Potato candy, Glop, and other odd holiday foods.

My grandmother used to make candies and cookies for the holidays, in addition to all of the traditional holiday foods, many of which came from our garden. As a candy maker, she was first rate. She would bake cookies well in advance and freeze them, but in the last few days leading up to a holiday, she made candies, which she insisted must be fresh. This included hard candies of many flavors (strawberry and grape flavored hard candies were made with the fruit we grew in our garden), as well as medium and soft candies. Her sugar thermometer got a work out. There's soft, firm and hard ball, which is for candies and confections which can be easily molded. Then there's there's soft crack and hard crack, which is for pure sugar candies--taffy is a soft crack candy, as an example. I would spend hours watching her.

My favorite was a candy which she called divinity. Some people called it white fudge. She's make it "plain" and with walnuts. It's a soft ball candy (about 4/5 sugar), which does mean it's similar to fudge. I never got any recipes--she had them all in her head. All that i remember about divinity-making for certain, is that it used vanilla extract rather than cocoa powder, which is what made fudge.

Well i'll be go to hell . . . i found a recipe for divinity. (clickity-click)[/b]

The main difference is that my grandmother would spread it in a pan like fudge, and then cut out squares, rather than dropping them as in that recipe.

Spending hours watching someone do something that they're very, very good at is a lovely thing all on its own, even without the bonus of candy.

Will you be trying your hand at divinity making?

I consider making potato candy every year but thinking I'd just end up sitting and sobbing and missing everyone too much.

Sadly, i eat too many sweets as it is--but i have wonderful memories. However, being a manly man, i don't sit around and cry about it like you weepy wimmins.

Ach, but this is all news to me and I like your memories, get over it.

I have never heard of potato glop, food sucker that I am.

Joy may be had..

Do it, Boomer.

My mom found this crazy cookbook and sent it to me: Pioneer Cookery Around Oklahoma, published in 1979.

I found this recipe:

Ellen Gulick's Cheese Salad:

Three hard boild eggs, 1 cup grated cheese mixed with the egg. Add alternately butter and vinegar till the consistency of whipped cream. Salt and pepper to taste; serve on lettuce leaves.

I don't think I'll be trying Ellen's recipe.

This is a fun one but I'd have no idea of how to actually make it:

Aunt Pauline's Graham Gems

3 cups sweet milk
Salt to taste
Butter the size of a hickory nut
1/2 t soda
Graham flour to make stiff batter

Mix and drop into hot tins (black iron "gem pans" the best) and bake in a quick oven so they will be "crustee" (Add 1 or 2 well beaten eggs the last thing before baking if desired and if you have your own chickens.

Note: 1/4 cup - 1/2 cup sugar optional. Some use half graham, 1/2 white flour (lighter). Do not overmix muffins, just moisten dry ingredients

Pauline Tyler Townsend (Mrs. Frank L.) was an artist, residing in Tulsa 1905 - 1957. She hand copied her mother's "best, everyday recipes" into blank pages of her teacher's class book which she bought when teaching drawing and writing in grade school in Ames, Iowa in 1894 (brought up on waste not, want not philosophy). This was prior to her marriage and honeymoon trip to Lamont, Ok. in 1900. Her parents, T.D. and Sarah Ann Wall Tyler, had moved to Newkirk, Okla. prior to 1895 with two other daughters, Nelle Gertrude, hat "trimmer", and Carrie, piano teacher.

gems ...

http://seidhr.blogspot.ca/2008/06/gems-lovely-gems.html

sounds like they're almost like heavy muffin tops

http://www.yesterdish.com/2013/08/18/graham-gems/

http://ontheblueonion.com/?p=421




my best friend's son has done some nice work with graham flour - he used it when making beaver tails

egg/cream/vinegar - it's almost like a mayo
with the grated cheese and seasonings ...

sounds like an early version of southern pimento cheese

Well now I really want some gems.

I didn't know that you could buy graham flour anymore. I'm going to have to check at Bob's Red Mill.

I'll also have to investigate how large a hickory nut is...

Hickory nuts are about the size of walnuts. Graham flour is just whole wheat flour with no additives, and no chemicals used in the milling and processing. Whole wheat flour from the store should work just fine.

Whole wheat flour does not work the same way for baking as graham flour does. Ask M about his experiments with beaver tails. Gotta use the right flour.