RYE AND INDIAN BREAD from Miss Leslie’s Directions for Cookery, 1840 This is a fabulous bread of a type that few of us have made. By volume, it is a 50/50 mix of rye and cornmeal. As with many 19th century American breads, it is mixed with milk. In this case, milk that has been…
American Bread Recipes from the 19th Century
These recipes were originally posted for people attending my Bread History and Practice Seminar #68 on American Bread, December 15, 2022. If you are attending the seminar, please make one of the breads that I am posting here so that we all have some experience with the taste and texture of the bread. Insights can…
Plaza. A New York Day, 1992
Night. Cold. A thin handsome black man with a mustache stands to the side of the Plaza Hotel. “Monday is a hard day for bums,” he says. I drop a quarter in his cup and walk on. Just behind, a woman in a long white cashmere coat approaches. “Monday is a hard day for bums,”…
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…
Raphael. A Story.
This is a story I wrote in 1992. It is based on my meeting a young Russian man in Trabazon, Turkey. Raphael His was the bright face who said a few words while I inspected three tin jumping frogs in the Russian Bazaar. A few days later he stops me at the market’s edge where…
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…
Miss Leslies Book of Household Management, 1840 “Rye and Indian” bread.
A mix of rye and cornmeal, “Indian,” in the vocabulary of 19th century American cookbooks, was a common bread in New England for most of the 19th century. Emily Dickinson won second prize for her version of this bread at an agricultural fair in Massachusetts in 1856. This bread pairs well with molasses which was…
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…
American Soda Bread
It was in the 1830s that leavening bread with an alkaline salt first became an important leavening. There was substantive uptake of this modern leavening — calcium carbonate mixed with muriatic acid was the first popular alkaline leavening for bread — in both Ireland and in United States. Less so elsewhere in the Anglophone world….
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 