is a detail of a painting of offerings in the Theban Necropolis Tomb TT3. This painting is strikingly beautiful. Imagine walking into a bakery seeing a display of breads that looks like this. For me, at least, a dream. Bakeries in Paris tend to display breads with the top crust…
Interpreting the colors in Egyptian Tomb Paintings.
These paintings from a tomb in what is now Luxor, Egypt, were painted to help the man for whom the tomb was built survive in the afterlife. These paintings were understood to stand in for real breads. What we do not know is how closely the paintings keep to actual practice. Was any artistic license…
Perspective in Egyptian Bread Paintings
This painting, in tomb TT69, may offer us a way to understand the perspective the artist used in depicting breads on offering tables. What you see here is a common concept in tomb and temple art. The depiction of foodstuffs, often with bread on the bottom layer, displayed on an offering table. The offering tables…
Detail from an Egyptian Pharaonic era tomb painting. Can this image help us read the perspective? Are the breads depicted standing upright, on one edge?
Ezekiel Bread, Book of Ezekiel, Torah
Ezekiel’s Vision, William Blake, (1803-05) There are many interpretation of “Ezekiel Bread” online, in cookbooks, and even in commercial products. While the most vocal interpretation is that it is a sprouted grain bread, all of the interpretations are for breads presented as being wonderful, good tasting breads. Reading the text taking into account period culture,…
William Rubel 