Reflection: Making kin with sourdough during a pandemic

Abstract

Relying on auto-ethnography, I reflect on the role sourdough and bread-making practices have played during the COVID-19 pandemic. I explore the agency of a non-human entity—the sourdough—and the relations that emerge from nurturing it. In particular, I inquire what living relationally means for me—a professional migrant—in a time that is not only challenging, due to the pandemic and consequent lockdown away from my country of origin, but which has also forced me to proactively and creatively respond to being in a precarious employment. Sourdough and bread-making practices have allowed me to create, recreate, and reinforce new and existing relations. I, thus, indicate to what extent such practices activate kin making and knowledge making, whilst counterbalancing the alienation and distress that come from experiencing a pandemic.

Keywords:

• Sourdough
• pandemic
• COVID-19
• relations
• kin making
• imagined communities
• knowledge making

Introduction

This auto-ethnographic paper shows to what extent receiving and nurturing sourdough starter and making bread from it counterbalance the ruptures caused by a pandemic, by either creating new relations or reinforcing existing ones. I indicate how the living starter meaningfully ties people together and thus opens up possibilities for kin making and becoming part of a new “imagined community” as well as for knowledge making. In this paper, I unveil the multiple processes of “becoming” and forming kin, which encapsulate both biological and cultural dimensions (Ingold and Pálsson 2013).

Originally from Italy, I now live in Finland, where I arrived three years ago to work as a University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Like many other scholars, I am on temporary employment and often rely on a variety of funding to conduct academic work. Before moving to Helsinki, I worked at the Universities of Aberdeen (UK) and Tartu (Estonia) as a postdoctoral fellow for a total of four years (two years in each place). I believe that this qualifies me as an academic professional migrant or as Italians would put it, un cervello in fuga (literally, brain on the run), which refers to the mass migration of graduates out of Italy in the last few decades. While moving from country to country for work has proved to be beneficial in multiple ways, as I have been able to access different schools of thought, academic realities, and networks, it has often required much creativity in finding ways to establish new relations and settle in in order to eventually feel at home in a new place. At its initial stages, the lockdown put a halt to this creative and more spontaneous flow of encounters, as everyone was advised not to go out and meet in person. In this paper, I show how sourdough bread making surprisingly mediated this condition of forced isolation inasmuch as it became the focal point of a set of existing and new relations, which little by little began to feel like I was making kin. To a certain extent, Janowski (2012, 175) echoes this when she indicates how for migrants, food and drink play an important role in creating and maintaining kin. Here, kin does not only refer to the new relation with the sourdough starter, which intimately affected my attention, emotions, and routines, but also to the existing relations with friends and colleagues in Helsinki, with my family and friends in Italy, and with indoor and outdoor spaces (such as, my kitchen, the city of Helsinki, and its surroundings). I have organized my paper sequentially, i.e., from a description of the relations with the sourdough to the relations with the space, illustrating how they have become something different and exciting during the pandemic and have enhanced my feelings of belonging to a new creative and proactive imagined community.

Making kin and knowledge with the living sourdough starter

Toward June 2020, as the lockdown came to an end in Helsinki, I realized that something had changed in some of the everyday practices of my colleagues, my friends and myself.¹ Little clues had already surfaced during the lockdown but I had simply overlooked them. By March 2020, the theme of sourdough bread and recipes had become persistent in my social media pages and online discussions. Initially, I thought of this new phenomenon as an almost predictable reaction to the lockdown, since people spent more time at home, where they could invest in new hobbies. However, little by little, this new trend and its recurrence on multiple social media platforms intrigued me. Within a few days, a few episodes took place: a friend bestowed homemade sourdough bread upon me. She explained how she had stopped buying bread altogether during the lockdown and started making it herself. The following day, two colleagues told me they had taken up this new skill and one of them shared a picture of homemade pizza from sourdough.

While I had remained a somewhat external observer to this emerging reality, a turning point in my involvement took place when a friend of mine donated a sourdough starter to me. In May 2020, indeed, a couple of friends (who are also scholars) and I agreed to restart our writing retreat, which had stopped during the lockdown. Instead of meeting at the library, we opted for a friend’s house. Here, during lunch breaks, my friends shared stories about their experiments—failures and successes—with sourdough bread and various recipes. Having no experience in bread making whatsoever, I could only listen and show a genuine interest in practices that felt a bit out-of-touch. At one of our meetings, one of my two friends took out of her backpack a box with the sourdough starter that she had carried from home, and told me this was for me. I felt immense joy—I had joined the team! It felt great and scary at the same time, given that I understood it required great care (and a bit of luck, too). My friends invited me to give the starter a name and it felt almost natural to call “him” by my mother’s grandfather’s name and my father’s abbreviated second name, Nanni. I assigned the sourdough to the male gender, possibly because in Italian sourdough is “lievito madre” (mother yeast) and “lievito” is a masculine noun. While sourdough is also called “pasta madre” (mother dough) in Italian, it did not occur to me that to use a female name.² The use of the word “madre” (mother) in both Italian terms for sourdough starter, nonetheless, is a direct reference to the source of every life. This new endeavor and the approach to its whole operation felt like I was making new kin in times which indeed were troubled and unsettling due to the fracturing of routines and increased isolation (cf. Haraway 2016) not only because of the naming and the Italian reference to mother, but also because of the relationships that little by little emerged and developed from it.

