What's the best way to preserve an endangered food?

You keep eating it, and making it, and sharing it, so others can keep eating and making it and sharing it, too.

Susan R. Brown, 58, had a sense of that in her 20s when she wanted to learn how to make her grandmother's old-fashioned "salt rising bread."

Now she's making hundreds of loaves of it a month, working with fellow baker Genevieve Bardwell and others dedicated to preserving and sharing this rare regional specialty with people here and around the country. They're doing this at Ms. Bardwell's relatively new Rising Creek Bakery and Cafe in the unlikely yet perfectly placed locale that is the coal-patch town of Mt. Morris, in Greene County, right at the West Virginia border, about 65 miles south of Pittsburgh.

Ms. Brown's part of the story starts farther south in southern West Virginia -- Ronceverte, Greenbrier County. In the late 1980s, it seemed to her that her grandmother, Katheryn Erwin, was one of the only people still making salt rising bread. But when you grew up there, as her grandmother did in the early part of the 1900s, or especially if you grew up there during the previous century, you likely made and ate salt rising or, as some call it, salt risen, bread.

From childhood on, Susan loved it. Her grandmother joked that that's because she and the bread shared initials: SRB.

It's a peculiar bread, once particularly popular in Appalachia but also in other places, that is made without yeast. It's a bread you could make before 1860s, when yeast -- the rising agent in most breads -- started to become commercially available, along with baking powder and baking soda.

What makes salt rising bread dough rise is the action of bacteria that occur naturally in the environment and starts growing in a starter, usually made with milk, corn or wheat flour and, often, potatoes.

One thing that's peculiar about that is, the bacteria cause the starter to smell like -- well, most people say it "stinks" like "rotten cheese." These are people who love the bread, which turns out dense and heavy, with a fine crumb and a subtle but distinctive cheesy taste and tang.

What else is peculiar is that the bacteria, under different conditions, commonly cause food poisoning and other disease, but more on that later.

While there's salt in the name, salt doesn't have anything to do with salt rising bread. Most women who used to make it -- and of course they were mostly women -- added no, or very little, salt.

Ms. Brown believes that pioneer bakers learned they could get the starter to "raise" bread by surrounding a crock of it with hot rock salt and keeping it warm near their wood stoves or fireplaces (which is where they kept their salt to keep it dry).

Her grandmother would place her starter overnight in a closet where a gas hot-water tank provided the perfect even temperature.

But, because you're counting on Mother Nature for the bacteria, there are many other variables. Unlike with sourdough starter, which contains bacteria and yeast and can be refreshed for batch after batch, you have to make fresh starter every time and use it exactly when it's ready for salt rising bread. Ms. Brown tried and tried, but she could never get her bread to turn out right.

When her grandmother died in 1989, Ms. Brown said to herself, OK, this is it: You have got to make this bread. Grandmother is gone and it's up to you to keep this going. Now she's doing it, preserving the tradition for her family and others, too.

Ms. Brown had married Dr. Lee Petsonk, a pulmonary disease researcher at West Virginia University, and moved from Morgantown to Mt. Morris in 1983. After finally teaching herself to make the bread, she kept going and started what she calls the Salt Rising Bread Project. Working with the West Virginia University Extension Service, she collected salt rising bread recipes from all over West Virginia. She also collected salt rising bread stories. Then she went back out into the field and shared the recipes and stories with people who came to hear her talk. She published a pamphlet on salt rising bread, subtitled, "Keeping the Tradition Alive," which she handed out, and also started sharing recipes and stories on a website she still maintains, http://home.comcast.net/~petsonk.

"Virtually every person that you talk to that's eaten it has a story that goes with it."

The homepage has a photo of her now 95-year-old neighbor, Pearl Haines, who has been making salt rising bread for 90 years. She makes it in a huge wooden bowl that was made by her great grandfather, and that she's since given to the girl in the photo with the bowl and her: T.J., who's now about 30.

"Pearl has never washed the bowl," Ms. Brown says. "She just wipes it out and scrapes it."

Not all families have such a strong tradition, of course. And fewer and fewer people have time to bake anything from scratch, much less finicky salt rising bread, which, after you let the starter go overnight, takes six to eight hours of work. As Ms. Brown puts it, "You have to love it." But she's not the only one who does.

One of her other Mt. Morris neighbors is Genevieve "Jenny" Bardwell, who's 57. A native of Hudson, N.Y., she worked at WVU as curriculum coordinator of the Health Sciences and Technology Academy, but her training was in cooking. In fact, after attending Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 1976, Ms. Bardwell trademarked the Yum Bun, which she describes as whole wheat bread dough filled with sauteed vegetables, almonds and spices. She sold them around New Orleans before buying her own bakery in Pittsfield, Mass., and selling them in the Northeast. But she wound up on a different path, married her husband, Andrew "Sandy" Liebhold, and when he got a job with the U.S. Forest Service in Morgantown, settled in Mt. Morris in 1988.

