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 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,…

A Recipe from Cato that Requires Common Sense

A Very Basic Early Bread Recipe Recipe for kneaded bread: wash both your hands and a bowl thoroughly. Pour flour into the bowl, add water gradually, and knead well. When it is well kneaded, roll it out and bake it under an earthenware lid. -Cato, On Agriculture, 74 [check] De Agri Cultura (On Farming or On Agriculture[1]),…

An Early White Roll Recipe: 1594

I think it fair to say that the two recipes in The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594) are the first fully fleshed out English language cookbook bread recipes intended for humans. In the 1570s, William Harrison, in the spirit of the Roman author Cato, included bread recipes in the history of England volume…

Rubel Spring 2022 Bread History Seminar Series

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…