The world was on fire.
It was the morning of April 18, 1906. Northern California was hit with a massive earthquake. Devastating fires broke out in San Francisco – 80% of the city burned. Half of the city’s 400,000 residents were left homeless.
Louise Boudin fled for her life.
Louise was the wife of Isidore Boudin, a French immigrant and master baker. They arrived in San Francisco during the 1849 California gold rush. Hopeful prospectors, known as “forty-niners,” raced to stake land claims along the river where gold was found. 300,000 “miners,” dreaming of instant riches, joined the frenzy.
Boudin’s “gold” was bread.
The forty-niners mixed a starter or “Mother” to make fresh, leavened bread to eat during long, back-breaking days of panning for gold. They made a thick paste of flour and water and exposed it to the air. It didn’t take long for Mother to ferment. Cultures of natural wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria grew quickly. A pinch of Mother added to fresh dough made the bread rise. If you constantly “fed” Mother, it lasted indefinitely.
It was called sourdough bread.
Kat Escher wrote in Smithsonian Magazine that the “gold miners kept their sourdough mother alive by cuddling them” – keeping Mother warm by storing it close to their bodies. A pinch of Mother and they didn’t have to purchase costly or hard-to-get commercial yeast. They could bake fresh, leavened bread on the campfire.
Herbert and Woodworth reported in Atlas Obscura that “sourdough bread was considered a food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook.” Too often wilderness campfire sourdough was “rough, tough, and smelled a bit funny.” Like the prospectors.
Gold Rush Prospector, Compliments of Wikimedia Commons
Everything changed with the arrival of French and Italian bakers. Most used commercial yeast.
Isidore Boudin, a French master chef, decided to use a Gold Rush Mother. Applying his skills, Boudin produced what is now known as “The Original San Francisco Sourdough French Bread.” It was so delicious that Boudin’s Bakery is still thriving – today you can go to one of 27 Boudin bakeries and cafes around the U.S., have their sourdough products shipped, and join a sourdough bread club.
Compliments of Tobias Kleinlercher, Wikimedia Commons
Which brings us back to Louise Boudin.
Between aftershocks and raging fires, Louise grabbed a bucket and filled it with Boudin’s Mother. Then she fled. It was a courageous act. Little did Louise know that the original Mother, carefully cultivated, would be “alive” almost 170 years later.
Although the Boudin’s Mother was a unique survivor of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history, it wasn’t the first. Fermented or sour dough had been around for thousands of years. Food historians believe that 5,000 years ago, in ancient Egypt, it was just a lucky accident. Someone mistakenly left flatbread dough or a porridge mixture out overnight.
Allie Faden speculated in Positively Probiotic that “upon returning, they [the ancient Egyptians] discovered this mixture was bubbly and smelled differently due to the yeast and bacteria that had colonized it during the maker’s slumber.”
They used it anyway. Bread rose and fermented dough made the menu.
The recipe spread to ancient Greece, Rome, and across Europe.
Meet Seamus Blackley.
Blackley is a video game designer, theoretical physicist, the father of the original Xbox, and what he calls a “GastroEgyptologist.” In 2020, the self-professed “bread nerd” harvested 4,500-5,000-year-old yeast from ancient Egyptian clay pots used to hold bread and beer. He activated it, mixed it with ancient grains, and baked a loaf of fermented bread.
“The aroma is AMAZING and NEW,” he tweeted. “It’s much sweeter and more rich than the sourdough we are used to.”
Quite a mouthful.
The Pantry Mama credits sourdough fermentation as “the original form of rising bread throughout human history until the discovery of commercial yeast in the mid-1900s.”
There are others who agree, like Carl Griffiths, known for his 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough and Ione Christenson who still uses her great-great-grandfather, Klondike Gold-Rusher Wesley David Ballentine’s, Mother. Rachel Poulson received the family Mother as a wedding gift, passed down from Mormon settlers in the 1800s.
There are hundreds of stories about Mother.
More recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, there was a shortage of yeast. Many took up sourdough baking as a hobby.
“I believe,” The Pantry Mama wrote, “that our love affair with sourdough bread will continue into the future as we strive to find a way to ground ourselves . . .”
Who could argue with Mother?