Living here, she became interested in the rural tradition of salt rising bread. Through Ms. Haines, she met Ms. Brown, and became not only her friend, but also involved in her Salt Rising Bread Project.

They and their friend Sue McDonald remember musing about opening a bakery. "You know how we all say, 'Wouldn't it be neat ...?' " says Ms. Brown. "It was like a dream."

One thing led to another, and one of those things was a dilapidated Mt. Morris apartment building Ms. Bardwell and her husband bought in 2008, tore down, and began rebuilding on a lot on Main Street high above prone-to-flood Dunkard Creek.

In March 2010, they opened it as the "Rising Creek Bakery & Cafe," a play on the creek and the bread they specialize in. First-time visitors can be visibly surprised at how big-city chic the place is. Ms. Bardwell points out the original beams that their Pittsburgh architect, Robert Baumbach, salvaged in the design, which reflects the best of local building style.

Open Wednesday through Sunday, the cafe also offers a range of other breads and baked goods as well as breakfast and lunch foods, and Pittsburgh's La Prima coffee.

When my family and I dropped in one Sunday in August, we were wowed by the decor and a delicious brunch including a breakfast sandwich, scrambled eggs and toasted salt rising bread, served with a side of another local specialty, tomato gravy.

Business has boomed, with much of it coming from nearby Morgantown. But the salt rising bread has proved popular with locals whose families used to make it, too. While Ms. McDonald cooks, Ms. Brown and Ms. Bardwell do the baking. Ms. Brown works up-to-12-hour days Monday and Tuesday baking the loaves, with their distinctive flat tops, that they sell by mail order, for $5.49 a loaf plus postage.

They also sell the bread and other baked goods at area farmers markets, including the Main Street Farmers Market in Washington, Pa., but most of those are closed for the season. Now they send a weekly order to the Artisans gallery in Waynesburg and might add other retailers.

Meanwhile, they are one of very few bakeries in the country making salt rising bread, and certainly the only one shipping so much of it.

More people are finding them online and they've got customers from coast-to-coast. After a small item on Rising Creek appeared in a wire service story that ran in the Charlotte Observer and several other papers last month, they gained so many new customers that this week they're putting in a new double oven and proofing box. Friends joke that they're the only thing keeping the Mt. Morris post office from being closed.

"I just anticipate the whole Christmas season, we're going to be inundated," says Ms. Bardwell.

No one is happier than Ms. Brown, who says, "It's like dreams really can come true."

This is more than a business to them. They're very generous with their recipes; you can watch their how-to-make-it videos on YouTube. They've invited people in to learn, too, including this spring a baker from Crossroads Bake Shop in Doylestown, Bucks County, that now is making "SRB," as the ladies call it. They're not worried about competition. "It's a difficult bread to make," Ms. Bardwell says. "Also because it's so loved, and people grew up with it, if they want to make it in their homes, good luck!"

They've even experimented with formulating a starter mix that they could sell to home bakers, and have thought about pursuing a grant to develop a starter that could be used on a commercial scale. (The Virginia bakery that used to sell such a starter closed several years ago.)

In the early 1900s, scientists figured out that bacteria are the leavening agent in salt rising bread, and developed starters for home cooks and big bakeries.

In a 1916 issue of "National Baker," a Henry A. Kohman, of Mellon Institute of Industrial Research at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote about salt rising bread's comeback, which was warmly welcomed around the country. He quoted an editorial in the Portland Oregonian:

"The restoration of Salt Rising bread to a position of gastronomic importance is a happy event for mankind. Millions can remember how good it tasted in their youth and how drear the years have been since it disappeared. Now it appears glorified and exacted by Science. In days of old, Salt Rising bread was made with 'emptins,' which did not always smell so savory as the ensuing loaf tasted. The modern cook (baker) uses ferment prepared in the laboratory with artful and immaculate erudition."

Ms. Brown and Ms. Bardwell, who've done a lot of research, know that salt rising "yeast" mix was widely available, including from at least one company in Pittsburgh's Strip District, and know the bread was made by many big bakeries. But they don't know why it almost died out. They still have a lot of questions about the bread, including, Where did it originate?

They've tried to trace it back to Europe, to countries such as Germany and Scotland, where early Americans came from. But they haven't yet had any luck.

