Three Basic Needs
Some thoughts on hunger, bread, and crisis.
“Like most other humans, I am hungry,” M. F. K. Fisher wrote in the opening pages of her 1943 book of essays The Gastronomical Me. More than most, however, Fisher understood that hunger was not an easily answered demand: “Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.” As she went on to document in those strange, sensual essays, written as the shadow of WWII loomed over Europe, our appetites do not go away in times of war or grief, but continue to make their demands of us—sometimes recognizable, and sometimes peculiarly transformed from the hungers of peacetime.
Fisher has been on my mind lately. I wonder what she would make of the sudden run on active dry yeast in grocery stores around the world, the Instagram-ed cascade of homemade cakes and cookies, the sudden society-wide obsession with our sourdough starters. We have transformed, more or less overnight, from the busiest humans in history, with our commutes and our side hustles and our hobbies, to a population of internet-connected homemakers, housebound and making do with what we’ve got. And by ‘making do’, I mean, mostly, trying to feed ourselves.
Food, security, love— this is the logic at work in this strange month of mass baking. For those of us who can stay at home (a privilege, of course) cooking and/or carbs seem to have taken on a collective role as coping strategy. Perhaps you, too, have made cake for breakfast this week or whipped up something improbably elaborate that, in another time, might have fed a happy crowd. Lacking a crowd, now, it must feed you. That we seem to be driven to these decadent, impractical ends in solitude is not an accident or an affectation. Care in a time of distance, safety in a time of uncertainty—these are the appetites we are answering.
This week, a friend texted me about the sourdough starter she had recently revived from hibernation at the back of her fridge. It had been sitting there for months since she received it, a tart slurry of microbes waiting under a little crust of dried flour as my friend went about the normal business of her life. Now, entering the second month of isolation in her one-bedroom apartment, she finally excavated the little jar to try to make her first loaf of bread. But, she complained, the dough wasn’t rising and the instructions seemed intricate to the point of absurdity. She was frustrated and a little bit giddy, like someone unsure if they’re about to laugh or cry. I recognized the mood. This was not the blissed-out modern homesteader meditatively kneading in the soft-focus lighting of her baking blog, but something messier, funnier, halting and uncooperative—in short, a lot more like real life. My friend wanted to know how she was supposed to fold the dough, how she would know when it was ready, whether it looked normal, whether it would all turn out OK.
The only real answer—that you can’t know, you can only pay attention—was also frustrating. She sent me a cellphone video of the pale lump of dough lying in its bowl as she prodded it dubiously, trying to see if it had risen. Whatever happens, I told her when she threw up her hands and threw the thing into the oven, the good news is that it will definitely turn into bread. A couple hours later, an update: “This bread is dense but the bomb,” she texted. “Time to make another!”
Outside, an invisible threat moves through our bodies and our institutions, closing schools and libraries and office buildings, overwhelming hospitals, leaving eddies of fear and exhaustion in its wake. A virus is small enough to slip between friends as they talk or strangers passing in the supermarket, and the movements of this particular disease seem chaotic to the extreme, hospitalizing some some while leaving others seemingly untouched. So, unsure of ourselves, we don’t touch. We walk in ten-foot arcs to avoid each other on the sidewalk and wash our hands until the skin is cracked, trying to slough off both the unseen danger and the ever-present worry.
No wonder, then, so many of us are learning how to court and coddle the invisible millions of bacteria and yeast that make up a sourdough starter. This, we can control: once or twice a day, at regular hours or else whenever you remember to do it, measuring out precise amounts of flour and water, feeding, mixing, waiting. We feed our starters as metonym for our own alien hungers, and are are reassured to see that the rules, well followed, can conjure consistency from chaos. This mundane parthenogenesis, bordering on the miraculous; flour and water, giving rise to life. But then, the transubstantiation of flour and fat and sugar and salt into food has always been one of our primal experiences with control, giving us a small sense of mastery over the invisible forces of hunger and its appeasement. Everywhere in the world, people bake bread, feed each other sweets, make a meal out of unnecessary little transformative touches. Baking is not trivial, it is not cute or clean, and it is certainly nothing new. Medieval cooks cutting beef tallow into pie crust, floured to their elbows, had the same appetites to fulfill. And by meeting them, we are reassured that the universe can be held in balance, at least for a time, with a little application of attention and care. Ergo, we make cookies.
…. This is not the part where I now tell you how to keep a sourdough starter. Everyone on the internet has already done that, and their instructions are much more patient and precise than mine would be. One such guide I’ve particularly enjoyed is Tara Jenson, a baker in North Carolina who has been coaching followers of her Instagram account, @bakerhands, through the day-by-day process of cultivating a starter. Jensen is, among other things, thoughtful, funny, and encouraging, and her instructions are patient and forgiving. She also understands that baking is not frivolous, and that waste is another kind of hunger. For all of those “discard” steps in other sourdough guides, Jensen has a recipe for you to use up your leftover starter (the sourdough cake is a particularly good specimen of the ‘breakfast cake’ genre). If you are looking to start somewhere, start there.
As for me, all I can add by way of advice is one rule: Pay attention. You are probably hungry.
-A
References & further reading:
M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780865473928
And a nice review of it: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/25/gastronomical-me-mfk-fisher-review
Tara Jensen’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bakerhands/
And her book, A Baker’s Year: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250127389
And a nice review of it: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/smoke-signals-bakery-tara-jensen-a-bakers-year
Claire Saffitz’s Guide to Sourdough: https://cooking.nytimes.com/guides/59-how-to-make-sourdough-bread
My brilliant friend Eve (who just baked her first bread) writes a frank, funny, and powerful advice column, the latest installment of which is particularly honest and—I suspect for many—relatable: https://grist.org/ask-umbra/im-an-advice-columnist-and-i-dont-know-what-to-say-that-could-help/
Want more like this? I’m going to be sending little weird food essays every week or so. Subscribe and see more at www.queenofthesconeage.com