The Hundred Year Starter She Stole

What Mom Did in 2016

You have to go back nine years.

In 2016 the Iowa State University food science department, working with the State Historical Society, did a project on heritage foods. Heirloom sourdough starters, mostly, and some old farmstead cheeses and a few families’ hard cider cultures. The idea was that these living cultures were a kind of history that was disappearing every time an old woman died and nobody kept feeding her sponge. So a professor and two graduate students drove around the state that summer collecting samples from the oldest continuous starters they could find, sequencing the microbes, documenting the family stories, and archiving a preserved, dehydrated sample of each one with a catalog number, like a seed bank but for the wild yeast and bacteria that raised us.

My mother’s sponge was in that project. Somebody at the Guthrie County extension office had told the professor about Vera Lindgren’s hundred-year sponge, and the professor drove out to Cutler and sat at our counter and my mother fed him bread and told him about Ingrid and the dugout, and he took a sample. A teaspoon of the living sponge, sealed and labeled and dated, August 2016, and its genetic sequence, the specific fingerprint of the specific colony of wild organisms that only existed in one crock on earth. Every sourdough starter has one. It is as individual as a face. The mix of yeast strains and lactobacillus that grew up in Ingrid’s dugout and rode down four generations of Lindgren counters was not the mix in a Vermont packet, and it was not the mix in anybody else’s kitchen, and there was one preserved, sequenced, catalogued, third-party-documented sample of it sitting in a climate-controlled archive at Iowa State, with my mother’s name and story attached, nine years before Darlene ever backed her Tahoe up to my porch.

My mother knew that sample was there. And when Darlene started circling, when she brought the hundred-dollar crock at Christmas and started saying “I’m the only one who’ll do it right” at the supper table, my mother, who did not do conflict, did the only kind of fighting she knew. She got quiet, and she got ready.

The winter before she died, Vera did two things. First, she took a healthy split of the sponge, a good active cup of it, and she put it in a plain glass canning jar, and she drove it over to my house herself and set it in my refrigerator and said, “Keep this fed, Nora. This is the sponge. Whatever happens to the crock.” I thought she meant if the crock broke. She meant if the crock walked. She gave me the living thing and let Darlene have the pot.

Second, she called the professor at Iowa State, the same man from 2016, and she asked him a question, and he told her yes, the archived sample was still there, still viable, still hers, still catalogued, and that if anyone ever wanted to know whether a given loaf of bread was truly made with the Lindgren starter, the lab could compare it, culture to culture, and tell you, and stand behind it. My mother thanked him and hung up and did not tell me. I only found the call later, in her phone records, after, when I understood what she’d done.

So here is where things stood the Sunday the Register feature ran. Darlene was selling “hundred-year heirloom” bread made with a Vermont packet and swearing to the whole state it was Ingrid’s sponge. The real Ingrid sponge, the actual living hundred-year colony, was alive and well and bubbling in a jar in my refrigerator, fed every week, exactly as it had been fed since 1925. And there was a sealed, sequenced, third-party sample of the true starter in an archive at Iowa State that could prove, to a scientific certainty, which was which.

My mother left me the sword. All I had to do was wait for Darlene to stand still.