"Good, Palatable and Nutritious Bread" - Was it Sourdough?

​"Among all civilized people bread has become an article of food of the first necessity; and properly so, for it constitutes of itself a complete life sustainer, the gluten, starch and sugar which it contains representing ozotized and hydro-carbonated nutrients, and combining the sustaining powers of the animal and vegetable kingdoms in one product. As there is no one article of food that enters so largely into our daily fare as bread, so no degree of skill in preparing other articles can compensate for lack of knowledge in the art of making good, palatable and nutritious bread."
The White House Cook Book, 1887

Sourdough has quickly gone from a little-known bread species to a household word. Sourdough-only bakeries pop up in our towns, sourdough loaves populate grocery shelves, and the product is touted everywhere as being both a healthier and more historical bread. As a bread-baker myself as well as a historian, I too have found myself researching the subject. After all, not only do I turn out many a crusty loaf in my own kitchen, but so do some of my characters, from Phebe in The Letter to Dorota in Through the Darkness - including Margaret's rejected slices in In the Family Way! So, did Phebe Kavanaugh, Rozalia Hujar, Grace Burton, Margaret Westover, and Dorota Ondraski bake sourdough bread? Let's find out!

Following a recent bread-baking video by historian and YouTube chef Jon Townsend, commenters revealed that a sourdough of sorts was indeed a staple bread for the poorer classes in Poland, but had some distinct differences. Firstly, the bread was made from rye flour; secondly, even though rye flour needs the lower pH and enzymes of wild yeast rather than brewer's yeast to rise, the starter was not like today's bubbly jar of watery sourdough. Polish housewives, like Rozalia's mother Apollonia Bartkowska, would take a small ball of dough from the batch they were making and bury it in their sack of flour to dry into a dehydrated starter. Next time they baked, this hardened ball would be dissolved in water and allowed to ferment for a day before making the next batch. So, sourdough or no? The jury is out on that one.

In the late 1800s, the most popular cookbook was The White House Cook Book, first published in 1887 and an instant bestseller. By 1890, Margaret Westover (The House on Harmony Street) and Rose Burton and her daughter Grace King (Dunstan) would have used this book extensively. I searched its pages for the word sourdough or a sourdough-type process, but neither really appeared. Under 'General Directions', I found this information:

​"The yeast must be good and fresh if the bread is to be digestible and nice. Stale yeast produces, instead of vinous fermentation, an acetous fermentation, which flavors the bread and makes it disagreeable. A poor, thin yeast produces an imperfect fermentation, the result being a heavy unwholesome loaf...
"Home-made yeast is generally preferred to any other. Compressed yeast, as now sold in most grocery stores, makes fine light, sweet bread, and is a much quicker process, and can always be had fresh, being made fresh every day."

​The first recipe for Wheat Bread only mentions yeast as an ingredient, but considering that you are using a 'teacupful' it is obviously a homemade yeast, not the one ounce of 'compressed yeast' in the next recipe, which is purchased at the grocery store. What follows are three recipes for yeast alone: Home-made Yeast, made from potatoes, hops, flour, water, sugar, ginger, salt, and premade yeast; Unrivaled Yeast, from hops, salt, brown sugar, flour, potatoes, and no previously made yeast - which, they assure us, has "an advantage" due to "its spontaneous fermentation, requiring the help of no old yeast"; and Dried Yeast Cakes, which is simply the first recipe allowed to dry and cut into cakes or crumbled (reminiscent of the Polish yeast balls). Two additional recipes are for Salt-Raising Bread, which has a starter fermented for only five hours, and Bread from Milk Yeast, a cornmeal and milk starter that ferments for less than twenty-four hours. Neither recipe has you save any of the starter for future batches; they are always made from scratch. Sourdough or no? Probably not, since the starters are mostly created from fresh ingredients, fermented for twenty-four hours or less, and none of it is saved for future recipes. The Unrivaled Yeast recipe mentions that you can store it for two months in a cool place, but only needs the bottle to be shaken before use.

Now, if you back up twenty years to the Civil War, in The Letter Arabella's sister-in-law Phebe brings freshly baked bread for lunch. Civil War Recipes: Receipts from the Pages of Godey's Lady's Book shows much the same process as the White House Cook Book: homemade yeast is created from hops, water and flour, sugar or molasses, and occasionally ginger, and used at once or bottled and tucked away to keep for up to two months with no additional care required. A teaspoon to a teacup of this 'soft yeast', as one recipe calls it, are added to bread, doughnut, and even pancake recipes. Sourdough or no? In terms of a starter that is nurtured, tended, and regularly added to, I would say no.

Closer to the modern day, Dorota rushes her precious loaves of Polish bread into the Anderson shelter to keep them safe from an air-raid in Through the Darkness. Her bread would have been a white bread made with store-bought, non-instant yeast allowed to 'fizz' briefly in water and sugar during the baking process. Containing eggs and sugar or honey, it is a sweet bread similar to the Challah still baked today for the Sabbath, which Jewish bakers adapted from the bread their Christian Polish neighbors were baking for Sunday. Polish Sweet Bread or Egg Bread is a tender loaf with an unmatched soft and lightly sweet crumb. Often it is braided, twisted, and decorated. No wonder Dorota didn't want to risk it being destroyed in a bombing! Sourdough or no? Definitely not sourdough, as it is made from purchased dried yeast.

There is no doubt that sourdough had a presence in the American West, as memorialized by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her award-winning Little House series, but it appears that it was far less popular than may be currently portrayed. However, making your own yeast was always recommended as the best way to make the best bread. Sourdough or not, early cooks were an independent bunch who recognized that the baking of bread was a time-honored process that could be made without any outside help as long as you had flour, water, and some type of sweetening to encourage the growth of bacteria from the air. And that is a spirit that all of us could benefit from, in a world where so many of our baked goods are made far away by mysterious processes in windowless factories. So, whether you buy your yeast from a store in a bag or in a packet, or grow it in a jar or a bowl in your own kitchen, I encourage you to bake up a batch and enjoy the work of your own hands!