Salt Rising Bread. Genevieve Bardwell

      The continued interest in discovering our family histories – the people, their stories and the details of the lives they lived – is a powerful testament to the importance of tradition and memory. It grounds us and gives us connection. And one way we connect with our past is through food.

      Until not so very long ago, salt rising bread was still being made in American kitchens by women who followed the recipes handed down to them by their mothers and grandmothers, one generation to the next. In many early pioneer homes, salt rising bread was the only bread baked. It was often an essential part of their everyday lives and wellbeing.

      And then, for reasons having to do with societal change, a loss of family continuity and the special nature of the bread itself, the tradition of home-baked salt rising bread began to fade. However, through much of the 20th century, salt rising bread could be found in bakeries across the country. In California, for instance – far from Appalachia – the Van de Kamp’s bakery chain sold salt rising bread up and down the state until the mid-1970s. Today, Californians of a certain age still remember the salt rising bread from Van de Kamp’s and how good it tasted. How do we know? They’re some of Rising Creek Bakery’s best customers. They find our bakery online and tell us their stories. And not only Californians. Almost daily, we receive a phone call from someone in a faraway state asking if we really do make it . . . then asking, with a hopeful voice, “Does it have that salt rising smell?” These are people who remember eating salt rising bread many years before. They tell us how they’ve yearned to experience again that distinctive taste that carries them back through time, to memories of a cherished youth with extended family gathered around the kitchen table.

      Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakery in Los Angeles, CA, was known for its salt rising bread.

      For both of us, Susan and Jenny, baking is an integral part of who we are in relation to our lives and our families. In our separate paths to success with making salt rising bread, we each had great curiosity to understand more about it. Even though we had the best of teachers, there were things yet to be discovered. Where did it come from? Who first made it? Why did it sometimes work and other times not? What made its fermentation behave so unpredictably? We joined forces and began looking for answers. One mystery after the next presented itself to us until soon we had quite a list.

       Our List of Mysteries

       Where did salt rising bread come from, and who made it first?

       How did salt rising bread get its name when there is little or no salt in its recipes?

       What is happening when a starter does not work?

       What is happening when a sponge does not work?

       What is happening when the loaves do not rise?

       What factors determine the intensity of the “salt rising” aroma?

       What effect does adding ginger to a starter play in the fermentation?

       Why does starter fermentation often not work when the outdoor temperature fluctuates from warm to below freezing?

       What folklore around success or failure can be believed?

       What is it about salt rising bread that makes memories stay alive deep in people’s hearts for a lifetime?

       Mystery #1

      The question that dogged us from the start was where did this absolutely unique bread originate? In our search for its distant beginnings, we have asked hundreds of people to share their traditions of salt rising bread with us, as well as their recipes – from western New York through western Pennsylvania and into the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky. We researched everything and anything we could get our hands on: scholarly journals, early cookbooks, diaries of pioneer women who described making salt rising bread along the wagon-train trails as they settled in such places as Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Utah, and, later, California. We contacted food historians, hoping to discover how the bread came to America in the first place, and found only speculation. Even more curious to us is that in extensive travels abroad, wherever we inquired about salt rising bread – in Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and across other continents – we came up empty handed. No one we have encountered seems to know about it outside the United States.

      The elusive origins of salt rising bread seem to be centered in and around the Appalachians.

      Although the ancestry of many of the pioneers who first settled in the mountains of Appalachia (where salt rising bread was well known) was largely Irish, Scottish and German, there is no evidence to indicate these people brought