This story was told me by Donald “Babu” Zakayo, of Wamba, Kenya in the mid to late 1990s along with several other stories, a few of which I offer here. The edited transcription is mine. OMAR WAS NOT crazy before. When he was eighteen he was a little bit crazy, but the Muslim took care…
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.
The Two Sons
This story was told me by Donald “Babu” Zakayo, of Wamba, Kenya in the late 1990s along with several other stories, a few of which I offer here. The edited transcription is mine. THE OLD MAN was very very old. He had two sons. Only. He was not rich. He was poor. Yes, he was…
Stories from Wamba, Kenya
Babu’s stories center on the life in the Samburu district of Northern Kenya. They are about the villagers of Wamba, and about the Samburu who live in the countryside with their cattle — their goats, cows, sheep, and camels. I first recorded stories by Babu, the owner along with his mother, Rose, of the now…
Bread in Italy circa 1894
I was searching Google Books for information on military bread ovens in the 19th century, a process my girlfriend refers to as “wooden cowing,” and came across this sketch regarding bread in Italy circa 1894. It was written by Olive May Eager, a minor American writer who lived in Italy and seems to have supported…
A Simple Military Clay Oven circa 1895
Armies march on their stomachs. Historically, this often meant that armies marched with their bakeries. Military field manuals are a source of information in simple impromptu oven construction. The simplest oven is the item 496: An oven may be excavated in a clay bank (Fig. 6) and used at once. Few of us have sloped…
Building a Mud Oven with Soil/Concrete
The ovens demonstrated here are based on designs from the Jewish Moroccan community in Israel. They were built at the Jewish Moroccan Museum and Archive for Living Culture at Moshav Sedot Micah, a village in the center of Israel. There is a profound way in which these ovens are traditional constructions. The ovens are built…
The Dislike for the Sour Taste in Bread (1903)
LEAVEN is nothing more nor less than flour and water, stirred together and kept in a warm place until fermentation commences. Every time the baker makes bread, a certain quantity should be kept back in an earthen pot for the next sponge. The use of leaven is supposed to have originated in Egypt. It is…
Hearth Cooking at Plimoth Plantation
What you see here is a woman cooking in an iron pot over a fire. It is hard to see, but the iron pot is hanging over the fire from an iron hook. The woman in the photograph is stirring the fire. This pot has three short legs so it can also stand on the…
Making Tortillas from Nixtamal
Bear with this grainy video. It is shot in low light with a simple camera. The video documents two women making tortillas on a clay griddle (a comal) fired with branches from masa (dough) that is prepared from nixtamal (whole corn kernels boiled with lime (cal in Spanish) and ground on a grindstone (matate). The…
How much amanita muscaria is safe to eat?
Detoxified Fly Agaric How much Amanita muscaria to is safe to eat? When you detoxify the “Fly Amanita” by leaching out the water soluble toxins by parboiling thinly sliced mushrooms in plentiful water for at least ten, and preferably fifteen minutes, you transform Amanita muscaria into a prime edible mushroom. Short of lab testing which…
William Rubel 