TheBanyanTree: quarantine sourdough

[tobie at shpilchas.net]

Wednesday, May 27, 2020


Say Julie,

	I have to thank you from the bottom of my (bottomless) heart for writing your dissertation on sourdough starter.  What a Godsend your post is!  My mom (remember her? just turned 100) kept hinting that she really really truly likes sourdough bread.  The silent message was clear that I should launch into a sourdough starter project.  I want you to know that I resisted because I know a little bit about sourdough starter futures and I already have too many people to take care of. Adding a growing doughy orphan wasn’t something I was willing to undertake.

	And it’s not that there is no sourdough bread around here.  San Francisco and environs are where the best of it is made.  Something about the fog and climate and probably the ambient bacteria, spores, infinitesimally tiny things that go bump in the night.  The stores (which I haven’t been in nor seen for nearly three months) are or used to be full of sourdough bread of all sizes, shapes and styles.  I’ve heard legends about master bakers from all over the world who have made pilgrimages here to beg a few tablespoons of real San Francisco sourdough starter off the local bakers who take it all for granted. I’m sure our bakers are standing around, shifting their weight and twiddling thumbs while the sourdough loaves and rings and batards and baguettes and fascinating wedding cakes expand all around them. In fact, here in the bay area, we are used to being pursued by quick growing sourdough as we retreat down quaint alleyways (bay area is full of quaint alleyways) running for our lives.  People have gone missing.  Occasionally, a missing persons case is closed when a local discovers a scarf, brooch or shoe in the rustic loaf they are tearing into at dinner.

	My mom is having trouble with her taste buds.  It’s medication probably, though her age could certainly be a contributing factor. Dysgeusia: distorted taste. Things don’t taste the way they should. Sometimes they taste foul and sometimes just wrong — she will report, "this is too salty," when no salt whatever was put into it.  Or, "All I can taste in the cottage cheese is sweet."  "Too spicy," when not a scintilla of capsicum or isothiocyanate was sneaked into the food.  Generally, the commentary I hear when she’s facing yet another gourmet meal from the chef in residence is, "YEUCH!"  Warms my heart (the bottomless one). 

	But she soldiers on, asking for things she fancies will taste like they did when she was 17 and swooned over her mother’s "shrimp wiggle," or as she remembers that peanut butter and pickle relish sandwich her aunt Anne used to love so much. Every time, the disappointment she expresses is tragic.  It’s not just that it didn’t taste like she remembered; that’s bad enough. It’s that she keeps trying to recapture that "It’s It," she got at Playland at the Beach in 1940. She has me doing summersaults trying to replicate food she loved in hopes that her taste buds will come alive and behave, please and delight her the way they always did.  But it isn’t the popcorn or the sweet and sour stuffed cabbage or any particular food she wants.  I tell (warn) her that nothing is going to taste like it did, not even if her taster were operating perfectly, because what she remembers is not just the taste, but the era, the mood, the people she was with and the conversation they were having, the friendships and anticipations, the room she sat in and plate she ate off of.  It’s not recapturable.  The era has long passed, the mood existed once, the people are all dead so she's the only one who remembers the conversation.  The room she sat in? San Francisco, since the tech boom, has been utterly transformed. It is no longer the quirky loving place it was when Emperor Norton roamed the downtown paying with his personally minted illegal tender, being hailed and revered as an eccentric. He’d get arrested off the streets now and people would rush past him quickly, on their way to make some fat money.  Downtown is skyscrapers on the San Andreas fault. Some of the neighborhoods still retain their character. But even the Castro is corporate now: extremely predictable outrageous gay people no longer able to outrage anyone (they do keep trying).

	Taste can’t be summoned.  Sourdough starter was just another in a long long series of requests for something that will resurrect her love of food.  She loved food. Loved it. We three siblings actually developed neuroses from the obsession with food, too much food and then the battle to lose weight.  Sad? Eat something.  Happy? Celebrate with food.  Bored? You know what to do; the refrigerator is over there. People coming over? Get out the big guns.  Now we have to keep her weight up, the irony being that now that she could eat anything she ever wanted, everything she had to resist all her life, now that she can …. she can’t.  

	I didn’t know how to tell her that I wasn’t willing to tend a sourdough starter. I’m overwhelmed entirely as it is. Not sure she sees that, but does it matter? I won’t have to remind her. I can just print out your post and hand it to her. She’ll get it.  Not one molecule missing from her brain.  

I write too much.