After receiving the starter, I could not pretend things were the same as before. I kept looking at him, wondering if he would grow nicely. I searched for ways to take care of him on different online sources and learned that feeding the sourdough starter may vary, depending on how often one wants to bake. It can take place once a week if kept in the fridge, or on a daily basis if kept at room temperature. To feed the starter, the ingredients remain the same as those used to make it: flour and water (and air). I found that the proportions among those varies, but I opted for the 2:1:2 combination, which corresponds to starter:water:flour. I tend to take 100 gr of Nanni, 50 gr of water, and 100 gr of flour. The quality of the flour also matters and the amount of protein should be around 13-14gr in 100 gr as this gives the starter enough power to grow. While at first I only used all-purpose flour, I continue experimenting by mixing it with whole-wheat, buckwheat, or spelt flour. The reactions have varied and so far, Nanni has preferred whole-wheat flour to the others. I also learned that it is advisable to pour water into a bowl and mix it with the starter, until some bubbles form, which indicates whether the starter is healthy and “happy.” Flour should be added to the mix last. I work the flour, starter, and water in the bowl with my right hand until the flour has all been absorbed. Surprisingly, after this operation, the nails on my right hand shine a lot brighter, possibly feeding from the nutrients of the sourdough. I then lay the dough on the kitchen surface, and continue kneading it with both my hands for about ten minutes. I push the dough with the lower part of my palm and pull it back with my fingers, form cylindrical and round shapes, turn clockwise and repeat this until it feels elastic. Finally, I place it in a glass jar—always the same jar—and cover it with a paper towel. I tend to wait for an hour before putting the jar into the fridge to let the microbes activate at room temperature, which becomes visible as soon as the sourdough starts to grow.

When refreshing Nanni, I am able to look inwards and feel my heart beat and breath more clearly. Reconnecting with my breathing, also through a regular yoga practice, became paramount during the lockdown as a means of attaining tranquility amidst the chaos. Breathing during the online yoga classes surely contributed to keep me grounded. However, quite unexpectedly, I became even more aware of my breath, when I started working the dough. As I synchronized and attuned my movement with my breath in kneading the dough to make it malleable and elastic, I felt both the quietness and the joy for what might result from it. I shared my breath with Nanni while I smelt the air that came out of the dough, evaluating whether it had a sweet our sour quality, and I breathed out into it during the coordinated movement (on shared breath, cf. Siragusa, Westman, and Moritz 2020). Such a subtle and intimate activity reminds me of what Barad (2007, 379) calls “intra-action” since through my hands, my nose, my eyes, I am directly, sensually, and materially intertwined to another living being. My actions are not separate from, but rather entangled with Nanni’s materiality and sensuality. His responsiveness and reaction has agency on how I perform when I refresh him, as I knead harder or softer, faster or more slowly, add water or flour, depending on his texture, which suggests that we attune affectively in these activities (cf. Kwek and Seyfert 2018 on “affective attunement”). This very personal and new relation weds with the positive feelings that emerge when the bread is ready and I can serve it to others or eat it myself.

Making kin with friends and colleagues in Helsinki

While intuitive on some levels, I later discovered that the degree of intimacy between the bakers’ hands and their starter has been a recent inquiry of investigation. Rob Dunn, who is Professor in Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, has demonstrated that the hands of bakers affect the taste of their bread, as the microbes found on them mirror those found within the starter.³ After this revelation, not only I smiled at the effect the dough had on my right hands’ nails, but I also reflected on the practice to share the starter with friends and family members. I contemplated how such a simple act allows the relations to become more intimate as people become sensually connected through the microbes on their hand, their food, and consequently their guts. Recollecting how I was bestowed the sourdough starter, I discovered a deeper level of closeness to my friend, as I understood that the first bread I made might have still tasted “like her hands.” This new closeness made up to some extent for the loss of normal social interaction caused by the pandemic.

