A bubbling starter brought back Joe, in more ways than one.
Joe, my friend of three decades, suddenly died at 57. It was nearly three years ago, and the cause, apparently, was a heart attack known as a widowmaker. While he left no widow behind, there were too many people with aching holes in their lives.
After the first night of shiva, Joe’s sister took me into his apartment, which was next to her own. Joe had lived there in New York City with his mother, in her Lincoln Square apartment, through the COVID-19 pandemic. He was still there after his mother died, while he was figuring out how to finally sort out his life now that he wasn’t caring for her. Would he build a tiny house? Take his music to a stage, or just live life as close to nature as he could? Did he have the courage for love? But in his final days, he was still sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor, amid the compiled clutter that some have called artistic hoarding.
Together, we looked for clues about his last moments before death. We took in Joe’s Joeness—his camping gear, his cute backpacker Martin guitar, his still-open MacBook Air, surrounded by a mini waterfall of books: the old Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the one he had implored me to read, which I had not, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford. “What would you like of his?” Joe’s sister asked me. There was really just one thing.
“His sourdough starter.”
She looked surprised by my answer. “Where would that be?”
We walked into the narrow, galley-style kitchen. The putty-colored slurry sat on the middle shelf of a nearly empty fridge. I lifted the lid and saw a thin layer of clear liquid, the hooch, on the surface. This is the buildup of alcohol, the product of fermentation that appears when a starter hasn’t been fed for a while. But it smelled sweetly vinegared. A snap of carbon dioxide flicked at my nose. This was a piece of Joe that could live on. I carried it carefully downtown on the subway.
I met Joe in the early ’90s. I was a playwright, he was a talented actor, and we both belonged to the Waterfront theater group in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was never romantic between us, but damn, we went deep. When we found out we had the same Cancerian birthday, he ten years younger, it felt like a spiritual sibling bond. In time, when my real brother died, Joe was there for me in a way that even my lovely beau couldn’t be. There was something about the way he called me “Al” that felt like a sustaining cradle. He was the one person I knew who couldn’t wait to age; he had faith that the best role for him was as an older man.
We had a tight family back in those days—a group that had mostly gone to Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts to study theater—and we would spend long weekends at a place in Delaware County that they nicknamed Flat Rock. Nothing grand, it was the lopsided, bat-infested family farmhouse that belonged to one of our clan, adjacent to acres and acres of lobe-like fields. In the ’90s and early aughts, our weekend trips were frequent, essential, and filled with bonding: time and nature, music and friends, uncompromising necessities. Up there, all were plentiful.
In every season, we would walk the fields until Cassiopeia turned on her head. One blizzardy winter night, we were up to our thighs in white stuff. Beaten by the weather, we returned to the warmth of the house to defrost, pick up some instruments, jam, and then see what we could throw together for a group dinner. Joe had stayed behind, practicing tai chi form in the pelting snow.
Hours later, I went into full-throttle Jewish mother panic. Joe hadn’t returned. Was he buried in a snow drift? Had he woken a hibernating bear? I was terrified and out of my mind with the absolute certainty that we had to find him. Those who had known him far longer than me, including my then boyfriend, assured me: Joe had animal instincts. He would come home when the time was right for him, and not one millisecond beforehand.
Somewhere around three in the morning, there was the sound of boots, heavy with snow. “Joe!” I threw my arms around him, not yet understanding that worrying about Joe was not only useless but unwanted. I was awed to realize that, while his water bottle had turned into a block of ice, his hands were warm. The man was a woodburning stove. I would later coin the phrase “Joe does not ‘do’ weather.”
Around that time, Joe had started to bake. He perfected his pie technique, but he also bought one of those efficient, programmable home bread machines, a bulbous white Sunbeam. Slap in the packaged yeast, a scoop of King Arthur flour, and water; press a button; and wake up to a warm loaf. Being the food snob I was, I appreciated the freshness but assessed the results as homogenous and spiritless. But who was I to throw stones? For sure, sourdough was the way to go, but I was traveling too often to nurture a starter and show him the real thing, so it was all aspirational for us until COVID, decades later, afforded us the luxury of time. That’s when, both grounded, we telephonically compared notes, finally on our sourdough journeys.
The night I brought Joe-the-Starter home, I pondered whether I should keep him pure or blend him with my own. I went the sentimental route: I mixed us together, and as I poured his into mine, I remembered our last trip together. Six weeks before his unexpected death, Joe orchestrated a return to Flat Rock for a long-overdue reunion. Call it our version of The Big Chill. This was Joe’s first foray into the world after the pandemic shutdown, and it had been a full 20 years since we were all in that sacred spot. Some came from Ohio, others from New York and New Jersey, everyone laden with all sorts of provisions. Of course, I did what I do. As someone who has written about wine and its culture for the past thirty years, I brought more bottles than we could possibly drink. And Joe and I both brought loaves.
