Bread History Seminars – William Rubel

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?

Rubel Spring 2022 Bread History Seminar Series

This Spring 2022 seminar series taking us from Seminar #29 through #34 starts with an in depth look at the history of written bread recipes starting with Ancient Egypt and ending in the late 19th century. There are three talks in my “close reading” series where I read from historic texts and then talk about…

Seminar #28 The Fabulous Breads of John Cochrane, 1797

John Cochrane’s portrait dating to the 1780s doesn’t suggest suggest someone who was passionate about bread. He kind of looks like a stuffed shirt sitting there with his wig and frilly collar and cuffs. He is a good one to apply the adage, Don’t judge a book by its over. Cochrane’s Seaman’s Guide was published…