Totally serendipitous find form a Google Books search. This is from the completely obscure “Soldier’s Vade Mecum; Or the Method of Curing the Diseases and Preserving Health in Soldiers” by Luca Antonia Prozio. In terms of diet, Ponzio seems to imagine Calabria as a kind of Arctic. A greasy bacon sandwich is the staple food….
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.
Cock Breads — 18th Century Breads for Fighting Cocks
The following text is from the “Royal Art of Cockfighting” by Robert Howlett, published in London, 1709. The portion of the text I reproduce here concerns the breads fed to fighting cocks — known in the period as cock-breads. A couple things I’d like you to note. Firstly, in the section, “Of the several Ways…
American Pullman Loaf, also called Sandwich Bread circa 1920
The Pullman Loaf , also often published under the more generic name, “Sandwich Bread,” is the classic American soft white crustless bread identified with morning toast, diner grilled cheese sandwiches, and school lunches. It became the focus of attention for the more industrial bakers in the first half of the twentieth century, whose industrial take…
Tandoor Oven 2,600 Years Ago
The tandoor oven (there are variant spellings) is ancient. There had been tandoor-style ovens for thousands of years before this terracotta figurine was made. The YouTube video that follows shows someone making an oven very similar to the one pictured above: There are lots of good YouTube and Vimeo videos that show baking in the…
Bread on a Spit: Fragment from Atheneus
ΕΓΧΕΙΡΟΓΑΣΤΟΡΕΣ From 6 Athenaeus 645bc ἐγὼ μὲν ἄρτους, μᾶζαν, ἀθάρην, ἄλφιτα,κόλλικας, ὀβελίαν, μελιτοῦτταν, ἐπιχύτους,πτισάνην, πλακοῦντας, δενδαλίδας, ταγηνίας. Fragments 6 I [have, provide] loaves of bread, barley cake, porridge, barley groats, rolls, bread on a spit, honey cake, cupcakes, barley gruel, flat-cakes, barley cakes, pancakes. Reading in translation is always problematic. One has to trust the translator to have gotten it…
Male Bias in the History of Bread: Logo for Fleischmann’s Yeast
When The American yeast company, Fleischmann’s, had a pictorial logo in the first decades of the twentieth-century, they made it male. From the Neolithic and up until very recently, women were responsible for most of the process of producing bread. With the limited exception of baking bread in commercial operations and certain grain planting processes,…
Portable Oven — Campaign Oven — Dutch Oven
The impromptu oven is beyond ancient. This said, in terms of the history of bread, its documented history is recent. The documented history only goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. If you know of something earlier, then please share in your comments. The biggest literature on impromptu ovens prior to the Early Modern English…
Recipes for Bread History Seminar #14, Domestication of the Bread Grains
Natufian & Pre Pottery Neolithic The first breads were made by Natufian hunter gatherers around 14,000 years ago. Naatufians are the people in southwest Asia that we know for sure first utilized bread grains for bread. We know this because we have proof in the form of archeological remains. Natufians, and the early Neolithic peoples,…
Bread Recipes from the Assize of Bread, Late Medieval England for the Thursday, October 8, Bread History Seminar
Note: Please choose which of the three breads you will make for the Seminar/Workshop on October 8, 2020. Please weigh out the ingredients. We will mix and talk about the recipe after the formal lecture is completed. The English Assize laws dating to the Late Medieval Period, the 1100s and the 1200s, were very simple,…
Bread History Seminar/Baking Workshop #13: Assize for Bread
October 8, 2020. 9am Pacific Time. You can register through EventBrite for this Zoom event. I have been working on the Assize laws off and on for the last twenty years. I look forward to sharing my research with you. I will be talking about the Assize in its original Late Medieval structure, and in…
William Rubel 