[Sca-cooks] Baker's borax from the other side.

Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com
Wed Sep 25 12:21:23 PDT 2013


båraq or boureq (bakers' borax)

I suppose one could ask just how shiny their bread was if treated with borax and was it shinier in comparison to untreated items?
In Nasrallah's new edition of Delights from the Garden of Eden there's a full page that describes these "Medieval Leavens". See page 452.

It's very interesting to do a search on borax under the subject of cookery in the advanced search feature of Google Books.
At the turn of last century in 1903, borax was used for all sorts of remedies like curing one of freckles, washes for painful sunburns, washes for teeth and hair, poured down smelly drains, used to killed insects, and as a preservative for meat. It was mentioned as an adulterant in bread. The source here is Enquire Within Upon Everything.
The 1878 volume The Housewife's Companion: Compiled and Arranged by Henry M. Mathews ...

  writes that "Borax is the best cockroach exterminator known. This troublesome insect has a peculiar aversion to it, and will never return where it has once been scattered. As the salt is perfectly harmless to human beings, it is much to be preferred for this purpose….."

Would Charles Perry know? He talks about "Borax is sometimes called for in bread recipes" in his article "Three Medieval Arabic Cookbooks" for the Oxford Symposium Food in Motion: The Migration of Foodstuffs and Cookery Techniques ..., Volume 1 from 1981.

Johnna

On Sep 25, 2013, at 3:24 AM, David Friedman wrote:

> 
> One of my al-Warraq puzzles is baker's borax. It's chief use seems to have been to make bread loaves shiny. So instead of asking "does baking soda make bread shiny," baking soda being one possible guess for baker's borax, we could look at the question from the other side:
> What chemical that could have been available to al-Warraq would make bread shiny? Is there any such chemical that would also work as a chemical leavening? Alternatively, are there two chemicals, one of which makes bread shiny and one of which works as a leavening, that might have been found together in nature? snipped



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