February 4, 1999

The quietest place in a supermarket to study your grocery list is in baking supplies. It is used mainly as a shortcut to reach TV dinners and frozen concoctions from prepared foods in the delicatessen, so even on the busiest of holidays, carts don't have to be parallel-parked. No one cares if you back against the flour shelf for a comfortable rest to review the orders at hand. Minute amounts of flour dust stick to the seat of my pants, but bakers count so little among the mobs of microwave cooks that there's more danger of being reported as a suspicious character than for being unkempt.

Mother left the legacy to bake bread in my family. Her recipes for oatmeal rolls and cornbread continue on even in this age of wadded-up sandwich loaves, so full of preservatives and imitation flavors that mice refuse to eat deeper into the wrapper than the wax paper. The heavy lid from a 10-gallon keg she used to cook cornbread is shelved here at the ranch. What's missing are such principal ingredients as bacon grease, twice as flavorful as vegetable oil, and yard eggs double the weight of the anemic supermarket brands.

Before Christmas, the neighbor to the west sent a card featuring the picture of a grisly old puncher in a red longhandle underwear top, flipping a pancake on the front and the recipe for sourdough starter on the back to make pancakes outweighing the skillet. I kept the card face down to remember to make the starter and to hide the other side so as not to ruin the holidays with memories of what poor hands a lot of those bunkhouse marvels were in the kitchen.

Once things settled down, I made a batch of starter to work in one of mother's old milk crocks. Recipe books offer vague references to the exact ratios of flour to starter to make sourdough bread. The reason is the big variations in the fermentation and composition of the base formula. The recipe on the Christmas card prescribed using two cups of boiled potato water mixed in flour and a little sugar thick enough to be dough. (It's best to make the consistency the same as buttermilk instead of as thick as dough.)

Timing and amount of sugar, however, are critical. Throw in too much sugar and let the potato water stand too long, and the starter may turn into vodka instead of dough. If heavy distilling occurs, the only difference in procedure is that time-out rules need to be liberalized to give the cooks rest from the sampling.

My starter went right to bubbling and roiling up potato flakes in the creamy depths of the crock. The old kitchen revived yeast spores left over from all the loaves of bread Mother cooked. Fruit flies flew around the rim of the crock and resembled the ones from so many years back that feasted on her dough. (No DNA exists for fruit flies or vinegar flies. However, if this bothers you, try a new hobby or taking more physical exercise, like laying bricks or building sea walls.}

The first biscuits weighed the same as the ones Uncle Goat Whiskers used to call "sinkers." Inspired by the delicious odors from the yeast bread, I ate hot biscuits or toasted halves every meal. Big changes began happening to my body shape and body chemistry. First thing I noticed was that reaching over to change the bottom rack in the oven strained as much as bending over to pull on my boots. The next change came, (and this was a big one,) after a hot shower opened my pores; the fruit flies swarmed off the starter and enveloped me in a mass of fluttering wings.

The only way I found to keep nature in balance in the kitchen or the bathroom was to artificially stimulate the starter by adding enough yeast cakes to the crock to overcome the drawing power of my body odor. Before I gave up and refrigerated the starter, it was taking four yeast cakes to hold the fruit flies over the crock. (Fruit flies are second cousins to house flies and first cousins to gnats. Just like their kinfolks, they never know when enough is enough.)

The most detailed recipe I found is for sourdough cornbread in Joy Of Cooking. I fumbled through several different recipes for biscuits and loaves in cookbooks from Georgia and the Carolinas until I learned to sprinkle flour in the bowl instead of shoveling flour into the bowl.

Funny, but the Boss's old hook to pull on his English polo boots works good to change the rack in the oven and pull on my boots. Fruit flies stay trim from flying so much of the time. They are the only beasts around who train on sourdough and are still able to go very high off the ground, unless you want to count the momentary kick of the vodka...