From my mom’s newspaper column:
Today was peanut brittle-making day at this household. It’s a tradition.
Every year the Runner says, “Well, I guess I’ll make peanut brittle today.” I make a flying trip to the store for all that stuff that is not normally in our cabinets – raw peanuts, corn syrup, coconut (for the one batch with coconut added), margarine (well, I usually have that but not always). Years ago his mother showed him how to make this Christmas treat and I don’t believe in all the years he’s been doing it he has ever had a failure at it.
First, we get out every pan in the kitchen, including all the mixing bowls, measuring cups and measuring spoons.
I used to stay around to offer advice. This is not, you may realize by now, my project. I’d say, “You better get that off of there. It’s going to burn.” “It’s not going to burn,” he’d reply. And it never did.
Or – “The peanuts aren’t done yet.” He’d reply, “They’re done.” And they were.
Who am I to know? I have never made a batch in my life. But I am an aficionado and his greatest fan. He has realized through the years that not only do I not make peanut brittle – I do not clean up the kitchen. That would include – every pan, bowl, measuring spoon and cup in the kitchen, the stove, the sink and the floor. It is a very messy job.
Now, after only 51 years, he has become self-sufficient and cleans it himself. So, this morning, getting back from my second run to the grocery store. (I only got enough corn syrup for four batches and he decided to make five) I asked, “Did you remember this is the ‘off’ year? No one is coming for Christmas. We cannot eat 10 pounds of peanut brittle.”
“If I make it, they will come,” he replied.
And so, he began, cooking the first part of water, syrup and sugar until the hard ball stage, measuring out all the ingredients while it cooked. Then he would add the peanuts and cook them – each batch – to perfection. Quickly he would pour in the margarine, the vanilla and the baking soda, stirring carefully so it wouldn’t spill over – a very big potential mess, as
you might guess. Then into the greased cookie pans.
Each batch was wonderful. I did manage to arrive just in time to give my opinion each time by sampling the brittle. Soon we had pans of the hardened candy all over the kitchen.
Then it was time to get out all the Tupperware bowls we own and begin to fill them, cleaning up each little crumb along the way – by eating it, of course.
Then the first ones came. Two granddaughters arrived. One gave her approval. The other declined to try. She only likes pecan brittle, which is usually the last batch made. He omitted that, bowing to our small crowd this year. (He certainly had plenty of corn syrup, as I made sure on the second run to the grocery store that we didn’t run out. I’ll be making pecan pies all year. I don’t know what else to do with it.)
By the time we put it away, we only had two (very large) covered bowls full. We had certainly done our part to make sure it wasn’t wasted. Even the dog enjoyed it.
In the next few days I’ll package some up to send to the ones who didn’t come. I certainly hope he made enough!
Cheers – for the Runner and his ability to make this wonderful Christmas candy.
Jeers – for my inability to add any wonderful sweet thing to the snack table. I do make a mean crab dip. Nice start for a Christmas Eve repast! (He is sending us two – we’re going to be great-grandparents in 2007!)
- - - -
Someone needed to say it.
And Randall Balmer, a feature writer for Christianity Today, did — in Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament.
You won’t agree with everything. (Nor did I. It seems to me that there is much more diversity within Evangelicalism than it sometimes sounds in this book. Think, e.g., about the work of many young Evangelicals for Darfur!) But it is a compelling argument about something that has gone very wrong with much of the Evangelical movement in America.
Here’s a taste from the chapter: “Where Have All the Baptists Gone? Roy’s Rock, Roger Williams, and the First Amendment.”
Some of the things I learned from the radio while traveling the two hundred miles from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston to Longview, Texas:
- The intellectual and scientific case for evolution is crumbling.
- Global warming is a myth.
- The flat income tax is a superb idea.
- “Satan wants the United States to be kind to pluralism.”
- The reason we swear an oath on the Bible is because the Bible was the sole foundation of American law.
- The world has an unlimited supply of oil.
- The Constitution provides no guarantee of personal privacy.
- Government fuel-efficiency standards kill people.
- Satan dominates the secular media.
My visit to East Texas came at a strange time. A day earlier, Pat Robertson had issued his fatwa against the president of Venezuela, and I was certain, given their hysteria over terrorism, that my friends on the Religious Right would join me in calling for Robertson’s detention and interrogation on suspicion of making a terrorist threat. (The televangelist is no stranger to making death threats, of course, though in the past he has generally targeted Supreme Court justices, not foreign heads of state.) . . .
But Robertson’s statement elicited nary a comment from what passes for Christian radio in East Texas, although one pundit allowed that the televangelist might try to convert the Venezuelan president before calling for his assassination.
I learned something else in the course of my travels through the triple-digit heat of a Texas summer: There seems to be at least some truth in the oft-quoted statement of Bill Moyers (the pride of Marshall, Texas) that in East Texas there are more Baptists than there are people. I passed First Baptist Church and Second Baptist Church, Long Range Baptist Church, Faith Family Baptist Church, Charity Baptist Church, Timpson Missionary Baptist Church, Appleby Baptist Church, Holly Springs Baptist Church, First Freewill Baptist Church, Zion Hill Baptist Church, Friendship Baptist Church, Friendship Bobo Baptist Church, Heritage Baptist Church, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, Pleasant Valley Baptist Church, and Grace Baptist Church, which, according to a large sign, featured “Old Fashion Preaching” — to name only a few.
Given all of these churches, given all of these angry voices defending the faith on my car radio, imagine my surprise that evening when I attended a huge Religious Right rally at the Maude Cobb Convention and Activity Center in Longview and learned that, despite all appearances to the contrary, East Texas is actually in the grip of Satan.
The endorsements are as diverse as Rick Warren and Tony Campolo (though actually, I don’t think this is diverse as I would have five years ago). Campolo says: “Randall Balmer knows Evangelicalism inside and out. He writes with the ambivalence of a jilted lover who still cares very much about the movement but who is broken-hearted . . . .”