Ms. Bardwell, who recently came back from a family trip to Scotland, wonders if pioneer women just serendipidously discovered that milk and flour kept warm would leaven bread.

Which brings us back to the bacteria.

We now know that it is Clostridium perfringens. We also know that one type A strain of that bacteria makes a toxin that is a common cause of food poisoning from meats and gravies. Under very specific conditions, the bacteria cause gas gangrene. Does that make salt rising bread dangerous?

"Should SRB be viewed as the Appalachian equivalent of fugu, the poison-laden pufferfish of Japanese gourmands?"

That was a line in a paper Ms. Brown and Ms. Bardwell co-authored with two scientists that was published in the West Virginia Medical Journal in 2008: "The Microbiology of Salt Rising Bread." Their co-authors were Dr. Gregory Juckett from the WVU School of Medicine and Bruce McClane, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the Pitt School of Medicine. Mr. McClane, a PhD. who specializes in C. perfringens, cultured salt rising bread starter samples at Pitt and found abundant C. perfringens type A, but "none of the cultures were positive for enterotoxin and thus would be unlikely to cause human food borne disease." The authors concluded that the baking process, too, appears to reduce the bacteria to safe levels. "SRB has not been implicated in causing any human disease."

Mr. McClane said this week that he's sure the bread is safe, even though he doesn't eat it: "My graduate student did."

Ms. Brown and Ms. Bardwell don't go out of their way to advertise the bacteria in their bread, but say people who love it don't worry about that.

They've found that the magic of salt rising bread has less to do with what's in it and more to do, as with so many foods, with what it's connected to.

"It's much more than a bread to me . . . it's memories of my dad," says Linda Smith, who is one of Rising Creek's most distant mail-order customers, in Juneau, Alaska.

She grew up in Southwestern Ohio, where her father always bought commercial salt rising bread to serve with wild morel mushrooms they'd hunt together. For years, Ms. Smith couldn't find it, but when she found Rising Creek online, she ordered three loaves. She still has one in the freezer and plans to use it for her Thanksgiving stuffing. The others she toasted, which many fans say is the best way to eat it.

"Just the smell of that bread toasting brought back all those memories again."

Ms. Brown always asks for customers' stories ("I think they're just precious"), and frequently tucks a hand-written note into their orders. She says she loves "to be able to give that kind of joy to people" -- sharing the joy that all this brings her.

She considers salt rising bread-making to be akin to pottery, quilting, basket-weaving -- a tradition worth preserving. "Same idea, only this is bread."

Ms. Bardwell agrees: "It's wonderful to connect people with that and to honor that heritage."

SALT-RISING BREAD

Susan Brown shares this recipe, which she says sounds simple, but "the bread can still be very tricky to make. But you have to start somewhere!"

• 3 teaspoons cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon flour
• 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup scalded milk

Combine above ingredients in a jar or medium-sized bowl and stir. Cover and keep warm overnight -- at 104 to 106 degrees.

• 2 cups warm water
• About 1 1/2 cups flour

In the morning, after the starter is very foamy and has a "rotten cheese" smell, add 2 cups of warm water to mixture, then enough flour (about 1 1/2 cups) to make like a thin pancake-like batter. Stir, cover and let rise again in a warm place until it doubles in size and becomes foamy. This usually takes about 2 hours.

• 1 cup water
• Up to 20 cups flour

Add to the sponge 1 cup of warm water for each loaf of bread you want to make, up to 6 loaves (6 cups of water makes 6 loaves of bread). Add enough flour to make dough that can be formed into loaves (20 cups for 6 loaves, or about one 5-pound bag of flour plus 1/3 bag). Form dough into loaves and place in greased bread pans. Allow loaves to rise in warm place until the dough reaches the top of the bread pans.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes, or until loaves are golden and sound hollow when tapped.

-- Susan Brown

TOMATO GRAVY

This is not to be confused with the Italian "gravy" in today's Food Column. This is more like a thick tomato soup and makes a great side dish with breakfast.

• 4 to 6 home-grown tomatoes (or equivalent canned tomatoes, diced)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 4 to 6 cups milk and half-and-half
• 1/2 to 1 cup flour
• Water

Blanch the tomatoes and peel the skin. Return tomatoes to the pot and cook until soft enough to smash with a potato masher. Add salt, pepper and butter to taste.

In a separate pan, heat milk and half-and-half, being careful not to scorch.

In a small bowl, mix flour and enough water to make a thick batter. Slowly pour flour and water mixture into hot tomatoes and whisk. Add heated milk/half-and-half and cook until thickened.

-- Sue McDonald, Rising Creek Bakery