BiblioVault - Books about Bread

Heinrich Boll

Northwestern University Press

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775

Steven Laurence Kaplan

Duke University Press, 1996

In preindustrial Europe, dependence on grain shaped every phase of life from economic development to spiritual expression, and the problem of subsistence dominated the everyday order of things in a merciless and unremitting way. Steven Laurence Kaplan’s The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 focuses on the production and distribution of France’s most important commodity in the sprawling urban center of eighteenth-century Paris where provisioning needs were most acutely felt and most difficult to satisfy. Kaplan shows how the relentless demand for bread constructed the pattern of daily life in Paris as decisively and subtly as elaborate protocol governed the social life at Versailles.
Despite the overpowering salience of bread in public and private life, Kaplan’s is the first inquiry into the ways bread exercised its vast and significant empire. Bread framed dreams as well as nightmares. It was the staff of life, the medium of communion, a topic of common discourse, and a mark of tradition as well as transcendence. In his exploration of bread’s materiality and cultural meaning, Kaplan looks at bread’s fashioning of identity and examines the conditions of supply and demand in the marketplace. He also sets forth a complete history of the bakers and their guild, and unmasks the methods used by the authorities in their efforts to regulate trade.
Because the bakers and their bread were central to Parisian daily life, Kaplan’s study is also a comprehensive meditation on an entire society, its government, and its capacity to endure. Long-awaited by French history scholars, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 is a landmark in eighteenth-century historiography, a book that deeply contextualizes, and thus enriches our understanding of one of the most important eras in European history.

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Bread

A Global History

William Rubel

Reaktion Books, 2011

It is difficult to think of a food more basic, more essential, and more universal than bread. Common to the diets of both the rich and the poor, bread is one of our oldest foods. Loaves and rolls have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and wheat has been found in pits where human settlements flourished 8,000 years ago. Many anthropologists argue that the ability to sow and reap cereals, the grains necessary for making bread, could be one of the main reasons why man settled in communities, and even today the concept of “breaking bread together” is a lasting symbol of the uniting power of a meal.

Bread is an innovative mix of traditional history, cultural history, travelogue, and cookbook. William Rubel begins with the amazing invention of bread approximately 20,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and ends by speculating on the ways in which cultural forces and advances in biotechnology may influence the development of bread in the twenty-first century. Rubel shows how simple choices, may be responsible for the widespread preference for wheat over other bread grains and for the millennia-old association of elite dining with white bread. He even provides an analysis of the different components of bread, such as crust and crumb, so that readers may better understand the breads they buy. With many recipes integrated with the text and a glossary covering one hundred breads, Bread goes well beyond the simple choice of white or wheat.

Here, general readers will find an approachable introduction to the history of bread and to the many forms that bread takes throughout the world, and bread bakers will discover a history of the craft and new ways of thinking that will inspire experimentation.

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Bread

A Memoir of Hunger

Lisa Knopp

University of Missouri Press, 2016

When Lisa Knopp was 54, she began tightly restricting what and how much she ate. A whisper, a shadow, or a flicker is what she wanted to become. When she finally realized that the severe restricting that had left her sick and small when she was 15 and 25 had returned when she was deep into middle age, she was full of urgent questions. Why did she respond to that which overwhelmed or threatened her by eating so little? How could she heal from a condition that is caused by a tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychological, economic, spiritual, and cultural forces? Are eating disorders and disordered eating in older women caused by the same factors as those in younger females? Or are they caused, in part, by the sorrows and frustrations of aging in a culture that sees midlife and beyond as a time marked by increasing deterioration, powerlessness, dependency, and irrelevance?

Knopp’s focus on eating disorders among older women makes Bread unique among “anorexia memoirs.” Most experts agree that about 10 percent of those with eating disorders are older women, though the number is surely higher, since most women who restrict, binge, or purge don’t meet the narrow diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge-eating disorder. And, too, many in this group disguise or misread their symptoms as being due to a health condition or changes associated with aging. For teenagers, symptoms usually manifest as a result of problems in their family of origin. But for older women, symptoms are more likely to manifest as a result of changes in the family they created, including divorce, infidelity, relationship conflicts, an empty nest, financial strains, a child with medical, emotional, or legal problems, and the demands of caring for a sick or aged parent, as well as their own health problems and fear of aging.

In her search for answers, Knopp read the research on eating disorders and imaginatively reentered those dark periods when she was self-starving. Bread, which is at once an illness, food, and spiritual memoir, will convince readers, both those who suffer from a conflicted relationship with food, weight, and self-image and those who do not, that eating disorders and disordered eating are about more than just food and weight. Indeed, they speak of our deepest hungers and desires and the various ways in which we can nourish and fill ourselves.

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Bread and Roses

Gender and Class Under Capitalism

Andrea D'Atri

Pluto Press, 2021

Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? This book is a journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, the Marxist feminist Andrea D'Atri traces the history of the women's and workers' movement from the French Revolution to Queer Theory. She analyzes the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. With the global working class made up of a disproportionate number of women, women are central in leading the charge for the next revolution and laying down blueprints for an alternative future. D’Atri makes a fiery plea for dismantling capitalist patriarchy.

