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.

Raphael. A Story.

This is a story I wrote in 1992. It is based on my meeting a young Russian man in Trabazon, Turkey. Raphael His was the bright face who said a few words while I inspected three tin jumping frogs in the Russian Bazaar. A few days later he stops me at the market’s edge where…

Starch Gelatinization and Starch Conversion to Sugar in Bread Dough

For much of the 19th century, American breads, were often made with cornmeal and If you can get a bread dough into the gelatinizing temperature range appropriate a given bread grain — in the 19th century American context, rye, and corn — gelatinizes multiple changes will take place altering the taste and texture of the…

Miss Leslies Book of Household Management, 1840 “Rye and Indian” bread.

A mix of rye and cornmeal, “Indian,” in the vocabulary of 19th century American cookbooks, was a common bread in New England for most of the 19th century. Emily Dickinson won second prize for her version of this bread at an agricultural fair in Massachusetts in 1856. This bread pairs well with molasses which was…

Scalding Cornmeal: an American Baking Technique well into the 19th Century. Well worth reviving.

It was standard practice to scald cornmeal as the first step in American bread recipes that used cornmeal throughout most of the 19th century. Based on the extensive number of 19th century references to this method I think it is reasonable to impute the system back to the early use of cornmeal in the 17th…

American Soda Bread

It was in the 1830s that leavening bread with an alkaline salt first became an important leavening. There was substantive uptake of this modern leavening — calcium carbonate mixed with muriatic acid was the first popular alkaline leavening for bread — in both Ireland and in United States. Less so elsewhere in the Anglophone world….

Recipes for American Bread 1620-2022 Talk October 27, 20202

A fifteen minute period will be set aside for attendees to show and talk about historic American breads. You may work from your own recipes or use ones I suggest. I have not tested all of these – so might also look at other versions by searching on the recipe names and/or ingredients. Please keep…

Flatbread for Bread History Seminar #34

Flatbreads. The geography of bread is divided between the peoples of the loaf bread, and peoples of the flatbread. This last seminar of the Spring 2022 session is the second seminar devoted to flatbreads. The talk is being given by Mohad Ahmar Alvi. The subject concerns purity in Hindu bread culture. As there is a…

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…