One apparently common bread during the pharaonic period was a bread shaped in the form of an equilateral triangle and painted white. The example here is from the the downtown Egyptian Museum. Note the white covering and the areas where the white has chipped off. The equilateral triangle was an important shape in ancient Egypt….
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Egyptian Text: The Inundation
Joy over the Inundation They tremble, that behold the Nile in full flood. The fields laugh and the river-banks are overflowed. The god’s offerings descend, the visage of men is bright, and the heart of the gods rejoiceth. Pyramid Tex circa 2500 BCE. The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Adolf Erman, Ed. Aylward M. Blackman,…
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…
Egyptian Tomb Bread : An example of variety in shape and surface decoration.
This magnificent row of breads is a detail of a painting of offerings in the Theban Necropolis Tomb TT3. This painting is strikingly beautiful. Imagine walking into a bakery seeing a display of breads that looks like this. For me, at least, a dream. Bakeries in Paris tend to display breads with the top crust…
Egyptian Bread from Temple of Edfu
Edfu is a Ptolemaic Temple located in Edfu, Egypt. Edfu lies between Luxor and Aswan. It is most commonly visited by tourists arriving by boat on the Nile. For the bread obsessed, this temple is important for the variety of bread forms depicted in bas relief that are often very different from the styles found…
2 Subway. A New York Day, 1992.
Earlier, in the afternoon, another thin man, this one white, much older, wrinkled, missing front teeth, asked for money on the lower level of a subway station. He was unkept. He looked at me. And he said something. But I. I shook my head and he moved on, waddling, his legs far apart with crotch…
The Sweater
This story is based on an encounter with an elderly woman in Prague a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. An inflation had destroyed the savings of retirees. This woman is selling her possessions to survive. Sweater Prague, 1993 At the top of a wide stairway bringing subway passengers to a huge…
Starch Gelatinization and Starch Conversion to Sugar in Bread Dough
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…
Scalding Cornmeal: an American Baking Technique well into the 19th Century. Well worth reviving.
It was standard practice to scald cornmeal as the first step in American bread recipes that used cornmeal throughout most of the 19th century. Based on the extensive number of 19th century references to this method I think it is reasonable to impute the system back to the early use of cornmeal in the 17th…
Recipes for American Bread 1620-2022 Talk October 27, 20202
A fifteen minute period will be set aside for attendees to show and talk about historic American breads. You may work from your own recipes or use ones I suggest. I have not tested all of these – so might also look at other versions by searching on the recipe names and/or ingredients. Please keep…
William Rubel 