Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  There was one exception. My grandma Lois, for whom I was named, did not deign to cook—she was my mother’s mother in that regard—but she did, on special occasions, bake bread. Specifically, she baked Chicago Prison Loaf, a comically hard and dense but apparently nutritious substance that she had learned to produce working part-time at an industrial bakery that served the Illinois Department of Corrections. In my family, Chicago Prison Loaf was a joke—a grim surprise often wrapped up for Christmas in a box chosen for its resemblance to a nice sweater or a video game console. Grandma Lois did seem to genuinely enjoy eating it, toasted and slathered. The rest of us, we buttered the bread we bought at the grocery store.

  My high school cafeteria offered a rotating daily menu item, but I can assure you that I never chose it. Instead: fries, fries, two orders of fries! Fries so perfectly crisp they put fast-food fries to shame, fries crusted with salt and eaten one by one, fries not merely consumed but circulated as social currency: peace offerings, seductions. Four years in that cafeteria and I ate nothing but fries. The teenage body is a miracle. How did it scrounge from those sticks of burnt starch enough vitamins and minerals to sustain me, and not just sustain me but make me grow, and grow absurdly, grow six inches, grow boobs and hips? It was a disgusting diet. I realize that now. I bow down before that body.

  In college, I did not immediately realize that it was behind me. The summer before freshman year, the One Campus, One Book selection had converted me to vegetarianism, which meant the things I ate never seemed to fill me up. Armed with a dormitory meal plan, I consumed the equivalent of nine meals a day, all of them shaded brown, textured crispy. You would expect a vegetarian, perhaps, to eat vegetables; you would be disappointed. There was never on my tray a single tuft of green.

  I sat in various dorm rooms with my computer science cabal, plowing through problem sets, eating whole pizzas and so-called Spartan Sticks—named for the school’s mascot, and upon reflection, it may have been spelled Stix—which were just pizzas that omitted tomato sauce and compensated for its absence with more cheese and even more cheese and a flaky garlic powder that carried a hot chemical burn.

  Four years of this. By the end, I was a puffy caricature of myself. As my senior year started, I did finally realize that something had gone wrong; that the teenage machine had broken down, and that my body—desperate, pushed beyond any reasonable nutritional tolerances—was simply building new parts out of salt. I tried to improve my diet, but only in the most marginal and clueless ways. I stopped ordering whole pizzas and bought family-size tubs of hummus. I consumed baby carrots by the pound.

  Later, back in Southfield, I cleaned up my act somewhat. Before I was the number one eater at Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, I was a very familiar face at the Whole Foods salad bar on West 10 Mile. My creations tended to go heavy on croutons. One day, a single chicken tender found its way into the nest of lettuce. It was delicious. So closed a brief and disastrous era.

  In San Francisco, I switched to Slurry, and my refrigerator looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, tight rows of shimmery Tetra Paks replenished every two weeks.

  This is all to say: I’d never baked bread in my life.

  THE LOIS CLUB

  I CLIMBED THE HILL behind the hospital to attend a meeting of the Lois Club.

  Do other names boast affiliated clubs? Certainly there is no Rachel Club. Maybe Persephones have a club. We Loises do. It’s real! There are chapters scattered around the country.

  My grandmother Lois LaMotte was a member of the first-ever Lois Club, in Milwaukee. Later, after she moved to Detroit to be closer to her daughter and eponymous baby granddaughter, she met another Lois waiting in line at Meijer and together they formed the Metro Detroit chapter. They advertised it in the newspaper! I attended an early meeting as an infant; there is a photo I still possess, scanned and saved, that shows a group of six white-haired women all named Lois gathered around a swaddled baby burrito who is also named Lois, their faces frozen in coos of delight. Little burrito Lois is crying.

  My only conscious memory of that Lois Club comes from when I must have been nine or ten years old. I can remember the dry floral scent of someone else’s grandma’s house, and what then seemed to me—a shy kid—an overwhelming cacophony of laughter; unrelenting cackles. I retreated into an adjoining room, where I played my Nintendo DS. One of the Loises—I have no idea which one—stumbled upon me there, and for at least ten minutes she watched the shimmering screen silently over my shoulder.

