Part of a Zoom Seminar, Thursday, March 27, 2025: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rubel-seminar-finding-a-focus-to-bread-culture-in-two-neolithic-breads-tickets-1260147578329?aff=oddtdtcreator Note: I will be re-testing this weekend – March 22 & 23 updating as tests suggest modifying the approaches outlined here. Wm. These two breads were described by Andreas Heiss in his paper on two breads found at the Parkhaus Opéra, Zurich, Switzerland, Late Neolithic…
Category: Bread Seminar
William Rubel’s 45th Bread History Seminar: Finding Focus to Bread Culture in Two Neolithic Breads
Register at EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seminar-45-finding-a-focus-to-bread-culture-in-two-neolithic-breads-tickets-1260147578329?aff=oddtdtcreator Join me, along with other bread and grain lovers, for my 45th Thursday Bread History Seminar on March 27, at 9:00 am Pacific. We’ll recreate recipes I’ve developed utilizing the archeologist Andreas Heiss’ analysis of the breads. We will taste them, and then talk about where these breads fit into the…
Two Breads from a Late Neolithic Swiss Community Described by the Archeobotanist, Andreas Heiss.
I am posting the PDF of the paper that describes two breads, one, a coarse barely bread, and the other, a more refined bread made of a mixed grains, barley and wheat. The later bread was flavored with an expensive seed, that of the wild parsley. This is the clean science story. How do we…
An Experimental Recipe for an Historic Pumpernickel
Join me in attempting to bake a pumpernickel that is black through-and-through. Please post your results in the comments, and also on my Facebook Group, Bread History and Practice. Note: Just after publishing this on January 2, 2024, I discovered that I can read Carin Getner’s book, “Pumpernickel: Das Schwartz Brot Der Westfalen” 1991 through…
A Rare Egyptian Stamped Bread
This is an important Egyptian bread. While it is rarely reproduced. As far as I am aware, this is the only surviving Egyptian bread whose entire surface is marked with a stamped pattern. I would put this into a class of “stamped breads.” This is the only example I know of of a surviving bread…
A Working Recipe for Ancient Egyptian Bread
Pharaonic bakers made bread with emmer flour and/or barley. Only. This was true until at least roughly 350BCE. Most breads were made with emmer, which is a species of wheat. It is makes a flour that has different properties from that for common bread wheat. Egyptians were aware of common bread wheat as that is…
1893 Comparison of American Bread with English Bread.
I just came across this very interesting comment on the difference between bread in England and the United States in the 1890s. The writer, Helen Campbell, goes to England to look for recipes for a cookbook she is writing. She notes that English breads were dense compared with American breads of the period. The American…
Interpreting the colors in Egyptian Tomb Paintings.
These paintings from a tomb in what is now Luxor, Egypt, were painted to help the man for whom the tomb was built survive in the afterlife. These paintings were understood to stand in for real breads. What we do not know is how closely the paintings keep to actual practice. Was any artistic license…
Perspective in Egyptian Bread Paintings
This painting, in tomb TT69, may offer us a way to understand the perspective the artist used in depicting breads on offering tables. What you see here is a common concept in tomb and temple art. The depiction of foodstuffs, often with bread on the bottom layer, displayed on an offering table. The offering tables…
Detail from an Egyptian Pharaonic era tomb painting. Can this image help us read the perspective? Are the breads depicted standing upright, on one edge?