Live sourdough starter is more a pet than a cooking ingredient, demanding loving nurture and regular attention. As US author Robin Sloan’s follow-up to his bestselling debut Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore demonstrates, it can also become an obsession. Lois, his young protagonist, works at a tech startup in San Francisco, programming robot arms alongside her mostly male colleagues – “bony and cold-eyed, wraiths in Japanese denim and limited-edition sneakers”. They have no time to eat properly, subsisting on a nutritive gel named Slurry. Lois fails to thrive until a takeaway leaflet for Clement Street Soup and Sourdough flops through the door of the flat she’s hardly ever in. The vegetarian sandwich and spicy broth she orders must be full of friendly bacteria; it quickly clears up her chronic stomach pains.
Alas, visa issues mean the brothers behind Soup and Sourdough must abscond; before departing, however, they present their favourite customer with a CD of music beloved of their (fictional) Magz community – women wailing “that life was tragic, but at least there was wine in it” – and a ceramic crock of what they call their “culture”. Though the brothers hastily amend the word “culture” to the more correct “starter”, what they really give her is a corrective to the grey tech world sapping her soul.
Through trial, error and internet research, Lois seeks to recreate the stupendous staple that will be her entrée to the high-end cafes and farmers’ markets of Silicon Valley. (The elaborately simple Café Candide is surely a nod to Berkeley’s famous Chez Panisse.) But lurking behind the high ideals of the scrupulous foodies lurk mystery backers with obscure aims, and is it really possible for automation and handcrafting to co-exist? The future of food might be the joyless Slurry after all.
Sourdough is a soup of skilfully balanced ingredients: there’s satire, a touch of fantasy, a pinch of SF, all bound up with a likeable narrator whose zest for life is infectious. The novel opens a door on a world that’s both comforting and thrillingly odd. Shelve it alongside Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette and your hipster cookbooks, and savour.
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