  Grandma Lois died when I was twelve, and throughout my teens my mother would gently inquire, once every couple of years, if I ever thought about attending a meeting of the Lois Club. I did not. Without Grandma Lois? Unthinkable. In any case, I’m not sure the Detroit chapter lasted long without her.

  So, my first thought upon arriving in California was not: I ought to look up the local Lois Club. Nor was it my second thought, or my three hundred and fifty-third. It was my mother who sent me the link. “I thought of Gram’s club the other day,” she wrote, “and look what I found!” It was a page on the Lois Club website advertising the existence of a San Francisco Bay Area chapter.

  I might not have been so eager to meet the Loises if I hadn’t been spending all day with the cold-eyed wraiths at General Dexterity. By comparison, hanging out with a bunch of middle-aged ladies with the same name as me sounded pretty alluring.

  The meeting was held in a dark-shingled house in a twisty neighborhood reached by a hidden staircase that wandered up from Parnassus Avenue. I hiked from the Farnsworth Steps to Edgewood Avenue to a cul-de-sac that backed up against the eucalyptus forest that crowned the hill.

  A handwritten sign on the door read: Welcome, Lois!

  It made me smile. I could tell that whoever wrote it was very pleased with herself. Not without reason.

  The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

  The Loises were in the dining room open to the kitchen, five of them clustered around a long table beside a wide window that showed a panorama of the western city—Golden Gate Park, my neighborhood beyond it, the fuzzy gray bar of the ocean beyond everything. Their hair, bleached by age, glowed in the afternoon light.

  If you ever wonder about the difference between Metro Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area: compare their Lois Clubs.

  The hostess, whom I thought of as Hilltop Lois, had owned her house since 1972—an impossible span. She had once run a cheese shop at the base of the hill, and her taste had not grown less discriminating; she served us the stinkiest cheese I have ever been offered at a casual gathering. Nibbling with varying degrees of enthusiasm were also:

  • Compaq Lois, who had been a marketing executive at that company in its boom years. Her wrists dripped with bracelets and chunky bangles, all gold; they piled up onto her forearms. She looked like a Valkyrie queen.

  • Professor Lois, who taught anthropology at the University of San Francisco. Through the window, she pointed to the spires of St. Ignatius: “I’ve been climbing that hill for a decade.” She was lean like a goat.

  • Impeccable Lois, who possessed the kind of sartorial style that stops you on the street. She was wearing jodhpurs—with confidence—and above them an inky denim jacket that any of the cold-eyed wraiths would have killed her to acquire. Literally murdered her. “Don’t wear that down by the ballpark,” I warned.

  • Old Lois, who deserved a better nickname, but truly: she was old. Somewhere past ninety. Physically she seemed barely there, curled into herself, but her eyes were bright, and when I walked into the dining room and introduced myself, she crowed: “I didn’t know they were still making Loises!”

  They were interesting and lively, their relationships worn-in and comfortable. They had been
gathering for two decades. I sat and listened and smiled and genuinely enjoyed myself, though afterward, as I padded down the Farnsworth Steps, I worried that I’d been too quiet—too boring. The other Loises had sharp opinions. They took up space.

  They reminded me of Grandma Lois, and I thought about her Chicago Prison Loaf. The absurd density of it. It was the single culinary tradition my family possessed, and it was horrible.

  But she had baked it all the time.

  As I walked through Golden Gate Park, it struck me: the mystery of that woman’s life. I hadn’t ever known her, not really. I sucked in a deep breath. She had relocated from Wisconsin to Michigan, but before that she’d lived in Chicago and performed with an experimental-theater company, bunking with three other women in a tiny apartment, and not only baking that awful bread but bringing it home to share, because it was free and more or less nutritious. In later years, when she baked Chicago Prison Loaf, it must have conjured that other place, that other time. Four women in bunk beds. Midnight shows. Crimson wigs.

  I sat at a computer twelve hours a day and slurped nutritive gel for lunch and dinner.

