Today, as part of my work on the glossary section of the history of bread I’m writing for UC Press, I have been researching the British Northern dialect term knodden cake, and its Standard English parallel, kneaded cake. I’m still working on the words and can today only say that I think they were enriched…
Category: Bread
A Georgian Tandoor Oven
This photograph, taken by Reaktion Books publisher Michael Leaman in Tiblisi, Georgia, very clearly shows that the top of the oven is angled so that breads stuck to its side will receive direct radiant heat from the embers or fire at the bottom of the oven. If you build a tandoor oven I would use…
Peruvian Watia Oven made with Spaded Soil
The impromptu Peruvian oven that is is built in the Peruvian highlands to bake potatoes can easily be adapted to bake bread. While the Peruvian watia dome is heated and then collapsed onto the potatoes, one can use the form to bake bread the usual way. The Peruvian potato oven is constructed in situ with…
Bread in Italy circa 1894
I was searching Google Books for information on military bread ovens in the 19th century, a process my girlfriend refers to as “wooden cowing,” and came across this sketch regarding bread in Italy circa 1894. It was written by Olive May Eager, a minor American writer who lived in Italy and seems to have supported…
A Simple Military Clay Oven circa 1895
Armies march on their stomachs. Historically, this often meant that armies marched with their bakeries. Military field manuals are a source of information in simple impromptu oven construction. The simplest oven is the item 496: An oven may be excavated in a clay bank (Fig. 6) and used at once. Few of us have sloped…
Building a Mud Oven with Soil/Concrete
The ovens demonstrated here are based on designs from the Jewish Moroccan community in Israel. They were built at the Jewish Moroccan Museum and Archive for Living Culture at Moshav Sedot Micah, a village in the center of Israel. There is a profound way in which these ovens are traditional constructions. The ovens are built…
The Dislike for the Sour Taste in Bread (1903)
LEAVEN is nothing more nor less than flour and water, stirred together and kept in a warm place until fermentation commences. Every time the baker makes bread, a certain quantity should be kept back in an earthen pot for the next sponge. The use of leaven is supposed to have originated in Egypt. It is…
Making Tortillas from Nixtamal
Bear with this grainy video. It is shot in low light with a simple camera. The video documents two women making tortillas on a clay griddle (a comal) fired with branches from masa (dough) that is prepared from nixtamal (whole corn kernels boiled with lime (cal in Spanish) and ground on a grindstone (matate). The…
An American Apple Bread circa 1860
A very light pleasant bread is made in France by a mixture of apples and flour, in the proportion of one of the former to two of the latter. The usual quantity of yeast is employed as in making common bread, and is beat with flour and warm pulp of the apples after they have…
Fry Bread
Many Native American tribes have adopted fry bread as their national bread. In this video Naomi Good Shield from the Lakota demonstrates her version of the bread in a thorough well-paced documentary. Note the detail that she does not want it to puff up in a ball, like a pita bread, and so she puts…
William Rubel 