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Bread and Tea

The Story of a Man from Karak

Ahmad Tarawneh

Michigan State University Press, 2017

In this post–Arab Spring novel, Ahmad Tarawneh tells the story of conflicting loyalties between two Jordanian brothers, one who serves in the Jordanian national security division, and another who belongs to an extremist militant Islamic group. With boldness, clarity, and an insider’s eye, Tarawneh addresses the root causes and circumstances that lead a desperate young Jordanian to be recruited into a terrorist organization, tempted by the lure of glory purported by a skillful, self-serving sheikh. The novel depicts the positive and negative forces that influence the two brothers in their soul-searching quests for self-actualization that lead to more questions than answers—questions many Arab youth still ask today, while engulfed in their own raging struggles over tradition, religion, modernity, and secularism. Readers find themselves on an intimate journey into the minds and hearts of the protagonists to witness the tragedy and absurdity of this conflict and the magnitude of the human destruction it leaves behind.

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Bread from Heaven

An Introduction to the Theology of the Eucharist

Bernhard Blankenhorn

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Bread from Heaven offers a contemporary theological synthesis on the Eucharist that brings together classical and critical biblical exegesis, debates on the early history of the Christian liturgy, patristic doctrine, the teachings offered by the Councils of Florence, Trent and Vatican II, and the Church’s lex orandi, all within a framework provided by the Eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas. The volume begins with Christ’s Bread of Life discourse in John 6, in light of the Old Testament theme of the manna, and the Synoptic accounts of the Last Supper. These biblical texts offer solid foundation for a theology of Eucharistic sacrifice, presence and Communion. It then continues with a historical and systematic study of the institution of the Eucharist by Christ, with special attention given to the emergence of the first Eucharistic prayers. Then follows a survey of key Christological and ecclesiological themes which undergird Eucharistic theology. The chapters on Eucharistic sacrifice and presence form the heart of the work. Here, the focus moves to key conciliar, patristic and Thomistic insights on these themes. Bread from Heaven clarifies misunderstandings of Eucharistic sacrifice and renders transubstantiation accessible to beginners. Blankenhorn concludes with a study of the consecration, the minister of the Eucharist and the fruits of communion. The chapter on the debate over the words of institution and the epiclesis gives a fresh perspective that integrates both eastern and western tradition. The study of the Eucharistic celebrant strikes a balance between a spirituality of the priest as acting in persona Christi and of the priest as praying in persona ecclesiae. The concluding chapter centers on the Eucharist’s unitive, mystical fruits in the Church. This textbook is ideal for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on Eucharistic theology. It also seeks to advance the debate on several controversial historical and speculative issues in sacramental theology.

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Bread, Justice, and Liberty

Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet's Chile

Alison J. Bruey

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

In Santiago's urban shantytowns, a searing history of poverty and Chilean state violence have prompted grassroots resistance movements among the poor and working class from the 1940s to the present. Underscoring this complex continuity, Alison J. Bruey offers a compelling history of the struggle for social justice and democracy during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath.

As Bruey shows, crucial to the popular movement built in the 1970s were the activism of both men and women and the coalition forged by liberation-theology Catholics and Marxist-Left militants. These alliances made possible the mass protests of the 1980s that paved the way for Chile's return to democracy, but the changes fell short of many activists' hopes. Their grassroots demands for human rights encompassed not just an end to state terror but an embrace of economic opportunity and participatory democracy for all.

Deeply grounded by both extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Bread, Justice, and Liberty offers innovative contributions to scholarship on Chilean history, social movements, popular protest and democratization, neoliberal economics, and the Cold War in Latin America.

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Bread of the Moment

Poems

David Sanders

Ohio University Press, 2021

A collection of poems about time, solitude, and wisdom that leads readers to hover between acceptance of and alienation from our fragility.

Bread of the Moment, the follow-up to David Sanders' Compass and Clock (Swallow Press, 2016), devotes keen attention to the porous nature of the past and how the unbidden evidence of ordinary life pervades the world, provoking a spectrum of moments from which to draw meaning and find solace. These poems, characterized by a mix of free and formal verse, depict quiet days at home or in nature, as well as close calls and brushes with death: chronic illness, a house fire, a car crushed by a boulder.

In this way, these poems amplify the fragility of the commonplace, a mystery from which we are, amid the noise of our everyday lives, sometimes estranged. Through this exploration, Sanders constructs a precarious balance between alienation and acceptance, striking a note at once recognizable and new.

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Bread Or Bullets

Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898

Joan Casanovas

University of Pittsburgh Press

The first thoroughly documented history of organized labor in nineteenth-century Cuba, this work focuses on how urban laborers joined together in collective action during the transition from slave to free labor and in the last decades of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba.

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Bread, Wine, and Money

The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral

Jane Welch Williams

University of Chicago Press, 1993

At Chartres Cathedral, for the first time in medieval art, the lowest register of stained-glass windows depicts working artisans and merchants instead of noble and clerical donors. Jane Welch Williams challenges the prevailing view that pious town tradesmen donated these windows. In Bread, Wine, and Money, she uncovers a deep antagonism between the trades and the cathedral clergy in Chartres; the windows, she argues, portray not town tradesmen but trusted individuals that the fearful clergy had taken into the cloister as their own serfs.