  After my success in college, my neat acquisition of a job, and my precocious home purchase, I had considered myself a child of whom parents and grandparents could be proud. But it struck me then: the starkness of my apartment. Of my life. Grandma Lois, if she could have come to visit—and for the first time ever, I felt a pang, a deep wish that she could visit me here, just her alone, alive—if she could have, and if she had seen me here in San Francisco, she wouldn’t have been proud of me. She would have been sad, and maybe a little bit worried.

  I needed a more interesting life.

  I could start by learning something.

  I could start with the starter.

  JESUS CHRIST IN AN ENGLISH MUFFIN

  I WALKED TO THE BRIGHT BOOKSTORE on Clement Street and obtained a used copy of The Soul of Sourdough, written by a baker named Everett Broom, whose forearms graced the cover, taut and darkly gleaming, cradling a loaf of bread that was likewise burnished.

  The book’s introduction ran for twenty-two pages. It was a baker’s bildungsroman, chronicling Broom’s youth in Sacramento, his visits to his grandfather’s bakery, his flameout as a professional skateboarder, his addiction to a home-cooked drug known as spaz rocks, and finally his retreat to a bread-baking shack on the beach and his reformation there. There were photos, all monochrome: a young man with a thick black beard below a face so clean and cherubic it made the beard appear glued on. In a photo spread across two pages, he leaned against a homemade brick oven, for which the adjective rustic was a favor; it looked like a pile of rubble. Scattered in the foreground were various signifiers of bohemian tranquility: a guitar, a surfboard, a book with VOLTAIRE on the spine.

  He was out there learning, in his words, “to bake without dry yeast, without desiccation, without death.” Well, sure. Nobody wants death bread. Instead, he sought the alchemy of sourdough: “Wet, living, fragile, sensual. The funk of life. I smelled it on the beach, and in the forest glades where I gathered mushrooms, and in the embrace of Lucia, who was at that time my lover. And I smelled it in my starter, too.”

  After twenty-two pages of funk versus death, the painstaking construction from found materials of his oven, the hollow of Lucia’s clavicle, et cetera, Broom figured it out. A photo showed a very young man with a very large beard grinning manically into the camera, hoisting a loaf of bread in the air like a trophy. The loaf was as big around as his chest, and, to be fair, it looked totally awesome.

  He came to San Francisco, where he opened Boulangerie Broom—now a chain with three locations—and wrote this book. He shaved his beard and traded the shack for a house in Noe Valley. He married a product manager named Olivia and had two kids.

  End of introduction. Next, Broom got down to business.

  Sourdough bread begins with sourdough starter, which is not merely living but seething. It is a community of organisms comprised of, at minimum, yeast, which is a fungus, and lactobacillus, a bacteria. They eat flour—its sugars—and poop out acid—thus, sour—in addition to carbon dioxide, which, trapped by stretchy, glutenous dough, gives the bread an airy structure, the so-called crumb, at its prettiest a dazzling network of gaps and chambers.

  Broom’s first chapter described the capture and cultivation of a wild sourdough starter, a process that could take a week or more. I already possessed the Clement Street starter, so I skipped ahead.

  Broom lamented the fact that we, his readers, could not bake with the benefit of a beachside shack or a rough-hewn brick oven or an Argentine lover. But he said we could still make a pretty good attempt at it, and he listed the equipment we would need:

  • A digital scale, to weigh the ingredients

  • A bench knife, to scrape and divide the dough

  • A bread blade, to score the loaf (with a baker’s mark that, ideally, matched our wrist tattoo)

  • A baking stone, to absorb and emit heat in a loose simulation of Broom’s brick oven (though he counseled that there was, in fact, no substitute and that, basically, he pitied us)

  I opened my laptop, called up the website of an expedient internet retailer, and pecked in the name of the scale—the precise brand and model that Broom recommended. The site immediately responded: CUSTOMERS WHO BOUGHT THIS ITEM ALSO BOUGHT … followed by the bench knife. And the bread blade. The baking stone. King Arthur flour and Diamond Crystal salt, just as Everett Broom recommended. And finally, Broom’s book itself.

