Sourdough Robin Sloan (2017)
I love baking bread, and I love how it tastes right out of the oven. Yes, I know you’re supposed to wait until it cools, so that the gluten can set, but I can never wait. Novelist Robin Sloan gets this. The main character in his novel Sourdough, Lois Clary, tells us about her first homemade loaf: “I made another cut, peeled away a rough slice, and blew across its surface, tossing it from one hand to the other. It was too hot to eat, but I began to eat it anyway.” (42)
Lois, not long out of college in Michigan, is a computer programmer of exceptional talents. Her special area of expertise is software for robots, so she’s recruited by General Dexterity, a robotics startup in San Francisco. All the horror stories about the punishing workloads of Silicon Valley tech workers play out here. Lois writes code for long hours, coming back to her minuscule apartment too exhausted even to cook supper. She starts ordering meals from a nearby delivery service and finds the food delectable.
Alas, the two owners of the under-the-radar kitchen have immigration issues and have to leave the United States quickly, but they take the time to stop at Lois’s apartment and present her with the starter for their sourdough bread. Can she please keep it alive for them? Can she feed it daily and bake with it? Lois has never baked bread, but she feels indebted to the brothers who’ve been sustaining her with their cooking. She immerses herself in the world of sourdough—the flours, the ovens, the coaxing along of the microorganisms that cause the rising and that flavor the crumb. Soon she’s baking on a large scale, in addition to working far more than full time at General Dexterity.
Sourdough skewers both the tech industry (hello, Jeff Bezos) and the gourmet/local food movements (hi there, Alice Waters) as Lois tries to combine her programming chops with her newfound bread obsession. Roboticized food preparation is one result, but in the end, Lois has to choose between two ways of life—or maybe three. Sloan has a light touch in this easy-to-read, funny novel.
Kitchens of the Great Midwest J Ryan Stradal (2015)
In a more serious vein, but still drolly witty, is Kitchens of the Great Midwest. Protagonist Eva Thorvald has a rough start in life. When she’s just a child, her mother deserts the family and then her father dies. But from an early age Eva understands the importance of taste subtlety, and the culinary arts beckon. She zeros in on the ultra-local and ultra-fresh food markets and becomes an internationally famed chef, while retaining her Midwestern roots. The novel approaches Eva’s story from the viewpoints of many of those whose lives she touches, bringing up how our preconceptions about people color our actions.
And for a nonfiction offering on the subject of food, see my review of S. Margot Finn’s Discriminating Taste.