Williams weaves a tight net of historical circumstances, iconographic traditions, exegetical implications, political motivations, and liturgical functions to explain the imagery in the windows of the trades. Her account of changing social relationships in thirteenth-century Chartres focuses on the bakers, tavern keepers, and money changers whose bread, wine, and money were used as means of exchange, tithing, and offering throughout medieval society. Drawing on a wide variety of original documents and scholarly work, this book makes important new contributions to our knowledge of one of the great monuments of Western culture.

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Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Crescent Dragonwagon

University of Arkansas Press, 2021

For nearly two decades, Dairy Hollow House—a country inn and restaurant tucked into the Ozark Mountain resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas—welcomed guests from all over the world. Praised by the New York Times, Southern Living, Bon Appetit, and Good Morning America alike, the much-loved inn offered sparklingly fresh, innovative “nouveau’zarks” cuisine—respectful contemporary interpretations of local traditional cooking infused with seasonal ingredients. Although the famed inn is now closed, you can still enjoy the satisfying and life-affirming dishes by the James Beard Award–winning writer/restaurateur Crescent Dragonwagon in this thirtieth-anniversary edition of Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread, a story rich cookbook as gutsy and distinctive as a steaming bowl of Gumbo Zeb.

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Good Bread Is Back

A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

Steven Laurence Kaplan

Duke University Press, 2006

In Good Bread Is Back, historian and leading French bread expert Steven Laurence Kaplan takes readers into aromatic Parisian bakeries as he explains how good bread began to reappear in France in the 1990s, following almost a century of decline in quality. Kaplan describes how, while bread comprised the bulk of the French diet during the eighteenth century, by the twentieth, per capita consumption had dropped off precipitously. This was largely due to social and economic modernization and the availability of a wider choice of foods. But part of the problem was that the bread did not taste good. In a culture in which bread is sacrosanct, bad bread was more than a gastronomical disappointment; it was a threat to France's sense of itself. By the mid-1990s bakers rallied, and bread officially designated as "bread of the French tradition" was in demand throughout Paris. Kaplan meticulously describes good bread's ideal crust and crumb (interior), mouth feel, aroma, and taste. He discusses the breadmaking process in extraordinary detail, from the ingredients to the kneading, shaping, and baking, and even the sound bread should make when it comes out of the oven. Kaplan does more than tell the story of the revival of good bread in France. He makes the reader see, smell, taste, feel, and even hear why it is so very wonderful that good bread is back.

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Peace and Bread in Time of War

Jane Addams

University of Illinois Press, 2002

First published in 1922 during the "Red Scare," by which time Jane Addams's pacifist efforts had adversely affected her popularity as an author and social reformer, Peace and Bread in Time of War is Addams's eighth book and the third to deal with her thoughts on pacifism.

Addams's unyielding pacifism during the Great War drew criticism from politicians and patriots who deemed her the "most dangerous woman in America." Even those who had embraced her ideals of social reform condemned her outspoken opposition to U.S. entry into World War I or were ambivalent about her peace platforms. Turning away from the details of the war itself, Addams relies on memory and introspection in this autobiographical portrayal of efforts to secure peace during the Great War. "I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of other people that at length I confined all analysis of motives to my own," she writes. Using the narrative technique she described in The Long Road of Women's Memory, an extended musing on the roles of memory and myth in women's lives, Addams also recalls attacks by the press and defends her political ideals.

Katherine Joslin's introduction provides additional historical context to Addams's involvement with the Woman's Peace Party, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and her work on Herbert Hoover's campaign to provide relief and food to women and children in war-torn enemy countries.

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Science, Bread, and Circuses

Folkloristic Essays on Science for the Masses

Gregory Schrempp

Utah State University Press, 2014

In Science, Bread, and Circuses, Gregory Schrempp brings a folkloristic viewpoint to the topic of popular science, calling attention to the persistence of folkloric form, idiom, and worldview within the increasingly important dimension of popular consciousness defined by the impact of science.

Schrempp considers specific examples of texts in which science interpreters employ folkloric tropes—myths, legends, epics, proverbs, spectacles, and a variety of gestures from religious tradition—to lend credibility and appeal to their messages. In each essay he explores an instance of science popularization rooted in the quotidian round: variations of proverb formulas in monumental measurements, invocations of science heroes like saints or other inspirational figures, the battle of mythos and logos in parenting and academe, how the meme has become embroiled in quasi-religious treatments of the problem of evil, and a range of other tropes of folklore drafted to serve the exposition of science.

Science, Bread, and Circuses places the relationship of science and folklore at the very center of folkloristic inquiry by exploring a range of attempts to rephrase and thus domesticate scientific findings and claims in folklorically imbued popular forms.

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Staple Security

Bread and Wheat in Egypt

Jessica Barnes

Duke University Press, 2022

Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security, Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat, and the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. With rich ethnographic detail, she takes us into the worlds of cultivating wheat, trading grain, and baking, buying, and eating bread. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths to which people go to secure their consistent availability and quality.

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