Mentally, I get ready to enrobe a cream filled centre and drop it lightly onto a tray.
My hand doesn’t open and close as smoothly as it used to. Still, I practise for a few minutes.
I learned to make candy from my mother.
I can smell the fondant boiling.
I can feel my arms ache as I beat the candy on her kitchen counter.
I know how to roll the centres and put them on a platter so that she can set them out in the cold before she dips them.
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Still I might test a spoonful of the mixture by dropping it in a cup of cold water – or even better, by looking at the temperature of the candy thermometer, if I am so lucky as to find the place where I carefully stored it from the year.
As a child, my favourite part of making candy was the handrolls: chocolate centres that had been dipped and then were placed in toasted coconut to be rolled and covered on all sides.
Or perhaps the chocolate would be dropped in crushed walnuts.
I learned that if I were to eat too many of the walnut-covered handrolls, I would get cankers on my tongue.
That was a lesson that I had to relearn every year.
Elsewhere I have published the recipes for fondant, caramels, divinity, and nougats. I have written about the history of candy-making in the 1940 and ‘50s in Alberta. I have purchased candy molds, chocolate cups, sucker sticks, and marble dipping slabs. I had Kelvin make me a 6-foot-high set of shelves just wide that each would hold a tray of chocolates. Trays and trays of chocolates.I don’t think many people make hand-dipped chocolates for Christmas anymore.
There is a book-full of stories still to be written about this old tradition.
Arta
You have truly captured in your post that experience of knowing something is done by the smell in the air. It can seem subtle when you are learning, but it is so obvious once you get it that it impinges on my senses with the pleasure of anticipation and the fear of not shifting focus quickly enough to catch it before it burns.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what to say back except that you got it and you made me laugh. I hate that look of tiny black flecks coming from the bottom of the pan, a sign that all is lost with that batch of candy.
ReplyDeletei too found my hands wanting to make the move of beating the warm chocoate back together so the cocobutter doesn't separate out.
ReplyDeleteAnd now we are going to have to add to the process of dipping chocolates, wash your hands with soap and water for 20 second before plunging your hands into the chocolate and then when taking your hands out. Do you think we can still lick the chocolate off of our hands before the second washing?
ReplyDelete