“William Rubel has made me rethink bread.” Abi Stokes reviewing my book Bread in Newcity Lit.

Thank you for visiting my website. I write about traditional foodways. I have written two books, The Magic of Fire (2002) and more recently Bread, a global history. I am interested in how life, culture, cooking and taste all work together. My current focus of research is the history of bread, although I regularly cook meals on my fireplace and am never far from hearth cooking.

This web site is my Web 2.0. I started a web site in the early 1990s but recently concluded that it was time start over. Perhaps rashly, I took the old site down and am now starting over.

My purpose in this revised site is to begin sharing research with you that isn’t going to fit neatly into books and articles. As will be evident as the site begins to bulk out again I have many interests, but I will let them speak for themselves as they reemerge onto the site. Comments and emails are always welcome. An initial focus of the new site are ethnographic videos of bread baking such as this one showing an Armenian woman baking in front of a simple oven. If you will be traveling soon to countries where there is still lost of baking in wood fired ovens, please write to me. Perhaps you’d be interested in documenting what you see in videos that we could then post.

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