Sourdough's Satisfaction

Ok. I'm a foodie.

Oh, not the kinds who says the dish has to be luxurious.

I love a bit of foie gras. Seared. And I love steamed broccoli in my favorite lemon pepper sauce (just mayo - Hellman's of course - blended smooth with lots of fresh squeezed lemon juice and dashed with lots of lemon pepper and fresh pepper seasoning) just as well.

I love a bit of wild salmon, sizzled skin side down. And just as much the pedestrian blue fish, from my New Jersey shore roote. Just broiled. Don't mess with it.

I love the most exotic food adventures. Lasserre in Paris' where the homard breton calls and the pretentious place rolls back the ceiling to let the stars shine in and the stale air waft away. Or in a North Philly dive for Papa Rellenas (just mashed potato balls stuffed with ground beef and fried in a cornmeal coating.

But there is at least one food place in my heart that isn't about food. It's about an internal adventure. Every time.

Baking fresh sourdough bread at home. It's not about baking. Or about bread.

It's about a compass that shows me where I am in relation to my center. The needle is the inclination to bake the bread.

It all goes back in some weird way to growing up in the 50's. Mom's relationship to vegetables. Frozen. In little square boxes. Going into that little square Pyrex pot. Cut into little square carrots and beans. (They never did figure out how to square the lima beans). Everything was supposed be like that. Never varying. Square cut, perfect every time. Always the same.

I subscribed. That was fine. Right up until my candles and sandals days in college. Learning to love variety, surprise, even to embrace disappointment. Discovering that vegetables came fresh and in very odd shapes. That they required lots of knowledge to cook right. And discovering that above all, I knew NOTHING of bread that didn't come in a round tube with a metal ends and a promise that if I knocked it just right on a table edge, I could grab and bake the perfect little rolls.

Somewhere after college, I discovered I liked my bread, and my life, and my adventures, at least a little bit messy. This was the time to experiment. And square at the center of that experiment was the quest for the wild yeast.

Sourdough bread.

Flour and water that traps what the air has to offer. Stuff that you knead and manipulate til it's to your liking - but never within your control. Tart in a special way, but sweet too. Crunchy or bland, rising well or defying the expectation of fluff. But always tasty and satisfying. Bread that took hours to make (though only minutes at a time through the process). But most of all, bread that connected me to generations, to my grandmother's baking, to the legends of my rituals (oh that bread that couldn't rise and so became matzoh).

For years, in my newlywed days, as a young mother, as a new resident of Iowa learning to garden in the black gold soil, I'd bake all our bread. Bake bread while the baby napped. Bake bread for the pot luck suppers. Bake bread, when I was a weaver, while the dyepot heated or in breaks from warping the loom. Before the magnitude of demand of career drove so much of that off. Before the career was centered away from the tactile and in the computer. Before we entered the time warp that demands nanoseconds instead of minutes of attention. Before I invented my own motherly organizing principles that let life be regular enough, easy enough to organize. Even got my own square Pyrex pot. Routine enough to be comfortable.

Yet, periodically, through the years, I decide to bake. And it has nothing to do with bread.

I know what I'm really doing. I'm reaching out to touch that self, that time, that centeredness of a long time ago. To bake part of it back into myself. To take out the sourdough starter from the far far back of the fridge.

And for me it always affirms something really important one more time.

All the experts will tell you that if you don't feed that sourdough starter, if you just ignore it way way in the back of the fridge, it will die. But that is no more true for the sourdough starter than it is for the dormant parts of us. For me, the weaver, the young mother, the soul who loved to be alone and quiet.

When I reach back there in the shelf and take out that old container, there's the starter, pale and dull. I visit with it. Pour off the used up "hooch" on top. Sweet talk it a little. Feed it all the right stuff. A little flour here, a bit of sugar there, stir it into a big glass bowl. Warm it and examine it quite carefully in the bright light.

It always obliges and starts to bubble away.

A whole new start.

Why oral history projects matter

So I got an email from Blue Sky Arts in Philly today, titled, 'The Big Tease'.

"Can you spin a good yarn?," it began. "If you have a story that relates to a specific Philadelphia location, we want to hear it. It can be about the street you grew up on; the empty lot where you played ball; the street vendor outside your office- anything that is evocative, authentic Philly. We are collecting these stories for an exciting new audio project that's still very hush-hush, so we can't reveal more just yet, but the stories of Philadelphia are the essential ingredient! Email mdalley@blueskyarts.org with your anecdote and stay tuned to find out exactly what we're cooking up."

