That was a year ago.
Eleanor has come every Sunday since. Fifty-one Sundays out of fifty-two. The one she missed, she had the flu, and she called me at six in the morning to make sure I fed the starter.
My guest room did become my home office. But my kitchen became something else.
It turns out sourdough is mostly math. Ratios. Temperatures. Hydration percentages. Timing. I’m a bookkeeper. I’m very good at math. Eleanor was shocked. After about two months, I built her a spreadsheet to track her starters. She cried.
She still talks to them. Now I do too. I’m not proud of it.
Harold still calls her his flour girl. But now he says it at our Sunday dinner table, in front of everybody, and Eleanor doesn’t swat him anymore. She just smiles.
Back in March, during the worst week of tax season, Eleanor asked me something over a bowl of rising dough.
“Claire, dear. You do business paperwork. Do you know what a person would need to sell bread? Legally? At a market?”
So I looked it up for her. In New York, you can sell certain homemade baked goods at farmers’ markets if you register as a home processor with the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. There are rules about labels and ingredients and what kinds of food count. I helped her fill out the application. I set her up with a simple bookkeeping system and a separate little bank account. I made her keep every receipt. Old habits.
She was approved in April.
In May, she finally walked up to the baker at the Saratoga Farmers’ Market. The one she’d been too nervous to talk to for six months. Her name is Rosalind. She’s been baking sourdough for twenty years.
Rosalind asked to smell R-07.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Ma’am, where did you get this?”
“My mother,” Eleanor said. “And her mother before that.”
Rosalind offered her half of her market table on Saturday mornings.
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