Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  I rose earlier than ever before and experienced a portion of the morning that was new to me. I heard the chirping of unfamiliar bird species—negotiations that had, until now, been concluded long before I woke. The bus didn’t run that early, so I bought a used bicycle, paying $50 cash to a woman outside Velo Rouge Cafe, and pedaled my new route: cutting south from Cabrillo Street to ride through Golden Gate Park on my way to the Wiggle, which would take me to Market Street and, at its terminus, the Ferry Building, locked tight.

  In this new darkness, I pushed my bicycle to the pier where the Omebushi waited. Carl offered me coffee from a family-size thermos. It was just the two of us crossing the bay, and when the fat little boat puttered below the bulk of the Bay Bridge, I felt like we were astronauts in transit across the back side of the moon.

  In this new darkness, the Marrow Fair welcomed me. The computerized STILL—TOO—SKINNY became rote and comforting. Naz’s morning playlist echoed through the concourse, lazy and hopeful. Even in those hours, the depot was never empty. There was always someone—multiple someones—who had spent the night working. Aromas wafted. Timers beeped. Crickets chirped.

  In this new darkness, my team greeted me. The Faustofen woke with the whoomph of burners. The Vitruvian snapped to life with a friendly chime and leapt instantly to work, arranging its tools in a neat line. The forming of the loaves still eluded it, but I’d taught it to reach the sink and wash the mixing bowls. That was something.

  In this new darkness, the Clement Street starter greeted me like a puppy, yapping and leaping, excited to be alive.

  In this new darkness, a catalog of phenomena:

  • Ripples across its surface like laughter

  • Bursts of luminescence, like the signal flare from before, but brighter, shifting from green to pink

  • A tiny pseudopod rising slowly like a periscope, wobbling back and forth, then retracting into the crock

  • Songs, various: wider-ranging, not just imitations of Chaiman’s CD, but new sounds it was picking up in the depot, including a soft but unmistakable foghorn

  • Scents, various: still banana, always, along with smoky smells, like far-off fires, and occasionally the scent of gasoline

  In this new darkness, I baked as fast as I could: taking dough from the Vitruvian, forming loaves, slamming them into the Faustofen.

  Then, while the Vitruvian stirred another batch of dough and the Clement Street starter performed its last labors in the oven, I cracked my laptop and did the work of the Dextrous, responding to emails, reviewing code. I was preternaturally productive in those hours. At first I theorized it was something about the rhythm of baking, the quick bursts of attention alternating with mandatory pauses, but then I decided it was probably something simpler: I was happy.

  Most days, I gathered my loaves and rode the Omebushi back to San Francisco, still in darkness, to deliver them to Chef Kate.

  On Wednesdays, I kept baking while the market opened for its preview hour. I called out, “Arm, change task. Say hello!” and the customers waved back. Loaves came out of the Faustofen and disappeared in moments. Pizzazz! As soon as I sold out, I patted the Vitruvian on the shoulder, powered it down, covered the starter in its crock, made for the Omebushi, and watched the sun rise over the Oakland hills from the middle of the bay.

  My work complete, I went to work.

  At lunchtime, I sat with the Slurry contingent in the General Dexterity cafeteria, but it had been weeks since I consumed any of the nutritive gel myself. I ate my own product: sourdough bread slathered with butter or soft avocado, consumed with gusto while Peter looked on ruefully.

  * * *

  AT BEO’S URGING, I upgraded my flour. The cheap stuff had served me well, but this new phase called for a finer grain. There was a mill just fifty miles away, in a farm town west of Davis, that sold flour ground from wheat grown nearby. It cost more than twice as much as King Arthur flour, so I started small, with just a little bag, a test run.

  The Clement Street starter loved it. It groaned and luxuriated. It belched ecstatically.

  There was more to upgrade. I went to a shop in downtown Oakland that sold salt of every kind and color, black and pink and blue. Each variety sat shimmering in a glass canister, priced by the ounce, with a handwritten card recounting its biography: here, salt from the beaches of Gujarat; there, salt from the pans of Brittany; behold, salt from the suburbs of Portland.