The ways the sourdough and bread making contribute to community building and becoming kin with my two friends in Helsinki, however, do not end here. If our schedules allow, we continue to meet once a week at one of my friend’s house, where we often have lunch together. Sourdough is one of the dominant themes of our discussions: we not only share best recipes and tricks that might work to make a better bread, but also blogs, Instagram and Facebook pages that we follow and where we connect with other sourdough-committed communities. Since we come from three different countries and have different heritage languages, we might not always be able to access the suggested pages. Yet, if a recipe has caught our attention, we tend to indicate that to one another. We do this also by sending each other pictures of newly made bread on WhatsApp, where we have created a group. This shared new interest in bread compensated for the pandemic’s curtailing of other shared past-times.

Sharing recipes and bread-making ideas around the kitchen table often prompts other stories that are linked to some childhood or youth memory, our home countries and the cooking practices of our families. Besides sharing stories and thus enhancing confidence and connection, we also consume the bread together, thus materially extending our intimacy (cf. Rowe 2012, 219). To me if feels as if around my friend’s kitchen table—where food and stories are shared—a sense of home forms, held together by the sourdough as an adhesive agent and story-telling as the air that feeds him.

Making kin with family and friends in Italy

The first time I made bread from Nanni, I was quite unsure about what I could bake, having no experience in such a practice. I eventually opted for a “classic” from Tuscany, where I am from, la schiacciata Toscana, which is a flat salty and oily bread, often eaten as a snack in the morning or afternoon. The recipe I found online suggested an all-day work process, where I would go to the dough every few hours, ensuring that it was growing and the fermentation was taking place. I would smell the dough, and press it lightly with my fingers to check whether the fermentation had stopped. If the dough stops responding back to the pressure of the hand, this means it is not fermenting any longer. I then spent the day back and forth between my desk and the kitchen board, getting my fingers dirty in the sticky dough and clean again for the keyboard. A few minutes after I put the schiacciata in the oven, the smell in the house satisfied my appetite for a restored sense of home and brought me back in time and space to streets I used to walk on as a child and to the schiacciata and mortadella (cooked cured pork) scenting school corridors during the morning breaks. I could almost taste the salty bread and smell the salty air of those summer afternoons spent in Calafuria—a place of untamed rocky cliffs near Livorno, my hometown—while savoring the freshly made schiacciata.

Feelings I had not experienced in a long time emerged and vibrated in me, as the smell of schiacciata, its visceral quality prompted memories that were both personal and culturally grounded (see Abarca and Colby 2016 on similar experiences among migrants). Bread often connects to one’s country of origin in both the sensorial affects and emotions it brings and the symbolism attached to it (Rowe 2012), as it “is a nexus of economic, political, aesthetic, social, symbolic and health concerns” (Counihan 1984, 49). Bread may stir important feelings, the imagination, and nostalgia in many migrants (e.g., Coakley 2012). The smell and taste of schiacciata grounded me, weaving past and present bodily sensations more tightly and thus creating a stronger nexus between different temporalities and places that had been fractured by the pandemic.

Nurturing the sourdough opened up new opportunities to reinforce existing relations with my family members and friends in Italy. In the early 2000s just as I left Italy to work overseas, my mother founded and managed a bakery at a large supermarket. That experience had always remained a mystery to me, since I could not share with her its developments due to our physical distance and the divergent life trajectories we had at the time. During the lockdown, reporting my attempts at bread making activated my mother’s memories of her work experience, including which tools are necessary for the best bread results (e.g., razors to cut the bread, the size of rolling pins, etc.). She also ordered a wooden board for me from an old family friend who lives in Faenza, Emilia Romagna, where the women are used to making tortellini at home on wooden boards. Kin continued to extend and be renewed, since by receiving the wooden board from an old friend, I was able to indirectly reestablish relations, which had great significance during my childhood, but that I had lost touch with in my years of living overseas. In a similar fashion, I reconnected with a friend from my student days in Pisa, who upon seeing pictures of bread on my Instagram during the lockdown, decided impromptu to send me a book on sourdough, written by a friend of hers. These two episodes indicate how through nurturing sourdough and making bread from it, I had expanded my community, in spite of the lockdown’s efforts to shrink it, by connecting to my home country, through people I know and care about, as well as people I am not even acquainted with.

Introducing bread making from sourdough enabled me—a migrant—to rediscover and reinforce kinship connections with my home country, which in some cases had almost become obsolete. Thanks to Covid’s pushing me to sourdough, existing social relations that had albeit weakened in time, mostly due to my migration, rejuvenated and found new depth.

