The Sourdough Wars

came up behind him. “Hi, I wasn’t expecting you.”
    “We have some good news for you.”
    “I could use some. I just turned on the radio and heard about the starter disappearing. Would you like some pâté?” Within seconds, Sally had laid a small feast on her long smooth pine table—pâté, butter, cornichons, a little white wine, and her own sourdough. I tried the bread with a little butter first, not polluting it with pâté. It was like candy.
    I can’t explain it exactly—it wasn’t sweet or anything, but so melt-in-your-mouth perfect that that’s what came to mind. I said, “Chris. Try this bread. You won’t believe it.”
    As Chris did, Sally leaned forward, hands twitching. She watched Chris taste and hardly gave her time to swallow before she spoke: “Do you think it’s okay?”
    “It’s the greatest,” said Chris. “Nobody else is making anything like it.”
    I helped myself to more, this time with pâté. “Is it because the other bakeries are so big? You have better quality control?”
    Sally shook her head. “I could bake just as good a bread if I had to do it in million-loaf batches. If only I had the opportunity.”
    “Why on earth,” asked Chris, “do you want the Martinelli starter? You honestly think you could improve on this?”
    “You really think it’s that good?”
    “You know it is.”
    Tears stood in her eyes. “The way things work in this country, a thing is good if people think so. You’ve got to have a gimmick. A scam, to get their attention.”
    “You feel you haven’t had the recognition you deserve,” I said. “Is that it?”
    “I can barely afford to pay my gas bills—Bob and Tony are millionaires. Or Bob is anyway, and Tony’s got a Mercedes.”
    “And you think if you had the starter other people would think your bread was special?”
    She nodded.
    “What we came for,” I said, “is to tell you there’s a second batch of starter. Whoever stole it didn’t get it all.”
    She looked like a woman who’d just been told her child wasn’t on that wrecked school bus after all. While I explained the situation, tears ran down her face. “There’s a chance,” she said. “Oh, God, there’s still a chance.”
    “You want that starter in the worst way,” I said. I’ve often noticed that if you just say what you’re thinking about people, they somehow get the idea they owe you an explanation.
    The kid came in for a bite of
pâté
and saw his mom crying. “Mommy, what’s wrong?”
    She wiped her eyes. “Nothing, Bobby—go watch TV, okay?” She turned back to us. “Or nothing new, anyway. You’re right, Rebecca—I really do want that starter in the worst way. I want to be the biggest, best, most important sourdough baker in the history of the world. I want to go down in history that way.”
    “You’re probably already the best.”
    “Not good enough. No one knows about me. Do you know where I learned to bake?”
    “You were married to Robert Tosi, weren’t you?”
    “That’s right. He taught me the business. I think he thought it was cute, or I was doing it to be supportive or it was a hobby or something.” She broke off another piece of bread for herself. “I guess it was at first. I was an ace cook—I mean I still am. I made the pâté as well as the bread, by the way. I was a good little wife who always did the wifely thing, and cooking was wifely. But I was really
good
at it. So I thought it might be fun to learn to bake sourdough. Bob gave me a job—actually paid me to work at the bakery till I’d learned what I wanted to. When we split up, I
had
to be a baker. It was the only trade I had.”
    Chris asked, “Did you plan it that way?”
    “In a way I did. I wasn’t very happy married to Bob—I mean, after Bobby was about three. I needed something else. I have a degree in sociology, but—I don’t know—being a social worker didn’t appeal to me. I needed something I could do on my own—and I was already a great cook. Bob was a baker, and it was just sort of
there
.”
    She looked down at the floor. “I don’t suppose I was consciously thinking about leaving him then, but I guess it was in the back of my mind.”
    “You were the one who left?”
    Sally nodded. Her eyes filled up again. “It was awful. He wanted me to do nothing but stick around the house. He had no sense of my needs at all.”
    Chris patted her hand. She had all the sympathy in the world for anyone who’d suffered at the hands of the Dread