Just found out my grandma's sourdough starter is over 80 years old

I was digging through old family photos at my mom's house in Des Moines last weekend, and I found a recipe card tucked in a tin box. My grandma passed it down to my mom back in the 90s, but I never really looked at the details. Turns out the starter she used came from her mother-in-law in 1942, during the war. I did the math and that thing has been fed and kept alive through three generations. I always thought it was just some random yeast mix she whipped up, but nope, it's basically a family heirloom. I tasted the bread she made with it last month and it had this tang that store-bought stuff just can't match. Has anyone else found something like this tucked away, like a old recipe or tool that had way more history than you expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

viola_garcia5610d ago

Heard a story from my friend Jenny who found her great aunt's cast iron skillet in the attic, caked in rust and grime... she cleaned it up and underneath was this faint inscription from 1918 her aunt had scratched into the handle. Turns out her great aunt used it to cook for the whole family during the Great Depression, and Jenny still bakes cornbread in it every Sunday. Said the first time she used it, the bread came out perfectly golden and she almost cried thinking about all the hands that held that pan before her. Made me wish I had something like that pass through my kitchen, you know?

the_ben10d ago

That pan probably saw more than just cornbread and Sunday dinners. 1918 was the year of the Spanish flu, so her great aunt might have used it to cook for sick neighbors or her own family when everyone was quarantined. The fact Jenny found it in the attic makes me think it got put away after some hard memory, not just because it was old. People forget that cast iron from that era lived through world wars, rationing, and a lot of loss. Sometimes a pan's history is as much about what you don't want to remember as what you do.

flores.mark9d ago

That "what you don't want to remember" part hits hard.