Stones for Bread (23 page)

Isn’t it that way in all things, though? The birds, the thorns, the lack of soil—all reasons to give up, to fade out of life and find the easiest way to deal with all those disappointing things people, as children, never expect will come to them.

“Another myth is that sourdough is always sour. Yes, some breads made with wild yeast have that sharp taste people associate with San Francisco–style loaves, but many do not. I, honestly, don’t like a strong sour taste in my bread. I sell one true sourdough, and let me tell you, it will make you pucker. But my other wild yeast breads range from very mild to just the slightest tang.”

“What makes the yeast get more sour?” one woman asks. “Isn’t it how long you leave the dough out to ferment?”

“That’s one reason,” I tell her, “but it’s not the yeast that sours the dough, it’s the bacteria.”

All but two of the women—the two, I imagine, who have tried making a starter before—look utterly disgusted. Bacteria is bad, they think. All their bathrooms have lovely pump bottles of berry-scented bacteria-killing soap, and they wash all those nasty little critters down the drain more times a day than they can count.

I explain the symbiosis between the yeast and lactobacilli. “The wild yeast live on the grain as it grows in the field, and when the wheat is harvested they’re still there, invading our kitchens whether we purchase the berries from the bulk bins at a natural food store to grind at home or pick up a paper brick of the all-purpose stuff at Hannaford. So does the bacteria. The yeast eat the simple sugars in the flour, producing gasses that make the dough rise. The bacteria, on the other hand, give off lactic acid, which is what gives the bread its sour flavor. Actually, the lactobacilli is what keeps the culture healthy.
Only the yeast strains good for bread can survive in the mixture’s acidity, and it destroys stray, unhealthy bacteria and other yeasts. The lactobacilli also eat dead yeasts.

“The way to keep a starter from becoming too sour, however your own palate defines it, is to feed it more often. The bacteria eat more slowly than the yeast. The yeast die off faster without food, but the bacteria can just keep on consuming the dead yeast and their waste, making more lactic acid and thus a more sour starter. Regular feedings keep the system in balance, so the yeast don’t run out of simple sugars and the bacteria never overwhelm the starter. I find it’s best, once the starter is well established, to feed every twelve to twenty-four hours. That’s if you’re keeping it at room temperature, of course, which is best to do if you’re baking daily or almost that much. Refrigeration slows the whole process down, but even then, you should feed your starter at least once a week.”

“I thought you had to capture wild yeast from the air,” the Renaissance fair woman says, disappointed.

“I’m afraid that’s probably another myth,” I tell her, and her frown deepens. “There are yeast in the air, but not necessarily the ones needed for sourdough. It’s like the idea of adding grapes to a culture; that white film on the skin is yeast, but it’s grape yeast—excellent for wine but completely ineffective for bread. Eventually that strain will be killed off in the culture because it can’t survive in that particular environment. However,” I add in the hopes of cheering her, though I doubt I will—her romantic notions have been burned away by too much knowledge, “it may be true that the more you bake with sourdough, the more wild yeast will be floating around your kitchen. Some of those very well may become part of your bread.”

She persists. “But is it true that the flavor and even the strain of bread yeast will change when you move from, say, California to Vermont?”

“Well, yes, that is the case. I think most likely that’s still due to the flour, since grains are regionally produced. If you have a starter
from Vermont and continue to buy your flour from Vermont and have it shipped to you in California to do your baking, your starter probably won’t change all that much.”

“Other famous bakers still think yeast is collected from the environment around us. I always leave my bowl outside, covered in cheesecloth, of course, and let mother nature blow them into my starter.”

“I suppose it’s possible.” I don’t mention she hasn’t managed to culture a stable starter, or studies in which sterilized flour will not establish colonies of yeast. I leave it alone. I was one of those hopeful wild yeast hunters—a lifetime ago, it seems. It’s the Santa Claus of bread baking, something people want to believe even though they’re too old to sit on his lap, even when faced with the realization the
From Santa
tags are written in their mothers’ handwriting, and they’ve accidentally discovered their Christmas lists tucked in the secret pockets of their fathers’ briefcases.

I share several more old wives’ tales, and the final one, that sourdough made in a home with women would taste different from one made around men only—due to, it was believed, the natural yeast of the female body—draws more chuckles and pulls the XX-chromosome group together in a sort of gendered solidarity.
Of course some stupid man would come up with an idea like that
. I don’t use the example if the class isn’t all female.

Together we make the beginnings of a sourdough culture—two parts water, one part rye flour, one part wheat flour—stirring it together in a glass Ball jar. I also give each woman half a cup of one of my established starters, encouraging them to report back to me their successes and failures, to take a picture of their first loaves and come post them on the baker’s bulletin board hanging just over there on the wall, and then I send them out the door before the lunch crowd begins. Then I sneak into the kitchen before any of the customers can lure me into a conversation and find Tee complaining about Jude’s knife skills. He cuts celery for her, not thin or even enough, and she
covers his hands with hers and directs him, counting each downward slice in Ukrainian. “See it is good like this? You do now.”

“I’m trying,” Jude says.

“And he’s supposed to be working with Zave,” I say. “I told you if you needed more help, I’d hire someone.”

“I no need help,” Tee says. “I have the boy.”

“Hello? Did you hear me? I’m paying Jude to help with the bread, not the soup.” Yes, he has a salary now, though he’s embarrassed by it. I’d pay him double if I could afford it.

“Is not for soup. We make quiche.”

“Tee, come on. Your job is safe. I’m only trying to make life easier for you.”