Love,


Tobie


> On May 27, 2020, at 7:29 AM, Theta Brentnall <tybrent at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I had a sourdough starter years ago. Someone gave it to me (which is another way to deal with the excess, apparently, although some recipients may never speak to you again.). Make bread, they said. It’s easy, they said. After tending the starter, which I never got around to naming, and baking “bread” which could be used for doorstops, one day I dumped the whole thing in the trash and never looked back. So, nope, no sourdough starter for me. 
> 
> Theta
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On May 26, 2020, at 3:02 PM, Teague, Julie Anna <jateague at indiana.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> I swore I'd never. I didn't need another damn mouth to feed.  People give them names like they are children and I'm still recovering from getting my sons launched, and now I have a dog and a husband (two things I also swore I'd never have) and although people have tried to lure me in for years, I've resisted all their photos of beautiful loaves of sourdough bread because I didn't want to make or feed a sourdough starter. Life is complicated enough.
>> 
>> 
>> Then came the coronavirus and now I'm home all the damn time, working but also looking at instagram and reading blogs and remembering the young woman who dreamed of sustainability and homesteading because, having no money and two young children, she was home all the damn time. That woman grew strawberries, made jam, canned tomatoes, kept chickens, hung her laundry on a line, and baked bread.  Who was she again, that lovely young thing with the long hair and strong back?  In our family we suffer the curse of being very in touch with our inner five year old, our inner twelve year old, our inner thirty-five year old, even while our outsides wither with age, our knees give out, and our backs hurt.  I guess that's my excuse.  During this time, I've  channeled my inner thirty-five year old who was more in tune with the slow movement of the days and the seasons and all the possibilities that some healthy effort could bring.  I planted strawberries, radishes, tomatoes, the ever-popular zucch
>> ini, and a whole host of other flowers, herbs, and vegetables.  I dug and weeded and mulched and nurtured until I don't have room for one more thing in my garden.  Looking around, all pleased with myself but still stuck at home and not much to do in the garden now except pull weeds and wait, I got sourdough envy and made a sourdough starter.  Her name is June.  June is a week old today.  She's bubbly and full of life.
>> 
>> 
>> Here's the main problem with a sourdough starter.  Yes, it requires regular feeding, but, ok, I'm here all day every day, I can feed the damn thing.  There are days when I resent feeding the husband or even feeding myself, but June's feedings are not ordeals of heat and chopping and timing and sink fulls of dirty dishes.  However, each time June is fed, a certain amount must be siphoned off into the "discard" pile.  I straight up hate discarding food of any sort.  The husband and I got into a big row just a couple of weeks ago because his impending mental decrepitude caused him to re-buy fresh vegetables and bread, all the same things, three times in one week, meaning that food was rather unsuccessfully wedged into the fridge and was going to go to waste.  We had four heads of broccoli.  I like broccoli just fine, but we'd have had to eat it every day.  Roasted broccoli, steamed broccoli, broccoli pancakes. When he left one day, I cleared out a bunch of stuff and gave it to my son.  
>> We had enough to feed two families, and then some.  You can see my dilemma as I moved over half of the sourdough starter, June, into another container which was supposed to be discarded, while mentally calculating how many starving people that flour would have fed.
>> 
>> 
>> This must be a common malady because the website for the starter also has recipes to use up the "discard" starter, all of them baked buttery goodness which I do not need right now, having already gained my quarantine ten and working on my nobody-is-wearing-their-fucking-mask-anymore fifteen.   This, in a nutshell, is the thing--sourdough starter (and discard) forces you to waste or bake.   I'm not a waster, so I bake.  And it's hot.  And we can't possibly eat it all.  I've baked discard muffins and discard biscuits and looking at a recipe for waffles.  I feel the guilt radiating from the top of the stove where June and the discard sit,  bubbling away and making more of them selves all the time.   I'm baking things to give away, and while I don't mind doing that, it's a hot job.
>> 
>> 
>> The whole process does slow down, and I'm just about ready to pop the thing into the fridge if I can find a spot.  (Husband repeated his over-purchasing even after the argument because I'm pretty sure he didn't remember the argument, much less the reason for it.)  Then I can feed and use some of the starter for baking once a week instead of twice a day.  June is just about mature enough that I can stop worrying about her multiple times a day--a stage of development I'll never get to with my kids.  Maybe then I'll be glad to have gone through it.  I'll gladly bake my loaf of sourdough bread or make my sourdough pizza crust with no yeastie beasties needed.  The world could go crazy (crazier?) and yeast could be as rare as arborio rice (do you have any kind of short-grain rice where you live?  It doesn't exist in Bloomington, Indiana, anymore), and I'll be happy to have my starter.
>> 
>> 
>> Julie
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
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"What are you?"
c.1951, Silver Spring Maryland
standard introduction line in the schoolyard



Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>