Робин Слоун - Sourdough

She uncorked a slender bottle and poured a trickle into a narrow glass. The wine shimmered thickly.

“Have you heard of botrytis?” She said the word carefully, bo-try-tis . “They call it the ‘noble rot.’ These grapes actually get moldy on the vine. On purpose, I mean. It gives the wine a flavor—you’ll see.”

I took a sip. The wine felt heavy in my mouth. It was very sweet but also tartly acidic, and the taste lingered for a long time. Barbara poured a glass for herself, nearly full-size, and her eyes were closed when she lifted it to her lips.

We were both quiet, sipping, when I felt a draft of cold, wet air. Barbara’s eyes fluttered open. “There he is!”

* * *

JIM BASCULE WAS SHORT AND LEAN, a sixty-year-old man with the bearing of a boy. His chin bristled with blond whiskers and his hair was pulled away from his shoulders into a neat ponytail.

I introduced myself and he shook my hand, looking plainly puzzled.

“Are you the Jim Bascule who baked at Café Candide?”

His eyebrows leapt. “I’m not sure if I am … But I remember him, sure. How do you know about that?”

As explanation, I hauled my tote bag onto the countertop, drew out the loaf of bread, and thumped it down.

He looked first at me, then at the bread. He smiled. And, of course, the bread smiled back.

I followed him out of the tasting room into a cluttered kitchen. Cases of wine were stacked haphazardly. There were also miscellaneous wheels of cheese and thin sausages hanging on strings like torpid bats. A slab of wood supported an array of jams as well as what appeared to be a loaf of bread, its brown bottom peeking out from underneath a towel patterned with blue flowers.

Bascule swept the towel back. The loaf underneath was round and thick-crusted with a burnish to shame Everett Broom. That crust didn’t show a face, but instead an intricate spiral.

“Did you do that yourself?” I asked.

“I think you know I didn’t,” Bascule said.

Here’s what he told me.

When he was preparing to reunite with his love in Europe—or so he thought—Jim Bascule left the starter with his parents in Santa Rosa, and he shared with them his suspicion: that it needed music to flourish.

“Things didn’t work out in Brussels,” he said. “Oh, gosh. She lived in this little apartment overlooking an alley … she had a balcony where she grew herbs. She knew everyone, and she was always helping people. Little favors, and big ones, too. I was smitten. There’s no question I built her up in my mind while I was away. By the time I returned, she’d met someone else. This gorgeous Greek guy. I didn’t stand a chance. So I wandered a bit, got involved in some other things.”

What kind of things?

“Oh, things. I didn’t come back to the States until 1985. When I returned, I discovered my dad still had the starter going. That whole time”—Bascule started to laugh—“he’d been playing it the Grateful Dead!”

So here I was seeing the hippie spiraling crust of a Deadhead starter.

“I still play it the Dead every night. There’s a lot of bootlegs.”

But how? Why?

“Here’s my theory, honed over decades of bullshitting to myself. This starter, it uses music as a kind of … synchronization. It helps the little yeasts and whatever-elses to do the right things at the right times. You’ve gotta be careful, though.”

Careful how?

Bascule laughed drily. “I used to play around with other music, just to see. You know that classical tune ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’?” He whistled a bit of the breakneck melody. “I left it alone for fifteen minutes, no more. When I came back inside, it had spilled out of its container. It was everywhere .” He eyed me sharply. “You seen anything like that with yours?”

I confessed I hadn’t. The Clement Street starter was well behaved.

“Well, be careful. I think the music matters. After that happened, I thought I’d finally killed it. Stuff barely bubbled for weeks. Now I just play it the Dead. Good vibes.”

I traced my finger around the maze, an inch above the sourdough’s crust. “Don’t you find this … really exceptionally strange?”

Bascule shrugged. “I’ve done a bit of reading. The way these things work together … It’s unbelievable. I’m sure you’ve heard all this stuff about the bacteria in our gut, how they’re like a second brain? There’s a lab—this was just published recently—there’s a lab where they’ve got some yeasts hooked up to the internet. You can log in and reprogram their DNA.”

That sounded like a terrible idea.

“My point is, there are things in this living world plenty weirder than this. If you want proof, just come back and visit us in the fall. See the grapes.”

“The ones with the fungus?”

“You ever heard of a suitcase clone? No? Well, okay. Come back in the fall.”

Before I left the winery, I asked one last question.

“Who was she? The woman in Belgium who gave you the starter?”

Bascule shook his head. “She had the strangest name.”

* * *

ON THE WAY OUT OF TOWN, I stopped at the Boonville Hotel. Inside, I walked down a shadowed hall to claim a stool at the short bar—I was the only one there—and when the bartender appeared, who was also the hotel’s manager, I ordered a glass of the Tradecraft Gewürtztraminer.

Through an open doorway, I watched a small kitchen staff working quietly, preparing that evening’s meal. I wondered how one of General Dexterity’s robot arms—with kitchen skills!—would fit in here on the side of California State Route 128. Would it ruin that kitchen, or improve it? I genuinely didn’t know.

I sipped my wine slowly.

I pondered the egg problem.

I wondered what other music I could play for the Clement Street starter. Was there any album, any composition, that would encourage a crust that looked simply … normal?

The bartender/manager came back out and asked me if I’d be joining them for dinner. I asked him what they were serving, and he reported: roasted chicken, accompanied by a panzanella salad with tomatoes from the garden and croutons from homemade sourdough.

I told him I had to get back to the office.

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN my mother’s face when Chaiman and I asked her about Jim Bascule. She told us she hadn’t thought of that name in thirty-some years.

Apparently, when he appeared again in Brussels, Shehrieh was shocked. She refused him, and she told us she felt bad about it, but he was too short, and he couldn’t cook anything. Well, he could bake bread, but she’d taught him that. And there was another man, he was Greek … this was before Leopold. (My father wasn’t home when we were talking about all this, and I think that was probably for the best.)

But I understand what she means about the cooking. It’s crucial in Mazg relationships, especially in the beginning. How do you even get started if you can’t woo the other person with your spicy soup?

THAT WASN’T A EUPHEMISM!

THE EGG PROBLEM

DURING MY SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE, at the urging of a professor who specialized in the history of the assembly line, I had embarked on a self-directed project to identify the first use of a computer program in a manufacturing process. After a semester of digging through libraries in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, I had scrounged a few early examples, but I failed to convince either Evelyn Simmons or myself that I had succeeded in my task. Nevertheless, she gave me a 4.0 and told me I’d learned a useful skill.

I used it now.

I was going to be the one to solve the egg problem.

I read up on anatomy and physiology. I acquired textbooks for students of physical therapy and DVDs for students of dance. I tracked down software from a company called Anatomix that could accurately simulate the flex of skin and muscle, and I inspected every menu, every command. Horace became my research assistant: he scoured the internet and brought me three new kinesiology papers every day; dropped them on the countertop still warm from the laser printer.