This is the recipe and mise en place for my Zoom bread history seminar/workshop for Thursday, June 25, 2020, 9am Pacific Time. Please have the ingredients weighed out for the start of the seminar. Another Manner for Very Delicate Bread, by Louis Liger Le Ménage des Champs et Jardinier Francois, 1711 (pp. 16-17) Sometimes, when…
Category: Bread
Mise en Place for Flatbread Seminar/Workshop #6
This week I am introducing flatbreads through an introduction to the history of bread. This is just an introduction to flatbreads. I am planning further sessions just on flatbreads led by people who are more expert than I am. It looks like we will be able to organize a session on flatbreads from the Indian…
The Miller’s Thumb
Stone milling is the art of grinding grain into a meal, and then through sifting and re-grinding (and re-sifting), refining the product into the quality flour one wants for the finished product. While sifting determines the final quality of flour, the ratios of what is produced (and thus profit) depends heavily on the precision with which…
Making Pine Bark Bread
In most of Europe, bread made from bark was a famine food. It was more regularly eaten Europe’s far North. The “bark” in bark bread is actually the cambium layer that grows under the bark. Pine was a common tree to use for bark breads. The cambium layer is pealed from the tree, dried, and ground into…
Important American Rye Bread Blog
I would like to call your attention to Stanley Ginsberg’s rye bread blog, The Rye Baker. The recipes in the site are varied. The geographic region unusually large — from the Alps to the Baltics — and the recipe notation is impeccable. Stanley has a book, forthcoming as of this writing — The Rye Baker:…
Zadock Steele, starving, eats too much bread.
Zadock Steele was captured by Mohawk Indians allied with the British in a raid in Vermont in 1780. It was called the Royalton raid. Zadock was transferred to British custody and eventually escapes. Starving, he and a companion are taken in by a “poor widow”. In this short scene he describes over eating what she…
Flour Mills on the Seine, Paris
This is an eighteenth-century print of a flour mill floating on the Seine with Notre Dame in the background. Until well into the nineteenth century mills were attached bridges that crossed the Seine and smaller mills, like the one in this print, were actually small boats, or barges, attached to shore or anchored in the…
Yeasted Bread and Good Health
A wonderful massively interesting trade card for Warner’s Safe Yeast circa 1885-1890. To this day, companies sell products by creating fear and then offering a solution. This ad falls squarely in the fear mongering tradition. It would not have seemed so absurd to people in its own time. For hundreds of years dense bread was…
Flatbread with Olive Oil
I was at an event the other night at the California Academy of Sciences. Cocktail party talk. In that context I was asked what I am so often asked, “What is your favorite bread.” It sounds flip, but it is true. My favorite bread is the most recent one I’ve made.
Making Cake from Bread Dough circa 1880
I’ve been reading the bread section from The Thrift Book: A Cyclopaedia of Cottage Management, a British book published in the 1880s. It is interesting for being written during a transitional period in home baking when bakers were shifting to tinned breads. The recipe for a cake couldn’t be more different from modern bread and cake recipes…
William Rubel 