Give us Your Bass Boats and we Will Spare Your Planet

Cream candy. Have you heard of it?

One pleasant thing about having a relationship with my sister is that my dad is no longer the only person I know who is from Eastern Kentucky. My sister and I have memories of a place that might as well be Mars, for all the similarity it bears to most of homogenized America. We have made a couple of trips to north Dade [County], and both times, she requested a stop at Cracker Barrel. This is a chain restaurant that features Appalachian cooking. Years ago, on trips to Kentucky, the family used to stop at a Cracker Barrel in Sevierville, Tennessee (home of Dolly Parton). My cousin managed one for a time. Now they have them in Florida. On our last outing, my sister mentioned cream candy. If anyone outside of Eastern Kentucky makes this stuff, I am unaware of it.

It’s very hard to describe. It’s sort of like chalk, except that it’s made from sugar. It contains cream (butter, actually), or it’s supposed to, but a lot of people cheap out and use margarine. It crumbles and dissolves in your mouth, and it’s extremely sweet.

I wonder if I can find it on the web. Yep, here’s a recipe.

This stuff is extremely temperamental. I have never made it, but according to my sister, women in Kentucky claim you can only make it in dry, cold weather. And you have to mix it on a cold marble slab. Oddly, nobody up there that we knew realized you could cool the slab with ice; my sister saw my aunt or somebody sitting around waiting for the slab to cool between batches, and she came up with the idea of putting a bag of ice on it. When she makes it here in Miami, she turns her air conditioner down as low as it will go.

It’s not the greatest candy on earth. About two pieces will do me for a year. But until my sister mentioned it, I had not thought about it in forever.

As far as I know, the only other candy that comes from that area is the Bourbon ball. You make a white pasty confection flavored with Bourbon, and you cover it with chocolate. They’re not too good. For one thing, no one up there seems to know how to make a non-waxy filling for a chocolate. I am pretty sure I have eaten Bourbon balls made with Gulfwax paraffin. For another, chocolate and Bourbon don’t go together.

I’m sitting here thinking about it, and it occurs to me that cream candy would be a whole lot better if you could flavor it with Bourbon. Then Bourbon balls would no longer be necessary. As I recall–don’t hold me to this–“Gulfwax” was originally one word, and the little boxes had the Gulf Oil logo on them. I see someone is selling a product called “Gulf Wax” online, but I suspect they stole the name and put a space in it. Gulf Oil is gone. I’ll bet Gulfwax was a refining by-product. Mmm…put that on your food and enjoy.

Whoops…Gulf has a website. I guess the brand is still alive somewhere.

My grandmother used that paraffin a lot. She canned everything she could get her hands on, and she used to pour a layer of hot paraffin on top of her blackberry jelly to keep air from getting to it in the jars.

I miss the food we used to eat at Granny’s house. That is not news. I managed to make some okay-looking shucky beans last year, and I may cook them for dinner tomorrow. Some of the beans I dried got mildew on them; the weather here just isn’t right for drying things. I’m considering getting a dehydrator. I’m afraid it won’t be the same. The dried apples Granny used to make were brown and chewy, unlike the ones you see in stores, and there is no way you could get white, fluffy ones to taste the same in a hand pie. Another strategy: put a window screen in my dad’s SUV, spread the beans or apples on it, and leave it in the hot sun. They do that in Kentucky. It makes a car smell good.

I don’t want a machine that will cook the food while it’s drying. That would ruin it.

It would be fun to surprised my dad with a stack cake (they’re made with dried apples) at Christmas. He’d faint. I’m not a huge fan of these things, but he loves them, and he hasn’t had one since maybe 1998.

I have to get off my hind end and get started on the food. I have to make several pones of cornbread today, plus pecan pies. I may inject the turkey today. It’s some kind of silly organic fresh turkey my sister found. I’m worried that it will be dry because it’s not full of the right chemicals and hormones. Maybe I should brine it. Arggh.

Whatever happens tomorrow, the food will be fantastic. I hope all of you have a great holiday.