The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

The Feature in the Register

Darlene was good, I have to give her that. By August she had wholesale accounts. Two coffee shops in Des Moines, a co-op grocery in Ames, and, the big one, she was in talks with a regional grocery chain called Hy-Kow, eleven stores, that wanted to carry Prairie Rose “heritage” loaves in their bakery section with a little card that told the hundred-year story. Eleven stores. That is real money out here. That is a woman becoming somebody.

And then the newspaper came.

The Des Moines Register ran a Sunday feature in the food section, and it was Darlene’s whole dream in newsprint. Half a page. A photo of her at the farmers market, and an inset photo of the crock, and a headline that said “A Taste of History: One Iowa Woman Keeps a Century-Old Family Starter Alive.” The reporter had eaten it all up. There were quotes. Darlene told the Register that the starter had been “started by my husband’s great-grandmother in a sod house in 1925,” which was almost true and entirely stolen, and that she felt “a responsibility to these women who came before me,” and that “you can taste the hundred years in every bite.”

You could not, of course. You could taste a Vermont packet from 2019. But the reporter could not know that, and the readers could not know that, and Darlene was betting the entire county could not know that either.

I read the feature twice at my kitchen table. Then I clipped it, and I put it in the folder, on top of the printout of the “mother to daughter” banner, on top of the note I’d photographed on my porch, on top of the two years of Facebook posts I’d been quietly saving. And I want to be honest with you about how I felt, because I have thought about it a lot since. I did not feel rage anymore. The rage had burned off back in the spring. What I felt reading that feature was something closer to relief, the relief of a woman who has set a long snare and just heard the animal step into it.

Because Darlene had now done the two things I needed her to do. She had claimed, in the largest newspaper in the state, on the record, that the bread she was selling was made with Ingrid’s hundred-year sponge. And she had, months before, poured Ingrid’s hundred-year sponge down the drain.

The only thing left was to prove both of those true at the same time, in public, in a way no story could talk its way out of. And that, finally, is the part I never told anyone. That is the thing my mother did three moves ahead of all of us.