Almost heaven, that’s what they say about West Virginia and a stinky bread that got its start when a mountain mama made a quick loaf that is slowly rising (pun intended) in popularity.
Words & Illustrations by Julia Skinner
August 19, 2021
Though smelly and finicky to make, salt-rising bread is divine: Its texture and flavor are unparalleled. And because it relies on wild bacteria and a new starter with each batch, the flavor isn't uniform like that of store-bought yeast bread or even sourdough.
Baked salt-rising bread smells sweet and almost cheesy. It has a dense crumb but doesn't feel as heavy as you would expect. And the flavor? Hints of umami and sweet, with a tiny bit of sour. It’s like no other loaf on earth.
With salt-rising bread, funk is an asset.
“You have to move on it; you can't wait,” says Amy Dawson, farm manager and baker at Lost Creek Farm in Lost Creek, West Virginia, referring to the fact that these loaves wait for no one. Once the starter is done fermenting, it must be baked off right away. A starter can be made from milk, potato, cornmeal, flour and water, or a combination of the above. Dawson’s preferred method involves cubing a potato, adding cornmeal, some flour, boiling water, and a little baking soda. She recommends cutting off any green parts of the potato so it ferments properly.
While a new sourdough starter can take weeks, with this, Dawson says, “I can have bread tomorrow at this time, with nothing but a potato and some hope.”
Jenny Bardwell, co-author of the book Salt Rising Bread: Recipes and Heartfelt Stories of a Nearly Lost Appalachian Tradition and founder of Rising Creek Bakery in Mount Morris, Pennsylvania, just across the West Virginia line, warns that the smell of the fermenting starter, which sits out for eight to 10 hours, is not for the faint of heart. “Some people call it ‘stinky bread,’ with the starter compared to cheese or feet.”
The “rising” in salt rising relies on the bacteria Clostridium perfringens, which is everywhere in our environments and strains of which can cause food poisoning and gas gangrene. This has generated a bit of controversy over the years about the safety of salt-rising bread, though no cases of illness have been attributed to these funky loaves, since baking eliminates much of the bacteria.
There are a few stories about where the “salt” part of salt rising comes from, since the starter contains little to none. In fact, salt-rising bread won't rise with too much salt. According to Dawson, “One theory on how it got its name … is that maybe they put the salt barrel next to the fire and put the starter down in it so it would be insulated at a consistent temperature.”
According to Susan Ray Brown, Bardwell's co-author and bakery co-owner, it’s also possible that women in wagon trains kept their starters warm in salt barrels, which they left out in the sun where the warmth would insulate and heat the starter. There’s also the possibility that the name comes from the dash of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) often added before baking.
The earliest known recipe is from 1778, written down in what is now West Virginia. In Virginia, Bardwell and Brown found similar recipes from the 18th and 19th centuries. These breads relied on what was available (like cornmeal) rather than what wasn’t (like baker’s yeast) to create a bacterial leavener. In their book they note that the “women who discovered that they could ‘raise’ bread dough without yeast may not have understood how it happened, but they seized the moment and repeated the process until they perfected it.”
The tradition of salt-rising bread spread out from this area to some parts of the Appalachians, but not everywhere: Appalachian food is not a monolith, after all, and Mike Costello, chef and farmer at Lost Creek Farm, notes that, “West Virginia is very different from North Carolina or Tennessee.” While salt-rising bread does appear in other Appalachian states, it seems to have been most popular in those near West Virginia.
Eventually, salt-rising bread spread up the Coal Belt into Pennsylvania and then moved farther north to New York while also moving west, with mentions in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and in Utah Mormon family histories, according to Dawson. In 1910, Kansas Governor Walter R. Stubbs became so enamored of it that he funded research on the starter, resulting in a commercial starter that was sold to bakeries. No one knows how that starter was made, but its production would later spur a growing demand for store-bought salt-rising bread in the 20th century. Over time, salt-rising bread found a new home in southern California. There, Van de Kamp's bakery in Los Angeles (among others) became famous for its salt-rising bread and churned it out through the 1970s.
Salt-rising bread also became an important part of Midwestern cookbook history. Malinda Russell, a free Black woman from Tennessee, fled to Paw Paw, Michigan, to escape violence during the Civil War. Desperate to earn a living so she could return home, she self-published A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Collection of Useful Recipes for the Kitchen in 1866, the first known cookbook published by an African American woman. Russell’s book focuses heavily on baking, and the first recipe it lists is salt-rising bread.
Russell’s recipe is quite a bit different from others, in part because it includes salt during the rising process, but also because it omits some key information: One can assume, for example, that the thick batter includes flour or cornmeal, but the recipe doesn’t specify, giving only measurements for water and salt. It may have been such a commonly made recipe that the cookbook reader would have been expected to know how much flour was needed. Unfortunately, Russell left no later records clarifying matters. Later in 1866, a fire destroyed the town of Paw Paw, and author Toni Tipton-Martin and cookbook collectors and curators Jan and Dan Longone have been unable to find any trace of her after.
Over the past 100 years, salt-rising bread has fallen out of fashion. Bardwell suspects that, with their busy schedules, many people aren’t interested in making foods that demand you drop everything to tend to them. She also notes that the incubating temperature — 104-110 degrees Farenheit — relied on a nearby fire or pilot light. “But now there are no fires, no pilot lights, and consequently no logical place to set a starter at that temperature.”