Seeing him in person for the first time in three months, I was worried that his right eye had narrowed—it was noticeably less open than the other. His face was too ashen. I should have said something. I should have. But he was so joyous to have our family together again that I kept my mouth shut. On the second night, Joe doled out his potent, homegrown mushrooms—another enterprise of seclusion. Who could say no to Joe?
“Just a little,” I said.
“Sure,” he responded with a smile. But it didn’t take too long before we could see that the six of us were in for it. It all kicked in right after we walked through the brambles and emerged into the midsummer heat and sunset.
As the full orange moon rose, we roamed the fields and talked. Joe’s beloved mother had been dead nearly a year, and my mother’s dementia was killing me. On a hill in the middle of the freshly mown field, I poured my heart out. I stumbled over myself, self-conscious because I knew Joe was in heavy mourning for his mom, and there I was, unraveling because of the burdens of my living one. But one of the rules of tripping is no apologizing. My friend listened intently, his head resting on his walking stick. The image was painterly, and I pocketed it.
Later, while the bats swarmed, when we could imagine eating, when we were ready for some wine, we brought out our loaves—mine with too much rye, as always. Joe’s was all whole wheat. We placed our respective loaves, side by side on the kitchen table’s daisy-splashed oilcloth. As we sipped the Foillard Beaujolais I had poured, I declared his bread superior. He didn’t agree. (He was wrong.)
“You really don’t build levain?” Joe did not give the starter that extra feed before baking.
“You don’t let it proof for two days?” He did not keep it cool for a slower, sourer fermentation, as I did, but baked it immediately.
This was a piece of Joe that could live on.
This past January was a year since my mother’s death. Unlike Joe, she was 98, and her passing wasn’t tragic. In my newfound liberation, I fled. I rented an inexpensive flat in Paris and, based there, was able to have a manic five months of catching up on those winemakers in Georgia, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy that I had neglected while caring for Ethel. Then, in a flash, I was home. Within seconds of entering my apartment, I dumped my bags and went directly to my refrigerator. My sourdough starter was a sad victim of my neglect and starvation. The situation was emotionally fraught because, of course, what was in that jar wasn’t just a starter. It was my friend.
At the time I left the country, I was off my bread game. While my crust had been perfectly crackly, I couldn’t get the degree of sourness, the texture, the glorious air pockets in the crumb that I coveted.
Now I had another chance. But my blended starter was covered with black fur. His smell? Vile decay, all ruined flesh and defiance.
Thinking about how much Joe had loved to come over to my place for dinner, I scraped away the offending bits and transferred the mush into a clean jar and commenced to feed it twice a day, a little more aggressively than in the past, with not only rye but fancy high-protein flour from Janie’s Mill. I constantly watched its temperature as if it was sick, making sure I kept it at 76 degrees. I still couldn’t quite forgive myself for not telling Joe that the change in his eye could have been indicative of something dire in the making.
My brother was a cardiologist. I knew these things. I should have insisted, even though I knew what he would say: “No.” It wasn’t just that he had no health insurance; he stubbornly believed in his ability to control not only his internal temperature, not only the pedestrians who invaded his space because of inattention but his ultimate fate. His starter was stubborn just like him, and clung to the smell of death. I despaired that it would ever turn around. A friend told me to trust the process and keep going. One day, she promised, I’d smell its faint rosiness.
By the end of the week, there was flower and fruit and still some rot. I was not pleased that the starter failed to emit the smell of sharp, honey-vinegared nail polish that signals health. To hell with it—time for a bake. I took 10 grams of my ferment and, sure enough, the levain frothed up. The bubbles were beautiful, but the dirt-in-the-wound smell was still there. I mixed flour and water and let it sit for 30 minutes, the autolyse stage. Then I added the levain and waited for that smell of sea air on bleached-out sand. Well, the mess of it smelled flat. One hour later, on the second stretch and fold, I felt the fairy dust of fermentation, a continuous cycle of death and resurrection; out of crumble and shreds came elasticity. The dough was in dialogue with me, teeming with vivacity.
The only thing that comforts me about Joe’s untimely death was that he always did exactly what he wanted to do. While he would stay out in the frigid night even as his water bottle turned to ice, he knew when to come in. He also knew when to exit. “Isn’t that right, Joe?” I said out loud as I finished my final shaping and placed the loaf in my refrigerator. Then, at the finale, the bread? It was victorious.
Possessing our entwined starter was much more viable than visiting a cemetery, placing a stone on a stone; here Joe could respond to me. Oh, I understand enough about sourdough science to know that very little of Joe’s original culture existed in the starter. But it didn’t matter. There was a little bit of his DNA in there—enough to make me believe that Joe was back, carrying my original starter on his shoulders, returning after hours in the fields during a blizzard. In a way. Not in the way I wanted, but in a way.