🍞 A library of living bread

On a cold night high on the Chilkoot Pass, north-west Canada, a man lies down to sleep with a small sack held close against him, guarding it like the gold he's about to go searching for. Under a cloudless sky, frost falls on the mountain, but the man's body keeps the sack warm through the night.

Inside is a sourdough starter: flour and water, and a colony of wild yeast and bacteria. In the days of the gold rush, with no shop-bought yeast for thousands of miles, that living culture was the way most prospectors got their bread. Flour, and importantly the starter, became vital to their survival.

Ione Christensen's family believed their starter came this way in the late 1890s, with her great-grandfather and his four sons. The family mined a place called Hunker Creek. The search for gold had some small initial success, but eventually their luck ran out. They went broke, and the steam boiler they'd brought north was left to rust in the bush.

But the family's starter kept going. It went from generation to generation, in an old jar with a well-worn label, and it came, in time, to Ione.

A keen hiker, Ione walked the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail 21 times, and each time she walked in her family's footsteps. On foggy days, she said, she could feel her ancestors walking up ahead of her.

Always a supporter of people hiking in nature, she once ran a cook tent with two friends at the end of the trail at Bennett Lake. Hikers who'd hauled themselves over the pass came down to her homemade sourdough hotcakes, all from the family starter, with butter and syrup and a mug of tea. I know that I'd have happily sat in that tent all afternoon, and so would the bears. Parks Canada put an electric fence round the tent to keep them out.

In St Vith, a small town in the east of Belgium, there's a room of dimly lit cabinets kept at about 4°C. Inside sit jars of starter from all over the world. The bakery company Puratos began the collection in 2013, after a Syrian baker of chickpea biscuits came to them feeling very worried. His sons wanted to switch to shop-bought yeast. Afraid his starter would be lost, he asked them to keep it.

Karl De Smedt is the caretaker of the jars. He feeds each one with its own original flour, sent by the people who donated it, so that each starter keeps its own character. One of his first jobs as a young baker was feeding a starter from San Francisco, and it became his first sourdough loaf. "Treat a starter nice," he says, "and it will reward you tremendously, like a good friend."

In 2018, Karl was listening to CBC Radio when he heard Ione talk about her starter. He then travelled to the Yukon to meet her and carried a sample home to Belgium. "I don't consider it mine," she said. "It is Yukon sourdough and it belongs to Yukon." She always referred to herself as one of its keepers. Ione had an impressive life: she was the first female mayor of Whitehorse, commissioner of Yukon, and a Canadian senator. She passed in September 2025, aged 91.

The Christensen family's starter is one of more than a hundred now cared for in the Puratos Sourdough Library in Belgium. Karl sees the library as a place to preserve and study the diverse and notable starters.

As for my own sourdough, there was a lunchtime when my partner bit into a slice, looked up at me, and said, "Something's missing... did you forget to add the salt?" I had. Without the salt, the bread lost its flavour, and that's how this newsletter got its name.

Do you keep a starter, or does someone in your family? Where did it come from?

Warmly,

Rob

PS Here's Ione's recipe for her hotcakes. I know what I'll be making at the weekend ... best stock up on maple syrup.