  I backed slowly out the door. I would stick with Diamond Crystal.

  At the Marrow Fair, I sought out Gracie, the woman with the Chernobyl honey, and the starter’s next feeding included a thin drizzle of the stuff. The morning after that, it glowed brighter than ever before, and when the loaves emerged, their expressions looked slightly wonky. I took a picture and shared my findings with Beoreg.

  * * *

  I WAS GETTING HEALTHY.

  My arms were stronger, from working the dough. My legs were thicker, from riding my bicycle. My butt showed a heretofore unimagined definition. Even with all the bread I was eating—and it was not a small amount—I lost ten pounds. I felt lean and purposeful. Scoping myself out in my stand-up mirror, I turned and gently twerked.

  In the evening—it was possibly more accurate to call it late afternoon—when I fell into my bed, I was truly tired; not merely the brain-spent Well, I guess I’ll give up now tiredness of a day at the robot factory, but something deeper, actually muscular.

  Weeks passed in a haze of happy exhaustion.

  In this new darkness, once every two weeks, I found waiting on the ping-pong table an envelope, and inside a check issued by the Patelco Credit Union under the authority of an ALAMEDA TEST MARKET, LLC, bearing the angular signature of Lily Belasco. My earnings, minus the market’s percentage. The amount was not staggering—barely a tenth of my General Dexterity paycheck for the same amount of time—but this money felt more truly mine, somehow.

  In this new darkness, I stood behind the ping-pong table, considered the Clement Street starter in its crock and my partner the brawny Vitruvian. The hardy Faustofen, too. I looked out across the depot, awash in pink light, the tang of tube-fish rising, and realized it was the hidden root of something interesting and maybe important, and I, improbably, was part of it.

 

  WE’RE MOVING AGAIN!

  Shehrieh decided suddenly, and when you’re Mazg, you don’t question this feeling. Our destination is Berlin. It’s actually going to be perfect. Even though Berlin is a bigger city than Edinburgh, the Mazg community there is smaller. I’m thinking strategically, you see.

  I just finished packing our kitchen things into boxes. I wish we could take the oven. It’s a good one—a very old and beautiful English model. I told our landlord she could sell it on the internet. Someone in California would buy it in a second, then pay just as much again to ship it across the world.

  I still haven’t told anyone else about my restaurant. This is good practice, to say it, or write it. I’m nervous. Shehrieh will be worried because we’re supposed to be “the second-story people.” Leopold will be worried just because he worries. But I want those tables! I want a sign, written in German and in Mazg. I want a front door with a little bell that rings when people step inside.

  I’m starting my own restaurant.

  I’m starting my own restaurant!

  THE EATER’S ARCHIVE

  IT WAS WEDNESDAY MORNING at the Marrow Fair, the customers all gone, the doors closed again. Horace sidled up to my workstation while I was cleaning, and I could tell by his quiet calm—no incipient factoid, no swirling ecstasy of trivia—that something was afoot.

  He lifted a loaf of the sourdough, held it at arm’s length, regarded it with a new sharpness.

  “You cut these faces into the crust, do you? You learned the technique from someone? From a book?”

  I wiped my hands on my apron. “No,” I said carefully. “I didn’t learn it from a book.”

  “I suspected as much.” He lowered his voice. “I fo
und something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “What do you think?” He waggled the loaf, then tucked it under his arm like a football. “Come along.” I began to protest, but he was already on his way. “Come along! You’ll want to see this.”

  * * *

  HE LED ME THROUGH THE LEMON GROVE and into his library, but he did not pause in the shelves. Instead, he plunged through them, and beyond, into a portal I had never before noticed—or, if I had, I assumed it led into one of the depot’s innumerable dark corridors.

  It did, but this corridor was lined with shelves. Horace’s library continued.

  “Yes, of course it does,” he said. “At the time I moved here, I had two thousand linear feet of materials, and to store such a collection in archival-grade conditions … it was not cheap. Mr. Marrow was able to entice me primarily with the prospect of unlimited storage.” He said those last words with palpable relish.