Making kin with my kitchen, the city, and its surroundings

Besides connecting to Nanni, friends and family, making kin encompasses also spaces and places. As soon as I started nurturing Nanni, my kitchen in Helsinki became more dynamic, as I reorganized some of the cupboards for the flour and arranged more space on the board to knead the dough. Likewise, the jar in which Nanni sits obtained a new spot in the fridge, where I place it every time after refreshing him. Besides the shelves, boards, and the overall reorganization of the space, the air in the kitchen has transformed and become sweeter, since by baking more regularly, it is often filled with the aroma of freshly made bread. Reinventing the space married new shopping patterns, since for the bread I bought new knives, baskets, and linen towels, which also occupied more room on the shelves.

My consumer habits changed as I started paying attention to shelves I used to ignore. While at the beginning of the pandemic, many shelves in the local supermarkets emptied fast and it became a challenge to find, for example, pasta and coffee, I was able to acquaint myself with products that were available and I had not actively bought before. New shelves unveiled to me, as I started looking for different types of flour, hence realizing that some of the flour that is available in Helsinki (e.g., rye flour) is on the contrary unavailable in Italy. By screening the shelves in search of nutrient-rich flour, I learned new words in Finnish, such as “vehnäjauho” (lit. wheat flour), or “ruisjauho” (lit. rye flour), which my friends and I started assimilating in our talks about sourdough and bread recipes, as if conceiving our own new pidgin language. I started searching for shops where to find different types of flour and of different origin, and discovered that in Itäkeskus, an eastern district in Helsinki, I could buy flour produced in Estonia and Russia. The search activated other questions as I began to wonder where to find mills that grind the grains into flour. After a few consultations with my friends and colleagues, I acquired a couple of addresses of mills just outside Helsinki that I am now planning to visit. Through this renewed attention to the city and its surroundings, I am feeling more grounded in one place (cf. Sen 2016). Bread making has thus counterbalanced the ruptures of the pandemic lockdown and the stresses of being in a precarious employment. As Coakley (2012) argues losses and gains are part of the experience of every migrant—by engaging more deeply with the infrastructure of the city, I creatively and innovatively deepened a sense of belonging, made new kin with it, and warmed to the place.

Concluding remarks: surpassing boundaries

During the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent lockdown in Helsinki, bread making helped me generate a new sense of community and possibly even of home. I was also able to revive old sensorial memories and bring my family closer, especially during a time when Italy was badly hit by the virus and the desire to connect with my relatives and friends grew stronger. A sense of home, however, took also new directions. Through bread making, not only I established and/or reinforced relations with my new friends and colleagues, but I also built an entirely new relation with my sourdough, who was alive, responsive to me and to the conditions of the room, and highly dependent on my constant care and attention. By sharing my experiences with other bread makers and nurturing a new dialogue with my sourdough, I had expanded my community, revived a sense of home in the smell and the memories that it prompted, and established new kin with human and nonhuman beings.

In making kin, in both its biological and cultural dimensions, and making community, my companions and I transcended national boundaries and “cultural differences” through the exchange of recipes and ideas, eclipsing their original localization. Such a refreshed living relationally also helped me accept (if not fully, surely largely) the challenges of being in temporary employment and away from my home country.

I would like to conclude by saying that experiences of “affective attunement,” “shared breath,” and living relationally with nonhuman entities that were generated by the pandemic are not unique to my current experience in bread making. In fact, as an anthropologist with an interest in ways of speaking and nonverbal communication and as a scholar who has long worked with indigenous peoples, I acknowledge and value different practices and the potential they have in bringing people together. However, especially during the lockdown, connecting with bread making practices in full steam, drawing in all my senses, my breath, and my memories reminded me of their importance, on what living relationally can involve—an unanticipated benefit of the disruptions of the pandemic. In a time when we were forced to isolate and to reevaluate how to maintain social relations, I was surprisingly reminded to be present, to make kin, to connect with an imagined community, which has no political boundaries, to feel my breath and attune with the breath of others, while simultaneously getting my hands dirty.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Humanities Program at the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, and by KONE Foundation grant, NORMAL [grant number 201805889, 2018]. I am also immensely grateful to my friend and anthropologist Esin Duzel, who read and commented on a first draft of this paper and to my husband Dmitry Arzyutov, also an anthropologist and historian, for supporting this work from the beginning… and tolerating my failed attempts with bread making. Infinite gratitude goes to the Food and Foodways editors and reviewers for their valuable comments.

Notes

1 It appears I was not the only one to notice a change in cooking habits: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/can-archaeology-explain-the-bread-baking-craze/?fbclid=IwAR2MCrpSK3p7fW7cS7CjKuJN5CBRfislC9ijh3xoCJANor5BZshz_tiLjDY <accessed 25 June 2020>

2 However, when I later made a rye-flour starter from scratch, I used a female name, Alla, after one of my friend’s name.

3 See https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/11/12/665655220/sourdough-hands-how-bakers-and-bread-are-a-microbial-match?t=1600333493874 <accessed 25 September 2020>