When in January the New Yorker declared a comeback for bread, it was greeted as the giddy limit of fake trendspotting. “Phew,” said the world. “Thank God. I haven’t eaten bread in decades. I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” But there was a bead of truth; starting in Silicon Valley and radiating outwards, a little bit like – what’s that thing? Oh yes, the internet – sourdough had carved the most amazing space for itself in the culture. Proper coders’ brains were lavishing their downtime on finding ways to track the fermentation of their starter culture and then make graphs about it. Instagram is laden with tender crumb shots (it is what it sounds like), people couldn’t delight more in the miracles of this alchemy than if it were neolithic times and bread had only just been invented.
Bread has always been a staple, some magic combination of ease of production, ease of distribution, ease of storage, ease of sale and ease of use. But for these very reasons, it fell out of fashion, and into the category of guilty pleasure. Set snobbery about the mass market alongside the great anti-carb movement that has been tweaked but never abandoned since the late 80s, and bread had in recent years become fatally compromised, like elastication, like nylon, like a Happy Shopper or an arcade – terminally uncool. The most timeless and delicious bread products known to humanity – baguettes, crumpets – were not enough to rescue it. That is until sourdough brought bread back from the dead.
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