How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [14]
The chemistry of bread is not as exact as you might imagine. Everything influences the mix of dry ingredients to wet, particularly with the artisan loaves I am baking tonight. I use the small shovel in the bin to fill my bowl with white flour and take it back to the center island, then gather the rest of my ingredients and tools—some sugar and loose yeast to help the mother dough along, a scraper and plastic wrap, measuring cups and spoons.
As I begin to measure dry ingredients into a fresh bowl, my mind drifts back to Katie. Tomorrow the dog will arrive. Before he gets here, maybe there will be time to get her a haircut, maybe some new clothes. Everything in her suitcase was quite plainly purchased secondhand, and much of it is stained or ragged or too small. Her panties, in particular, pain me. Every single pair has holes. I washed everything and neatly folded it all, then stacked it on a chair just inside her bedroom door. The child slept on, oblivious, her body so thin she barely lifted the covers.
As I measure flour, I imagine her after her mother’s arrest: waking up in an abandoned house, putting on those tattered panties, and trying to comb her crazy hair. I have to lean my hands on the cold steel counter, take a long breath against the blistering heat it rouses in me.
How could she have slipped through so many cracks? Oscar was at war, obviously, and Sofia lived here, but didn’t they talk to her? And what about her teachers? Parents of her friends? Didn’t somebody notice?
Obviously not—Katie had been living with her mother in a house with no running water and no appliances for a couple of months, maybe more. Katie was clearly adept and clever, so she made people believe what they wanted to believe.
Still. Those collarbones.
As if to nudge my darkening mood aside, a minuet twirls out of the radio. I stir the liquid ingredients together, set them aside for a few minutes to greet one another, and transfer the sourdough sponge into a clean jar that is carefully labeled. It goes back in the fridge, in a special small box I have outfitted with a lock to which only I have the key. My aunt Poppy tends a line of the sponge, as well, but each of ours has a different quality, as you might imagine. Poppy has been happier than I, so hers is sweeter.
All of our sourdough starters are born from the same carefully tended mother dough our ancestor carried from Ireland in 1845. How she kept it alive through the famine times is a mystery we don’t examine too closely.
What we do know is that Bridget Magill carried her sponge to a big house in Buffalo, where she was a cook in a banker’s house, and made the finest bread anyone had ever tasted. More than one matron in the fashionable district tried to steal Bridget away, but she steadfastly cooked for the Mitchell family until her thirty-fifth year. By all accounts the lively, plump old maid then charmed a westward-thinking miner by the name of William O’Hare, who married her and brought her to the gold rush in the Colorado mountains, where she cooked just as happily for miners until she died.
Bridget’s good nature made a bread that was sweet as heaven. She also kept her loaves cold for a long stretch, letting them ripen, resulting in a bread that melted on your tongue like sugar.
I am not as prone to good cheer as my ancestress, and tonight my mood sends the yeasts bubbling riotously in the bowl, filling the air with that fecund and piercing scent. It carries with it a promise of rain, and I turn it out on the layer of fine white flour I’ve scattered across the surface of the counter.
Finally I can begin to knead, and everything slips away, as if I am meditating, as if I am praying.
Only names waft through my mind: Sofia. Katie. Oscar.
RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS
EASY SOURDOUGH STARTER
Technically, the best sourdough starters are made without commercial yeast, but it’s easier to understand the properties of a sponge if you make an easy one to begin with. This one is simple and reliable.
2 cups potato water (water in which