  I followed him as he plunged down the corridor, which was not wide to begin with and made narrower by the shelves and legal boxes on both sides. Cold white lights above were set up on motion detectors, and they snapped to life as we approached.

  As we walked, Horace’s fingers danced from the lips of shelves to the lids of legal boxes. I saw annotations on the fronts of the boxes. The years ticked back like a time machine: 1992, 1991, 1990. Horace’s handwriting gave the nines long elegant tails.

  Behind us, the motion-activated lights snapped off.

  We passed through a tunnel of memory in a bubble of light.

  “It began with a windfall,” Horace said. “I used to haunt estate sales. It was my hobby. I was less focused then … I was interested in fin de siècle pottery, rejected applicants to the Oulipo, siege weaponry of the Gironde. But this collection that I found, it was something entirely new to me. He was a great eater, you see! John Eliot Sinclair of San Francisco. Born in 1913 and died in 1998, during that wet, wet winter, alone in his enormous house on Sacramento Street, and in the time between, he made it his mission to eat at every restaurant that opened in his city. And”—Horace turned to me, alive with astonishment—“he kept the menus. He kept all the menus!”

  I didn’t think you were, strictly speaking, supposed to keep the menus.

  “John Eliot Sinclair must have been very charming. Or clandestine. Or both. Probably both.”

  “How many menus are we talking about here?”

  “He was not the only one with this passion. After I acquired the Sinclair collection—for the price of hauling it away, not a penny more—I began to wonder if I hadn’t stumbled onto something. The archives of the great eaters. That is what I am assembling. Here!”

  He stopped short and selected a volume, fat and puffy like a photo album. He held it against the shelf and flopped it open; inside, protected by plastic overlays, were wine labels, fastidiously peeled from their bottles and flattened, each with an accompanying note written in a spidery hand. More albums waited. The wine drinker’s liquid autobiography occupied four entire shelves.

  When I thought of archives—documents stored and studied—I thought of poets, writers, politicians, scientists. But why shouldn’t the archives of the eaters also have avid keepers?

  Horace kept walking, the lights snapping on ahead of him, and I followed. The years ticked back, and around 1979, there was evidence of a transplant in process, documents being moved out of old boxes, foxed and rippled with age, into new ones, freshly assembled.

  A cup from Naz’s coffee bar sat on the corridor’s floor beside one of the boxes.

  Horace turned. “I was revisiting the Louise Bouk collection, which is of particular interest because she overlapped with John Eliot Sinclair in San Francisco. Sinclair loved the steak houses. Bouk was different; she was enthusiastic about California cuisine.”

  “Raw turnips drizzled in olive oil? That sort of thing?”

  “I’m not sure the cuisine’s adherents would call that its most soaring exponent, but yes, you have the idea. In Bouk’s collection, I found … No, not this one … Where is it…?”

  He was pulling out menus as big as newspapers, hand-lettered and reproduced using some antique process on heavy brown paper, with fine-lined illustrations that made them look like pages from a Victorian children’s book. The menus were all dated 1979.

  I saw one menu titled JAPANESE DEATH POEM. Another called THE PLUM’S LAMENT. I saw a tiny, perfect sketch of a clutch of carrots with shaggy tops. Another of a very handsome goose.

  Horace found his quarry. “Here,” he said, offering it. “December 1979.”

  The menu was titled A FEAST FOR THE UNREQUITED, and it began with a dish called Sourdough à la Masque served with smoked salt and bone marrow. It was accompanied by a very respectable rendering of a loaf of bread, darkly crosshatched. The loaf was oblong and rustic and unmistakable: because a face leered out of the crust.

  The name of the restaurant was written in tiny script at the bottom of the menu, almost reluctantly. I read it aloud: “Café Candide.” I looked at Horace. “Have you heard of it?”

  He blinked. “Yes, Lois. I have heard of it.” He looked at me strangely. “Never? Truly? Perhaps … the Café Candide cookbooks … simple black covers, very elegant…? She sold two million of them?”

