William Rubel

William Rubel has been baking bread since he was eleven. He mills most of his own flour, bakes in his backyard wood-fired bread oven, and for the last six years has immersed himself in the history of bread. Rubel began his career as a culinary historian with his book on hearth cooking, The Magic of Fire, which Alice Waters calls the “indispensible guide to this lost art.” His recently published Bread, a global history, is the first of what he plans as a series of books on bread history. Of this first volume, Steven Kaplan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, refers to it as “engaging as well as controversial.” Drawing on years of bread-related travel, research in libraries and online databases, a scouring of museums for bread-related images and his own experiments in the kitchen, Rubel is redefining the accepted history of bread.

Besides bread and hearth cooking, Rubel, writes on varied culinary topics including wild mushrooms, eighteenth-century kitchen gardens, and the foodways of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. A stickler for historic accuracy, the combination of Rubel’s passion for culinary history and for contemporary ethnographic travel drives him to find sources of fresh inspiration for today’s cooks.

Rubel writes for Gastronomica, Mother Earth News, and the British journal Petits Propos Culinaires.