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…
Category: Bread Recipes
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…
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…
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…
Gluten!
Gluten! Gluten, the protein structure in wheat flour that makes it possible for a pizzaiolo to toss pizza dough into the air in order to stretch it; the fine balloon-like network of bubbles that makes white wheat bread the bread with the biggest potential air bubbles baked into a finished loaf. Gluten can be developed…
Salt Rising Bread Recipes and Instructions
Jenny Bardwell, Guest Speaker Bread History Seminar #20 February 18, 2021 9am Pacific: 6pm Belgium: 9:30pm Bangalore SALT RISING BREAD (made with potatoes + cornmeal or garbanzo) Yield: 2 loaves STARTER: Slice 2-3 potatoes (with the peel) into a quart mason jar. Add 1 tablespoon of cornmeal, 1 tablespoon of garbanzo flour (optional), and…
William Rubel 