  Had I seen them at the bookstore on Clement Street? It was possible, but …

  “Lois. Café Candide is a very important place. It is the wellspring.” He shook his head. “Surely you’ve heard of Charlotte Clingstone.”

  “Is she on TV? I don’t really watch—”

  “I’ll tell you this.” Horace snorted. “You have dined, apparently without realizing it, in restaurants established by alumni of her kitchen. I know this for a fact because all the restaurants are established by alumni of her kitchen. It is the greatest and farthest-reaching culinary mafia since the twelve pupils of Apicius, who went out like disciples … Wait! You have read Everett Broom!”

  The tattooed baker whose book taught me the basics of sourdough. Yes, of course.

  Horace raised a finger, triumphant. “He, too, hails from the Candide clan!” Then his look grew admonishing. “Lois, it is a lazy thing not to know whose world you live in. This is Charlotte Clingstone’s.”

  He held up the menu with its leering sourdough.

  “And you see, that makes this interesting. Café Candide, of all places! How did a loaf with this … look arrive at Charlotte Clingstone’s table? How did it come into your possession, more than three decades later? Something links you to her.” He paused, as if to digest the implausibility of that statement. “In any case, this is a highly suggestive document.”

  The lights above snapped off. We’d sat talking for too long.

  “Does that happen often?”

  “A fair amount, yes,” Horace said. “I don’t mind. It gives me a minute to think.”

  We stayed quiet. Thinking.

  “You must seek her out,” Horace said at last.

  He was right.

  The lights snapped on again, revealing Horace on his feet, caught mid-gesticulation. “It takes a bit of a leap to wake them up.” He straightened. “Bring the menu. I’ll make you a copy.”

  We walked back the way we’d come, resynchronizing with the present.

  From the disarray in the corridor, and from the bright sticky notes affixed to the shelves and boxes and walls and floor, overlapping in places and fluttering like feathery lichen as we passed, it became clear: this was not a sleeping archive. Horace had a project under way.

  “What are you doing with all this?”

  “I am following the path that the archive of John Eliot Sinclair set me on. I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice—and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium. There are histories of food, of course. I have them all here. And yet … something is missing. So, I am trying to write a book.”

  He sighed.


  “And even if I fail—this is always the archivist’s consolation—perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser.”

  We walked farther.

  “I gave this place its name, you know. I said it to Lily. I said, ‘This man, our benefactor, he works powerfully in secret like a lump of marrow.’ She repeated it to him, and the next thing I heard was that the place was called the Marrow Fair! And then, to his chagrin perhaps, he became Mr. Marrow. It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it? From the Old English mearg, the innermost core. The hidden heart! It makes our blood in its secret chambers. That is Mr. Marrow’s ambition, I believe. The production of new blood.”

  The end of the corridor was in sight; across the concourse, a grow room glowed pink.

  “Is he succeeding?” I asked.

  “It is no small thing to change a culture,” Horace said simply. “But I think interesting things are growing here. Lucrative enterprises. Provocative tastes. Perhaps, even, if you can imagine it”—he pranced into the light—“this book of mine.”

  Out in the concourse, among the shelves I now understood were only the tip of a vast project, Horace hunted and reached and produced a grip of books.

  “Here,” he said. “This is your education.”

  The stack contained The Candide Cookbook and The Next Candide Cookbook, both with plain black covers, along with California Table: The Café Candide Story, large and glossy, and finally a floppy paperback titled Tend Your Garden: Charlotte Clingstone and the Making of a Perfect Place.

  That last volume showed on its cover a woman, broad-faced and serene, standing in a garden wearing very comfortable pants. A sense of recognition circled the runway, came in to land: I knew Charlotte Clingstone after all. She had been part of the panel at the Ferry Building. She was the central deity. That will be all. I had no doubt: she was the one who’d said no.

 

  IN YOUR MESSAGE, you told me about your family, how you don’t have any traditions. The first time I read that, it made me sad, but then I thought about it for a while and I started to feel jealous. Lois, think about it! No one cares if your restaurant has tables. You can build robots, or bake bread, or do something else entirely. You’re unencumbered by culture. You’re … light!