The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Topping Up My Sourdough Starter with Tennyson

Subscribe to Andrew's monthly newsletter here for all his latest writing.

A recent sourdough loaf (one that actually came out well enough for a photo).

‘Tis better to have loaved and lost, then never to have loaved at all’ wrote Tennyson... almost. Well, okay, maybe he didn’t but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a catchy opening. The original line ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ comes from his 1850 elegy ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’. It’s a beautiful sentiment which prizes love for its own sake, even if William Congreve may have got there first in his 1700 play The Way of the World when he wrote ‘Say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have loved’. At heart it’s a line offering consolation in the face of death or a the breakdown/break-up of a relationship. Whether Tennyson was a part-time homebaker like myself, with a proclivity for fresh bread we’ll never know, but this line came to mind recently when I wanted, after a long pause of a year or more, to get a sourdough starter going again, with a view to using it instead of the usual fast-action yeast I buy. Indeed, believe it or not, my first experience of baking bread was, apart from soda bread in Home Economics lessons in school, sourdough bread. I’d visited my cousin in Shropshire who’d been making sourdough for years, and on one occasion just as I was about to get going in the car he handed me a little jar half filled with what appeared to be a beige coloured gunk, along with what seemed like complicated instructions for ‘activating’ it and using it in bread as yeast. 

Anyway, I took it home, gave it whirl and couldn’t believe that after I’d been able to make my own loaf. It was until a long time afterwards that I started using fast action yeast, which to be honest I just find more convenient, efficient and consistent when I want to bake a loaf of bread within a day. However, to say all of this is to be a little economical with the truth and suggest that baking bread is easy and that, like riding a bike, once you’ve cracked it you’ve cracked it. Because what I’ve found out since I first baked that loaf of bread is that the perfect loaf is as elusive as the holy grail. I’ve baked enough loaves now to know that there is no such thing as the perfect loaf - despite my best efforts and tweaks and changes to oven temperature and fridge proving and flour types and kneading methods and hydration ratios and additions of seeds and variations in proving times and steam in the oven (and so on) while some loaves have come closer than others, I still remain unsatisfied with some element of my loaves. But, then I wondered if maybe perfection wasn’t the point of baking, and what if the process of it, i.e. the mixing, the kneading (that’s if you knead as opposed to use the slap’n’fold technique), the proving, the shaping, the proving again, the baking, oh and don’t forget the cooling, what if that instead was the point. What if the point of baking was about entering into a process whereby failure was always going to be outcome, but the solace and consolation was to be found instead in the process, by which I mean the process of letting your mind wonder by letting your hands take over. Or the process of learning how to wait by waiting for the bread to rise. I have ocme to learn in all my baking experiments, (and there have been hundreds by now) that the end product of the baked loaf was really just a bonus and it was the process that was the true reward – as trite as it may sound, the process – by which I mean all of it, even waiting for it to cool down – was its own reward, even if what resulted from it was wonky, raw in the middle, had hardly risen, or was burnt. 

So, to return to Tennyson, it really is better to have loaved and lost, than never to have loaved at all. I can’t imagine my life now without baking. No matter where I am in the world, if there’s a kitchen with an oven, I’ll probably try to bake a loaf. It’s a way of keeping in touch with myself, a grounding, a form of sustenance, not just bodily but mentally. By baking I’m doing something worthwhile, not just for me, but for my family, something that will bring us together, feed us, keep us going. And I;’m also getting in touch with one of the most ancient forms humans have of finding sustenance: bread. But that process is fraught with loss, and if baking bread has taught me anything it’s the human quest for perfection will always end in disappointment, we are inherently flawed, but there is something joyful and gratifying to that lesson, it’s a lesson in humility, of surrendering to our faults and imperfections, and that’s why I keep going back to the mixing bowl. And to think all of this, from simply mixing flour, water, salt and yeast. 

In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot Estragon asks of Vladimir ‘We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?’ I think baking bread is about more than giving the impression we exist, it is the essence of existence. We exist in the process of making bread, and exist off it. Baking is an education in itself, as it teaches us: discipline, precision, humility, patience, frugality, provenance of ingredients, the relationship between simplicity and complexity, learning from mistakes, accepting defeat, respect for time honoured methods, selflessness in making something to be shared and responsibility in making something upon which others may depend... I could go on. 

At any rate, back to Tennyson. He was one of the great elegists, and I could have done with one of his elegies recently as I spent days  feeding the starter, and then a day proving my first sourdough loaf in while, only to watch it in the oven rise the princely height of about 1 centimetre. All that time, for a dense, flat loaf of bread – I’ll be honest, I was gutted. If you visit the Tartine Instagram page you’ll be greeted with deep brown sourdough loaves with huge bursts down the middle, signifying a very healthy rise and that they’ve been baked with very active sourdough starter. My loaf did not look like that. 

So, with Tennyson ringing in my ears, I changed recipe, fed my starter again over the course of two days, proved the loaf in the fridge for what felt like a week but was really two days, shaped it, proved it in the fridge again, and then baked it. The picture you see at the top of this article is that loaf. 

So, with new wind in my sails I will loave on. After all, to quote again, this time in his blank verse narrative The Princess: "Nor is it wiser to weep a true occasion lost, but trim our sails, and let old bygones be." In this case, my bygone loaf became bread crumbs for chicken schnitzel, so all was not lost and there is perhaps no greater act of remembrance for a ‘bygone’ loaf than turning it into breadcrumbs for fried chicken. Perhaps not a Tennysonian memorial, but a nod, albeit a breadcrumby one, to the great Victorian Poet Laureate.