Her sourdough helps her meet neighbors, make new friends and attract the attention of Charlotte Clingstone, owner of the famed Café Candide, a thinly disguised version of real-life Alice Waters and her Café Panisse.Īlthough Lois loves the adventure she’s having with her baking, she’s not ready to walk away from her life in tech. The bread Lois bakes is very good, so good that she stops her Slurry subscription and starts supplying the General Dexterity cafeteria with fresh loaves daily. Loaves created from the starter come out of the oven with what seem like human faces displayed on their crusty surfaces. The starter seems to be a bit magical, at times emitting flashing disco lights and sounds that resemble Mazg music from the CD. Her starter never behaves like the starter in the book, but after several disasters she learns to work with it and she soon develops a passion for the work. With the help of the Internet and a vintage cookbook, The Soul of Sourdough, she teaches herself the art of baking sourdough bread. Lois really loves the bread so she steps up to the challenge. They ask her to keep the starter alive by feeding it, playing music to it and making bread from it. Before they go, they leave Lois, their “number one eater,” with a crock of bread dough–the starter for their delicious sourdough–and a CD of melodies from Mazg, their fictional homeland. Then, just as suddenly as they came into her life, the immigrant brothers are forced to close up shop and leave the country when their visas expire. In reality there is no restaurant, just a to-go service run from the brothers’ small kitchen. “That bread was life.” She starts ordering from Clement Street Soup and Sourdough every night and learns the names of restaurant owners Beoreg and Chaiman.
“That bread was the secret of the whole operation,” she says. The spicy soup and crusty sourdough bread soon clear up her stomach problems.
One day she comes home from work to find a take-out flier for a new soup restaurant stuck to her apartment door. It turns out that programming robots to replace humans requires a lot of work and that’s all she does, leaving no time for herself or friends. She writes code to control robotic arms at tech startup General Dexterity and, like her male colleagues, puts in long hours.Īlso like her co-workers, she has replaced many of her meals with a nutritional gel called Slurry that’s easy to consume while working but leaves her with a gnawing pain in her stomach. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is a female nerd working as a programmer in San Francisco. Lois Clary, the protagonist in Robin Sloan’s second book after the bestselling debut Mr.
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