Homemade Holidays : An Exile in New York, a military brat, a mom who poached a tree. . .and the search for figgy pudding. ‘Tis the season to remember. With recipes. : Grandma Had a Way With Candy

By the time she died, my grandmother, Jessie Bell Ingle, had curled over with osteoporosis like a fiddlehead fern. Her hands were so knotted and twisted with arthritis that she could no longer hold a pen. But I remember her hands in earlier years, in the exciting days approaching Christmas, how she would rub them with butter, then reach for my young hands to coat my little fingers. One simply doesn’t approach the making of popcorn balls without buttered hands.

She was born in 1893 in a small town in northeastern Washington state where she lived for the majority of her life. Jessie had five sisters and a brother. Her mother, Kathrine Ide, had come to the territory as a teen-ager with her two sisters and her father, who had been appointed federal lands commissioner by President Grant. They had traveled from their home in Portland up the Columbia River by riverboat as far as the Dalles, westernmost terminus of the Oregon Trail, then to Walla Walla by train, and finally by military wagon for the trip north to Ft. Colville. Kathrine Ide had learned her way around the kitchen from her mother’s Chinese cook in Portland, and she passed these important skills on to her daughters, all of whom were creative cooks and bakers.

Of all the Ide girls, Jessie and her youngest sister, Lilian, showed the most culinary promise. Lilian was the family baker. Jessie had a flair for candy making. And the popcorn balls that are a Christmas fixture in my family are a result. While the recipe is not unusual as molasses-based candies go, Jessie created it when she was a teen-ager, around 1910 or so. It was a dual-purpose recipe: Cooked one way, the candy could be pulled for taffy; cooked another way, it had the perfect consistency to hold popcorn together.

My father tells me that, when he was a child, the making of popcorn balls always presaged the coming of Christmas morning. The Ingle house boasted an enormous fireplace built of rounded river stone with a heavy, dark wood mantle--the perfect-size fireplace for the descent of a fat, old elf. Before retiring on Christmas Eve, the family was careful to leave three popcorn balls on a plate near the fireplace. And in the morning my father would rush downstairs to check for evidence. Someone would have taken a big bite out of one of the popcorn balls and then, rather absent-mindedly, have left behind his small, old pipe.

Not all of this tradition successfully carried forth into my childhood, though I am sure my parents tried their best. I had a brother and a sister ahead of me who knew a thing or two about this fellow Santa Claus, information they were all too pleased to share with their little brother. Nonetheless, as Christmas approached, a discernible pressure built up in the house, starting with the arrival in Seattle of my grandmother. And when the day dawned that Jessie put on her apron and got out the candy thermometer, Christmas morning could only be hours away.

My father would pop enough popcorn to fill the biggest wooden salad bowl in the house, and while Jessie worked her magic at the stove, the children would paw through the popcorn to find every single un-popped kernel. We called them “grannies.” When the candy had been cooked to the point that a sample dropped in cold water would pop with a noticeable crack when tapped on the edge of the glass--a hard hard ball, according to my grandmother--she would pour the candy over the popcorn and my mother would fold it in with a wooden spoon.

Then came the buttering of the hands, my grandmother reaching out with her warm, slippery hands to squeeze my fingers and coat them with butter. Popcorn balls are made while the candy is still hot to the touch. The butter protects the hands from burns. The technique is simple, like making snowballs, but work fast.

We would also make taffy. Jessie would cook the same candy to a softer ball, then pour it out onto a buttered platter to cool enough to handle. As it cooled she would continually lift a corner of the candy and fold it into the middle. Then, hands buttered up once more, we would all take a chunk of candy and stretch it out and double it up and stretch it out again and again until the candy turned a golden brown. The long ropes were allowed to harden on the platter, then broken into delicious pieces by placing the edge of a table knife on the candy and rapping the back of the knife with a soup spoon.

Jessie had mastered the technique for pulling the majority of the taffy candy, using both her hands and help from a partner, moving her arms back and forth, folding and stretching the candy much like a modern taffy-pulling machine. But her arthritis caught up with her and the time came when she simply couldn’t bear to do it. I’m sorry to say that the art of taffy pulling as Jessie did it has been lost in our family.

But popcorn balls, those frontier harbingers of Christmas day, live on. The day will come, and not too long from now, when I will put on my apron while my son, Farrell, now 7, picks through the popcorn for any grannies. He knows a thing or two about this fellow Santa Claus, but the excitement in the house will be palpable all the same. I will butter my hands and reach out for his young fingers just as Jessie reached for mine.

GRANDMA JESSIE’S POPCORN BALLS

1/2 cup popcorn

3 cups sugar

3/4 cup dark molasses

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1/2 cup cider vinegar

1/2 cup water

1 large piece butter (Jessie would say, “About the size of a walnut.”)

Pop popcorn. Turn out into large bowl.

In heavy-bottomed pot, mix sugar, molasses, corn syrup, vinegar, water and butter. Bring to boil and cook until hard-ball stage (250 to 268 degrees on candy thermometer), gently stirring.

Pour candy over popcorn, being careful about un-popped kernels (they are hard on unsuspecting teeth), stirring. Quickly shape popcorn balls with buttered hands. Makes 18 popcorn balls.

Each ball contains about:

198 calories; 23 mg sodium; 2 mg cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 49 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram protein; 0.12 gram fiber.

*

Variation:

To make taffy, cook candy to softer consistency, pour out on buttered platter, and while candy cools enough to handle, keep folding edges of candy into center of platter. Pull taffy until it turns light, golden brown. Allow to harden, then crack into mouth-size pieces.

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