Candy

She stood over the stove with her wooden spoon carefully stirring the contents of her pot as the flames slowly heated them to the hard ball stage. She couldn’t believe that all she really required was sugar and water, a dollop of flavored oil, and some color yet she knew she had read the recipe correctly.

It was her great-grandmother’s recipe, to be exact, and it was one she had learned when she was a small girl working in a lolly factory to bring a few shillings home each week to help keep food on her family’s table. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for great-gran to be so young and yet working with such a hot mixture. Following every step and using all the modern tools that would help to keep her from being hurt or burned, she still knew her fingers would be blistered once this batch was done but this year she intended to do more than just the one batch.

Quickly she added cinnamon oil to the boiling sugar mixture and set to work coloring. The white she put on the taffy puller to slowly pull it into a creamy, pearly white and she folded in the red and green with wooden spoons, one in each hand. Working quickly she laid snakes of color into a huge log that she hoped would translate into the disks looking like she had hoped. An hour later she had a thousand little perfect poinsettia disks.

Even at 12, great-gran was a master! The recipe was perfect.

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