My words puncture her and she droops without all her brashness to keep her puffed up. “When it is easy you forget how it is to fight.” And then she smacks her spoon on the counter, inches from Jude’s arm. “Enough with vegetable. See eggs in that bowl? Crack and beat. And no shells. None.”

I step outside, onto the concrete loading platform, the area cool and shaded. Not quite September yet, but the scent of it is beginning, the one reminding me of digging in the backyard for earthworms until my fingers bend painfully backward in the packed, slightly damp ground and the tips of my nails turn blue with dirt. An uncovering smell, one of endings, soon to overwhelm the air as all the leaves offer their fallen bodies to this yearly rite of passage.

The screen door squeaks and bounces behind me, and Xavier appears in the corner of my vision.

“That woman,” I say.

“You should be used to it by now.”

“You’d think.”

“The new girl is working out well.”

“Rebekah, yeah. She’s a godsend.”

“Any inquiries for the baker’s position?”

“A few,” I say. I’d received five résumés. All seem qualified and eager, but I’m in no mood to schedule interviews yet. “But I’m wondering if maybe we’re not doing fine without the extra hands.”

“Just trying to make things a little easier for you,” Xavier says, voice gilded in irony.

I don’t need him to point out my similarities with Tee, or remind me of my inability to relinquish control of things I’ve decided are more important than breathing—my personal principles of bread, the bakery and the way I feel it should run; all things of temporal value and yet I cling to them as I should only hold on to the One who is eternal. Idols. And more exhausting each day as the business expands, explodes, and I go without sleep and food and sunlight in my lungs. I can’t lay them down, though. They are glued to my palms, and I shake and shake and shake but they don’t come off.

I stare down the street. Two boys, somewhere in their teens but I can’t tell from this distance, smoke on the public bench, skateboards standing on end and clamped between their knees. “I haven’t seen Jude smoking lately.”

“He’s quitting, I think,” Xavier says. “Sometimes I see the ash glowing red from my window at night. But I don’t smell it on him anymore, or see him with them any other time. Just in the dark.”

The door swings open again. Rebekah. She holds the cordless phone. “Excuse me, Liesl? I’m sorry to bother you, but you have a call. Patrice Olsen from the Good Food Channel?”

“Thanks,” I say, taking the receiver. “Hello, Ms. Olsen.”

“Ms. McNamara, lovely to speak to you. I sent an e-mail, but I understand you don’t always receive them, so I wanted to call as well and tell you the air date has been chosen for your
Bake-Off
episode.”

“Okay, when?”

“Three weeks from this Thursday. The season premiere.”

It doesn’t begin as oppression, or not the kind of oppression it later becomes. After Rome falls, after the barbarians and wanderers of the north cease their warring and settle behind the plow, there come the manors. We call them
lord
and
lady
now, but these words rise from Old English ancestors:
hlaford
, the guard of the loaves, and
hlæfdige
, the kneader of the dough. A sense of provision, of protection. Something all at once good and necessary. But it’s of no surprise this degrades into abuse—of power, of people, of food. The universe is overcome by entropy, and this of the moral kind, where eventually all that is conceived as excellent and noble and true—governments and philosophies and religions and men—begins to break apart into corrupt particles of dust.

One might call it sin.

Why, then, does the serf stay in the field, providing bread for the lord when he hardly has enough for his own children? Eventually uprisings come, but not for hundreds of years because the monks and priests have done their jobs too well.
Are all men not bondservants of Christ?
they say to the peasant. They have become people, not possessions. And at once, the lowly position is given a measure of holiness, of status.

Of worth.

Those who work with grain—who sow and reap and thresh and grind—they remind themselves they are the worthiest of all as they are pieces in the passion of the bread, making it possible for God incarnate to come to them in the Eucharist, every day, just as he told his first disciples,
This is my body
.

Autumn sweeps into Vermont with unseasonably cool nights and mornings. Afternoons are as warm as usual, plenty of people strolling in summer clothes, still buying ice-cream cones and attending the farmer’s market, though snap peas and tomatoes have given way to stalks of celery and apples and squash. I wear a sweatshirt over my
T-shirt and bring a pair of socks downstairs with me in the morning, peeling off the extra layer once I get into the warm kitchen. But by evening, once the fire has died in the oven and there’s a breeze sneaking in through the back screen door, my long sleeves are back on and I loosen the elastic on my hiking sandals to accommodate my socks. Fortunately, the bakehouse is closed and no customers see this statement of fashion, but even if they did, no one would think twice. Tweed socks with sandals are a very Vermont thing to do.

With children back in school, Cecelia comes again each afternoon, the bus dropping her in front of the bakehouse around half past three, on the other side of the street, and she waits there until the driver gives an exaggerated okay with his fingers and then points for her to cross. Seamus has her in public first grade this year. She runs from one sidewalk to the other and bursts through the door, which I keep unlocked for her. She remembers to turn the deadbolt and announces, “I’m here,” to the room, whether empty or not. Usually Tee, Gretchen, and I are in the kitchen, and she bursts in like New Year’s Day, the ends of her hair still chewed, her tummy growing a bit rounder as she readies for a growth spurt. Tee makes her a snack and Gretchen tells her it’s time to make their list, and Cecelia writes each chore as Gretchen dictates, words like
shaker
and
ceramic
creatively spelled. All our routines from the spring resurrected, and I can almost pretend nothing has changed. Until the dough preparation begins. Until Seamus shows up. Until I stumble up to my apartment at night, my loneliness exposed.