But it hasn't just disappeared from home kitchens: It has largely vanished from commercial bakeries, too. A part of Lost Creek Farm’s mission is to preserve the region’s foodways, and Costello and Dawson have done archival research into Clarksburg, West Virginia’s local food history. While the pair found about a dozen bakeries in the area that commercially sold salt-rising bread in the early 1900s, especially the ’20s-’40s, by the beginning of this century, that number had dropped to one, and then zero.
“It was one of those food traditions that was so common and so ubiquitous here, that fell off rather quickly when processed commercial packaged bread showed up,” Costello says. “It’s amazing to us how many people still remember it, and remember it distinctly from other kinds of homemade bread. … It’s a testament to the unique flavor and especially the unique smell of it.”
Part of the issue had to do with advertising. “Narratives about class were really targeted to people who bake bread at home. And if you bake bread at home, it’s not something you should be proud of. You should aspire to go buy bread from the store,” Costello says.
Additionally, the manufacturer who produced the commercial starter stopped making it in the 1990s, and with high failure rates in baking and salt-rising bread’s particular demands for heat and time, many commercial bakeries abandoned it altogether. By the 1980s or 1990s, store-bought salt-rising bread had all but disappeared, Bardwell says.
But there is another issue, too: There’s a rather limited written record about salt-rising compared with records of other breads. We do know it was eaten very widely, as evidenced by the number of bakeries making and selling it, and that people ate it in their homes prior to commercially available bread. But salt-rising bread is, as Dawson notes, “difficult to learn from a written recipe, and so a lot of times it wasn't really written down, it was just passed on.” The method was passed through the matrilineal line, with daughters learning from mothers, then sharing it with the next generation. As fewer people made it at home, fewer people passed the knowledge to the next generation. And without many written recipes to turn to, salt-rising bread making knowledge became endangered.
As a new wave of bakers embraces salt-rising bread, their techniques have adapted to modern technology. Rather than putting her jar of starter in salt on the hearth, Dawson uses a jar of starter tucked into a tub of water heated by a sous vide (an immersion circulator that holds the water at a low temperature) with a towel draped over the top. This provides a temperature-stable environment that allows the bacteria to work its magic. There are other methods, too: for example, turning on your oven light and keeping the oven off, letting the starter bubble away overnight.
West Virginia still sits at the heart of the salt-rising story, which is still ingrained in living memory in the state. Susan Ray Brown was raised in Greenbrier County, where salt-rising bread was a Saturday breakfast tradition. Bardwell, on the other hand, was introduced to it through a Mount Morris neighbor just over the Pennsylvania line, Pearl Haynes, who had baked the bread for 90 years.
Bardwell and Brown felt like the task of preserving salt-rising bread was urgent, in part because the knowledge of how to make authentic salt-rising bread is no longer being passed down to young people. After decades of research, they documented what they knew in their 2016 book, and offer classes, workshops, and even apprenticeships (like the one Dawson took with them years ago).
“It is such a joy to teach this bread to others, and get them thinking about all the advantages of food fermentation and fermentation principles,” Bardwell says.
On their farm in West Virginia, Costello and Dawson felt a similar call. Worried the bread might disappear, they began to learn and bake to carry the knowledge on. “There was some personal history there, but also there's this element of responsibility that we felt because Jenny [and Susan were] selling the bakery, we didn't know who was going to take it over, and this is one of the very few places where you can get commercial salt-rising bread still. … A lot of people who still make it, if they have kids, typically the kids are not interested in keeping up these traditions. So it was one of those things that was on our radar as a regional food tradition that was very much endangered.”
Bardwell says, “For me, the accompanying smell, along with the flavor, cries out to be appreciated and remembered. Everyone should experience such a treat that was invented right here in early America by your ancient grandmothers, who utilized their ingenuity, knowledge of fires, and baking skills to devise this alternative method of raising bread.”
There are lessons we can learn from salt-rising bread: lessons about tenacity and patience, about the value of experimenting with new methods, about how great rewards can come when we devote our time to what can seem difficult and particular. And the future of this finicky bread seems bright. These days there is a growing trend of people who find joy in understanding the complexities of fermentation and appreciate the more varied tastes that happen with “slow foods.”
“ … I see it not as deprivation food but as a reflection of the ingenuity, patience (my God, so much patience), and hard work of our forebears,” Emily Rees Nunn, author of The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart, notes in a Medium article. And even without robust historical records, salt-rising bread offers us an edible link to those ancestors.
To Costello, the mystery is part of the allure. “I appreciate that people are trying to go out and find out what we can about the history, but it inspires me more that we don’t really know that much about it. The circumstance of not knowing drives more curiosity than in traditions where we can actually pinpoint things, and that’s sort of the beauty of these oral traditions. … To me, the storytelling is … what connects food to people and connects us to our history. … Oftentimes it's not about the veracity of the claim, it's that the story was able to inspire us to keep it going.”
Julia Skinner is author of the forthcoming Our Fermented Lives (Storey, 2022) and founder of Root, Atlanta's fermentation and food history company. She is also a visual artist and steward of two wildlife habitats in Georgia. Follow her @rootkitchens and @bookishjulia, or through her newsletter.
