My bread roots

My bread baking was inspired by my mother. In the eighth grade I had to do a home-ec project. At the time I think she was considering becoming a bread baker - she was a great home cook and this would be a new skill for her. She provided me with cookbooks and I baked a different kind of bread every week for six or eight weeks.

The whole family enjoyed the bread and one of the breads from my project, Monte Carlo Bread, a white bread with cardamom and currants, became her signature bread. I still have the cookbook in which we found the recipe -

   

And here's the Monte Carlo bread recipe:

She tried a few other breads along the way but always had Monte Carlo bread in her freezer, wrapped to give away to any friend who dropped by, any repairman who came to work on something in the house, or to toast for us for breakfast.

I did the home-ec project in the 8th grade, so she started baking bread after that and was an eager bread baker during my high school years (1962 - 1966). Somewhere in there when I was 15, she ordered sourdough starter that was 100 years old, from San Francisco. She kept that starter going all the rest of her life.

When she died in 2015, she had not been cooking or baking much at all in the last few years of her life. She was 93 when she died. When my sister and I went to Mississippi to begin cleaning out the house, I found a quart jar on the back porch. It was not in the refrigerator and was black, black, black on the inside.

I stared at the jar as I realized that it was her "100 year-old starter," now 152 years old. The starter had been sitting unrefrigerated probably for three or so years on a hot Mississippi screened back porch. I picked up the jar and headed for the kitchen.

Using some hot water around the lid and all of my strength, I screwed open the canning lid and lifted it off. A smell worse than the sewer poured into the room and could be experienced throughout the house. Totally gross and beyond decrepit, the starter seemed all but lost. I was not daunted, though and spooned the black goo out and into the garbage disposal. 

In the very center of the jar, in the heart of the smelly stuff, was some pure white sourdough starter still remaining. While my sister opened every nearby window to try to get rid of the odor, I put the white starter into a plastic bag and triple bagged it before taking it home with me to Atlanta.

In my Atlanta kitchen, I divided the starter into about eight or nine bowls and added 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water to each bowl. I covered the bowls with a wet kitchen towel and left home to go to work for the day. When I walked into my kitchen at the end of the day, it was like the monster that had eaten my kitchen!

Delighted to be fed and relishing the opportunity finally to have food, the starter yeast had gone rogue and bubbled all over my counters. 

I was THRILLED. So I bottled up the starter and began feeding it regularly. I now use it every single week to make the best ever bread with natural yeast.

A number of years ago, I read Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn. He studied sourdough starter and said that it contains microbes from every place it has been. As a result, everyone's starter is unique.

I love thinking that every time I make sourdough bread, my mother's microbes and the microbes from her Mississippi kitchen are mixing with my microbes and those in my Atlanta kitchen as well as with the original microbes from San Francisco 155 years ago.