[Sca-cooks] citations on sour dough from the OED
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Tue Nov 30 12:39:23 PST 2004
Also sprach Chris Stanifer:
>--- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise <jenne at fiedlerfamily.net> wrote:
>
>> In other words, the YEAST and the yeast qualities (fermentum) are the
>> important parts. :)
>
>
>Bzzzt.... I'm sorry, the answer is 'Bacteria', and not 'Yeast'.
>Thank you for playing. If this
>were the case, then any dough at all could be termed 'sourdough'.
>Unfortunately for you, this is
>not the case.
Please let me start by saying I'm only half serious here, but who was
it that wrote:
>After 6 months of devoted service and outrageous flavor, it appears
>that my starter has suffered from seperation anxiety. 3 weeks in
>the fridge, unfed and unloved,
>and it has given up the ghost....shuffled off this mortal coil.....
>gone to join the Choir
>Invisible...you get the point.
>
>I tried to revive it by adding more yeast, and replacing half of it
>with fresh flour and water,
>but it just sat there, looking up at me with billions of lifeless
>eyes. No froth, no bubble, not
>even a respectable burp. Listless.
>
>I'm wondering why the starter did not revive when I added fresh
>yeast and fresh flour. It always
>had before, and I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't now.
>Unless, there is too much acid
>in the starter??? I mean, this stuff is lemondrop sour, and made
>absolutely wonderful bread,
>pancakes and waffles, just to name a few.
Does this read like someone who regards sourness as the raison d'etre
for sourdough? I ask because the writer doesn't mention trying to fix
it by adding lactobacilli, only yeast! Because, it seems, it was
already sour, and therefore, by definition, successful, no?
Curiouser and curiouser!
Now, suppose a new starter was made, following the methods approved
by frontier cooks on wagon trains headed for, say, Californey from,
say, Independence, Missouri. (My son used to play the Oregon Trail
game a lot.) In its early stages the starter would probably not be
very sour. It might not be sour at all, and almost certainly would
not reach "lemon-drop sour" <g> for several generations (in baker's
terms) of use. But eventually, it would happen. And for many
(although not all) that flavor would be a welcome effect. It's one of
the reasons for cultivating a long-established sourdough starter, and
an entire subgenre of the breadbaker's art has developed in response
to it.
However, look at some nineteenth-century cookbooks. Lydia Child
(although a Bostonian whose judgement is obviously open to question
in this matter) has a recipe for a starter (she just calls it yeast)
which employs captured, airborne wild yeasts, and makes no mention of
souring, although I'm sure, if properly used, it would become sour
over time. Unless, of course, people preferred it not to be, in which
case they would throw it away and make a fresher batch. But what
greenhorn cooks like Mrs. Child and the baker in the best
gold-miner's-fleecing hotel in San Francisco had in common was that
their starter had to produce a light bread -- San Francisco Sourdough
bread is famous for it. In addition to its sourness, which is also
regarded favorably.
But these bakers were carrying with them while travelling, and baking
with, sourdough in large part because of its leavening capacity
(especially since barm and winemaker's levain were presumably not
readily available on the trail), and this would have been at least as
important as its capacity to impart a sour flavor, if not more so.
Consider which breadstuffs (including biscuits, pancakes, etc.) that
sourdough is used for, and which it is not, first off. Is sourdough
traditionally used in cornpone or crackers? Hardtack? Biscuits?
Sometimes, AFAIK, but not often. Most often it's used in leavened
breads. Next, consider the commercial product that replaced sourdough
to some extent in the Western baker's arsenal: baking powder. Not
only did it require less maintenance, but it offered the baker a
choice on whether his dough would be tangy or not (since, unlike the
use of soda, acids weren't, strictly speaking, a necessary addition).
And yet, cultured buttermilk and sour milk still show up with fair
regularity in biscuits and pancakes. They're mostly there for the
flavor (which could either be a throwback to sourdough use or flavors
associated with soda use), while the baking powder is clearly there
to provide aeration.
In view of all this, I submit that while sourdough is either sour, or
potentially so, hence the name, the sourness was not the primary
reason for making and using it in its 19th-century Western heyday.
The name describes a characteristic, but not necessarily its most
important characteristic.
Adamantius
--
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If they have no bread, you have to say, let them eat
brioche."
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
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