[Sca-cooks] citations on sour dough from the OED

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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