  The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.

  Two days later, a UPS driver delivered the tools and ingredients to my apartment. She also delivered one apron that I had purchased from a different internet retailer, a craftier one. The apron was squarish, made from heavy denim. It looked like something a blacksmith might wear. It was the first apron I’d ever owned. I loved it.

  I set out my tools. I donned my apron. Everything was in order, and I was ready to produce a beautiful, burnished loaf just like Broom’s on the cover of his book.

  There were detailed instructions. I love detailed instructions. My whole career was detailed instructions. Precisely specified actions, executed in order. A serene confidence settled over me.

  I mixed the ingredients together, and immediately the project collapsed into chaos and disaster.

  Where the bread book showed a lump of dough folded elegantly into itself, I looked upon a twisted mutant mass.

  Where the bread book showed Everett Broom’s clean fingers deftly maneuvering said lump, my hands soon wore thick gauntlets of glop. I waved them over the sink, tried to shake some of it loose.

  Where the bread book showed a rustic work surface smartly maintained, I looked upon a cramped and dingy countertop filmed with slime.

  There was dough on the cupboards. Dough on the faucet. Dough on the floor. It looked like the scene of a glutenous murder committed by a careless killer.

  With each step, reality diverged further from the shining ideal pictured in the bread book, and by the end of it, I wasn’t even following Broom’s directions anymore, just doing whatever I could to keep the dough in one piece. It was too wet, so I added flour, then it was too dry, so I added water, and it became gloppy again, so more flour was required, and the dough grew and grew, bloblike.

  There was a malevolence to it. It was not on my side.

  Broom’s directions indicated that it was now time to retreat while the starter did its work to make the loaf ferment and rise, and I did this gratefully. I washed my hands, tore off the apron, set the oven to preheat, opened an Anchor Steam, and flopped down in my living room. I found my laptop and set Chaiman’s CD to playing. I knew every song. I’d heard them all, waiting on hold night after night.

  When the timer beeped, I discovered that the dough had indeed expanded in size, and it had also firmed up somewhat. Its skin was soft but not gloppy. Glossy. I quickly folded it over onto itself, opened the oven—whic
h was really very hot inside; was this safe? Were you truly supposed to set the temperature this high?—and dropped it onto the baking stone. Then I pushed the oven’s rack back into place and slammed the door, just as a warden might slam the door on a prisoner, supremely evil and objectively irredeemable, banishing him to solitary confinement forever.

  I set the oven’s timer, opened another Anchor Steam, and played Chaiman’s CD again. It had seven tracks, each almost ten minutes long. The music of the Mazg was entirely a cappella—a tight cluster of voices. Their language sounded Slavic, but every so often there was a hard stop, like the hitch of a sob, or an ear-bending slide between notes that spun the sound into some other, more distant dimension.

  I wondered if the brothers had arrived at their destination. I thought about emailing Beoreg, but I didn’t know what I would say. Our relationship had been constrained entirely by the menu. If not “Double spicy, please,” then what?

  * * *

  FORTY MINUTES, four songs, and three beers later, the timer beeped. I opened the oven door and pulled out the rack to assess the damage.

  Against all odds, the malevolent loaf emerged from the oven round and buoyant, its crust split by deep fissures. It was perhaps not as perfectly photogenic as the one on the cover of the bread book, but it was … not too bad.

  In my exasperation, I had skipped one of Broom’s steps, the one where he exhorted you to carve a baker’s mark, some symbol of your own choosing. (His mark was a heart with an X through it, which was also the logo of Boulangerie Broom, seen on T-shirts and tote bags throughout San Francisco.) I had not signed my sloppy work, but there was nevertheless a clearly defined shape in the cracks and whorls of the crust.

  You couldn’t not see it.

  The loaf had a face.

  It was an illusion, of course. Jesus Christ in an English muffin. It’s called pareidolia. Humans see faces in everything. Even so, the illusion was … compelling. This face was long and twisted, wide-eyed and openmouthed, Edvard Munch–like. Where the crust cracked, it formed furrows in the face’s brow, lines around its howling mouth.