"What does that mean Granny?" I asked as I watched her continue to knead the batch and then half it and cover it with a damp cloth.
While the bread was rising I'd sit with her on the front porch where she'd compare making bread with the building of God's kingdom. For Granny, the sour dough was the yeast or leaven that gave the bread its flavor and caused it to rise. True Christians, she said, were the flavor and ingredient that built the church.
The way Granny talked about her sour dough made it sound like it was the Holy Spirit and her crockery jar was the Ark of the Covenant. When she and Papa John married and moved to Florida, she liked to have never found the right starter dough. When I asked why she didn't go out and buy it in the store she said that real leaven just couldn't be bought.
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She compared buying leaven to listening to radio preachers (33 years ago they hadn't purchased a television). "You don't get the Holy Spirit over the air," she said. "It doesn't taste right and it doesn't fill you up. In the end it's like store-bought bread -- tasteless and full of air."
Granny literally believed that her sour dough could only be found in the church -- that is, "in the right church." Today I guess we'd call it a kind of superstition, but back then Granny believed in signs -- and the sign of being in the right fellowship was to be baking a tasty and filling loaf.
Papa John and Granny visited a lot of churches before they settled in. The first church they visited was one of the oldest established churches in town. The people who went to this church were the more affluent -- local merchants, the bankers, the doctor, the lawyer, and several landowners. It was difficult to see any of these people except during Sunday services, and Granny didn't think that an appropriate time to ask about baking bread.
Finally she visited one of the lady's socials and discovered that only rarely did any of them bake their own bread. The baker's wife raved about her husband's recipe from the old country, but when Granny asked for a "starter piece" for her own kitchen, the woman insisted on maintaining the secrecy of the ferment from the family tradition. When Granny finally got around to purchasing a loaf she and Papa both said it tasted like cake.
One of the other churches that the couple got around to was a bit smaller but more more outward-going, at least among themselves. There were revivals, picnics, pot luck suppers and Sunday afternoon gospel singing -- and hard preaching at least three times a week. The group raved about their preacher and thought that nobody in the world could bake homemade bread like his wife.
The preacher's wife was very gracious and cordial to Granny and it was no time before she invited her over to bake bread. When Granny arrived she was extremely surprised to find out what a baking operation was going on in the parsonage kitchen. It turned out that both the preacher and his wife were baking dozens of loaves of bread for the entire congregation every week.