I can't wait to see what they're cooking up, and I couldn't resist sharing my recollections of arriving with a toddler in arms into the "urban pioneering" chapter of our lives...the one that put our ideals in conflict with charges of gentrification, but that has led to 28 years in residence in a fascinating urban melting pot neighborhood. Here's what I sent them:

"It was a barrio when we got here -- half young idealists who wanted to come into the city, half poor families packed into public housing. The housing had its own long stories...Once, what realtors named the Art Museum Area as it started to surge back, had just been the northern edge of the city...the Fair Mount. The place city folks came into the woods for breezes on the hill. The place the reservoir perched (before the Art Museum was built) on a hill at the northwest section of downtown. By the time we arrived in the early 70's the neighborhood had its own story to tell.

"Elegant Victorian townhouses had been divided and subdivided to house returning servicemen after WWII ...into single room occupancy stacked housing. Then the servicemen moved on...marrying...moving to the 'burbs...leaving behind tiny apartment best suited to the poor. Immigrants filled spaces that no one who could afford better would consider. By the early 70's, Puerto Rican families had filled the neighbhorhood and its nearly 100 year old homes were squalid. Many were boarded up, empty. White flight had taken the prosperous. Those who came behind rented, and the houses decayed.

"Right about then, young hippies and idealists, searching not just for cheap real estate but also for integrated neighborhoods, started eyeing this quick-walk-into-center-city zone.

"Our house was a gutted shell when we first laid eyes on it. Said 'Jesus love you" in Spanish in spray paint on the front. Had no back wall (it had caved in), and kids jumping from the 2nd floor rafters into discarded mattresses piled high in its back yard on the South side). Termite-eaten beams connecting the party walls of the house on the right to the party wall of the house on the left. Had a front wall with a belly in the brickwork and 3 cast iron stars holding it all together.

"Perfect!" I said to my husband as we gazed upon it with our baby in our arms. Walking distance to downtown. "Full south light. We can build a fireplace."

"You're NUTS," he replied with confidence.

"What? You've gone mad!" our suburban parents responded. But our hearts were stolen. The fishmonger in the truck came every Monday early hawking baskets of live crabs. The scissors grinder. A slice of 18th Century life in 1972 on Mt. Vernon Street. No, not pain-free. Yes, a robbery early on...But with a twist. BRINNNG went the doorbell on day 2 after the break-in. Answer the door and there was the stereo that had been taken. BRRINNG on day 3 and there was the record that had been on the turntable. BRRRRing on day 4 and back came the amp. Ah, word had gotten out. That was the "wrong house" to invade. The word was out that those were the guys who fed neighborhood kids cookies and, and that was the house where the doc who patched up scraped knees lived. Ever single stolen item came back.

"That was a sense of neighborhood we'll never have again in our now largely gentrified neighborhood. Yes, we still have Section 8 housing and a nice ethnic and economic mix, at least on a block or two of the now lush neighborhood. But it's all so sterile now. No salsa music at midnight at full volume. (Who ever thought I'd miss it?) No block party with a whole roast pig on a spit all night in preparation. No more immigrants pantomiming to new Yuppies about how it's expected that you wash your front steps ("the stoop") every Saturday so that every Sunday everyone can party out front.

"Yes, nice property values, no fear, no more language barriers among neighbors. But geez...what we've lost, too. Twas very very special."


A walk down memory lane for just a moment. Really amazing how a random email can regenerate the sights, smells, experiences of three decades ago.

Thanks Blue Sky.

Upon return to work after vacation

Take a long, long soak in an outdoor hot tub in a cold, cold place like Boston on a snowy winter day. So cold that bits of ice form up on the tips of wet curls. So cold that as you enjoy the soak, you observe the curls of "steam" as vapor rises off the surface into the icy winter gray.

After five or ten minutes of soaking, you know that when you emerge, you will have a few fleeting minutes in which you won't even feel the cold - in fact, a few minutes in which the cold will feel good before it feels cold - because you have stored up all that delicious warmth inside. And you know that you will feel the cold chill on the dash back to the house. That the dash and the work of pure will that it takes to emerge and dash is soon to be rewarded with a warn towel and a warm fireplace. Maybe even a warm hug.

That's what it felt like today going back to work after a good vacation.