Welcome to Sourdough Madrigals

a blog on bread from Graison Gill

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

Theodore Roethke 

Welcome. 

My name is Graison Gill and I’m writing from my new substack the “Sourdough Madrigals.”

I am the founder of Bellegarde in New Orleans and your name was on the Bakery’s e-newsletter. A decade after its beginning in 2012, Bellegarde became a worker-owned Cooperative. Since that massive change, I’ve been busy with new passions and projects and people. 

Some of you may recall those crusty, dark, and hard to chew e-newsletters. When I would spill my obsession with baking and milling. Where I would narrate how, in shaping so much bread, I myself was shaped by lonesome nights of flour dust and wild yeast and unfermented thoughts. Maybe you didn’t care then. Or maybe you laughed, or listened. Maybe you cringed. 

Good. Because my hope now is no different than it was then. I want to reach you–by making the stories we tell about bread more alive, more personal, more raw. And therefore, more relatable.

These Sourdough Madrigals are leavened by those old newsletters. But their flavor will be less sour, more aware, less dense. My obsession with bread is still deep, weird, and unrelenting. But these days, I’m more intrigued by the way things are and less by the ways things should be. Perhaps it’s sobriety. Perhaps fatherhood. Whatever it is, I find myself more at home in the questions, less in the answers. Life is more spacious here. 

We all tell stories about ourselves. We use different alphabets, wish different endings, maybe plagiarize our beginnings. Some of us use music, some use paint. Some use carpentry, some use dance. But all our stories have dragons and villains and wizards. And a hero who is always hungry. 

Bread has been the story I tell about myself. And my desire for the Sourdough Madrigals is to write about the stories beneath the stories we tell about food. I want to know what we leave out and what we leave in. I want to know how flavor is created in these choices. More than anything, I want to ask: 

What are the stories behind our recipes? 

To this question, I wanted a name which gathered all the wild and raw ingredients in our lives and fermented them into something real. I thought Sourdough Madrigals would do.

Each sourdough culture is composed of 70 different species of wild yeast. These are endemic to every bakery–in the mixing bowls, on the walls of the oven, in the soggy air. And these yeasts are embedded into the baker–in their nail beds, on their breath, their eyelashes. Although these yeasts are found around the world, they only come alive when a baker combines them with water and flour. In essence, these sourdough cultures are the stories we tell, what Jung called the collective unconscious. 

A madrigal is part song, part poem. Popular during the Renaissance, it was arranged in intricate counterpoint and played without instruments. Just lungs and lyrics: verbal calligraphy which hung briefly in the air and in the hearts of the listener. These beautiful songs were often secular, sung a capella, specific to the people and the places they were sung. In essence, these are the recipes we bake and cook together–in our families, our communities, in the shower when we think no one is listening to us sing.

So if we combine sourdough and madrigal we have two of life’s most essential ingredients: stories and recipes. Kneaded by its baker and sung into music by its chorus–those who grew the wheat, leavened the wild yeast, fed the oven’s fire, ate the loaf–we now have an edible song. 

Sometimes we need to believe in things we cannot see. And sometimes we have to trust things which we don't understand. This is why I fell in love with bread. And am still seduced. Even today, fifteen years on, I cannot see exactly how it all works, how it all comes together–the pH of a sourdough culture, the starch damage in flour, the perfect amount of fermentation. 

But whether I understand it or not, I still trust the story bread tells me. Because this is the alchemy of storytelling and bread baking: with nothing but the most elemental ingredients–flour, water, salt or breath, lungs, words–we can make our own stories from scratch. It’s a beautiful thing, a most human thing, to create something nourishing and unique with the ingredients which surround us. 

So. 

Will you listen to these stories with me? Will you help me leaven, sing, argue, share? Will you write me a letter, telling me about your family recipes and stories and bread? I hope so. I’d be honored to have you, however you can contribute–by donating financially or by just reading these blogs, gathered as we are around this digital campfire we call modern life.

My grandmother once told me that not every story is told with words. But that some are best tasted. Then she gave me a recipe. 

Sincerely,

Graison Gill