Ezekiel Bread, Book of Ezekiel, Torah

Ezekiel’s Vision, William Blake, (1803-05) There are many interpretation of “Ezekiel Bread” online, in cookbooks, and even in commercial products. While the most vocal interpretation is that it is a sprouted grain bread, all of the interpretations are for breads presented as being wonderful, good tasting breads. Reading the text taking into account period culture,…

American Bread Recipes from the 19th Century

These recipes were originally posted for people attending my Bread History and Practice Seminar #68 on American Bread, December 15, 2022. If you are attending the seminar, please make one of the breads that I am posting here so that we all have some experience with the taste and texture of the bread. Insights can…

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…

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….

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…

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…