John Cochrane’s portrait dating to the 1780s doesn’t suggest suggest someone who was passionate about bread. He kind of looks like a stuffed shirt sitting there with his wig and frilly collar and cuffs. He is a good one to apply the adage, Don’t judge a book by its over. Cochrane’s Seaman’s Guide was published…
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.
Dozens of Bread Shapes from Ancient Greece!
This paper documents and reproduces images of dozens of terracotta bread figurines excavated from a Sanctuary of Demeter and Kora on Acrocorinth. I think that most of these would have been maza, barley cakes. This is reference material for my November 22, 2021 talk on the breads of ancient Greece. Whenever you find this page…
Greek Breads Part 1
These are the recipes for my Bread History Seminar #27, Introduction to the breads of Ancient Greece, November 11, 2021. This week we are making easy breads and are not stressing authenticity in baking method or getting too finicky with the flour. We will get more focused on detail in the next talk on Greek…
Athenaeus’ “Cappadocian” Bread circa 300 CE
“The Greeks use the term “soft” for a type of bread prepared with a little milk, oil, and just enough salt; you need to make the dough soft and spongy. This type of bread is called Cappadocian, since soft bread is for the most part produced in Cappadocia.” From “Deipnosophistae” Book III circa 300 CE…
Rethinking Weeds
What is a weed? Most people define a weed as a plant that is out of place. This is what everyone I have asked has responded. And this is generally what one finds online. When thinking about weeds and gardens it is helpful to think of the garden as being surrounded by a wall. At…
Recipes for Seminar #23 — An English Bread Manuscript from the 1550s.
Recipes for Bread History Seminar #23 Recipes from the Manuscript by T. (only name we have so far), circa 1550 I am posting this Tuesday evening, April 20. I will be revising this text prior to the workshop, but this will give you enough to get started. I would like to acknowledge Jeff Pavlik. He…
Recipes for the Introduction to Egyptian Bread Seminar #22 & Revised for #24
The ancient Egyptian bread that is most often the focus of recreation is the molded conical loaf. Working out how to bake conical loaves in clay molds on an open fire is not a challenge that fits into my interest in historic breads. For me, it is a too specialized product. Emmer and barely are…
The Quartern Loaf : Recipe for William Rubel Bread History Seminar #21, March 25, 2021
The thing about the Quartern Loaf is that as far as I can tell, it is the one of the most important British breads. But, but be honest, before focusing on the bread for this talk, I had thought of it as a super minor bread. One of n real importance. I was wrong. This…
The Quartern Loaf Seminar, Thursday, March 25, 2021
“Just bread.” That is how to think of the Quartern Loaf. It was “just bread.” A workaday loaf. Nothing to write home about. Nothing special. Like the American peanut butter and jelly sandwich, its importance cannot be found by surveying cookbooks. The Quarern is defined by its size. It weighed 4 1/4 pounds. In its…
More fruit trees
More fruit trees in bloom along California Interstate 5 that runs up the state’s Central Valley. On one side of the valley is the Pacific Range — the low mountains that hug the Pacific Ocean from Mexico up into Canada — and on the other, the Sierra Nevada, rising beyond 4,000 meters and marking the…
William Rubel 