taffy

My great-grandmother Pineau pulling taffy.

Halloween, a favorite holiday of many people I know, does not inspire me as I sometimes feel it should. I have had my share of ridiculous costumes (once, I wore a large papier mache nose around... ) and now I have little patience for uncomfortable costumes or elaborate makeup or masks and generally limit myself to human characters I feel affinity for: for two years running, I went as Laura Ingalls Wilder (last year, happily, accompanied by my Almanzo, his manly hand forever covering my smaller, female one as we rode away in the annual Halloween Bike Ride) and the plan for this year was for us to go as Anne of Green Gables and Gilbert Blythe, and we would reinact the schoolhouse scene where Gilbert pulls Anne's braid (carrots!) and she smashes a slate over his head in return. We even reveiwed the PBS miniseries last week to study for these parts. But last night, when it came time to rummage through the closets for suitable clothing, we tried some things on, and then decided not to go. Why? Anne (with beautiful natural red locks) had a headache. I, who was to play Gilbert, was suddenly preoccupied with the notion of making old fashioned molasses taffy and was only too happy to do that instead of bundling up for a late-night bike ride.

For something like fifty years, my grandparents made popcorn balls for all the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Their recipe was surely from the Joy of Cooking, or else one passed down from great-grandmother Pineau. Bound with a molasses flavored sugar syrup and wrapped in plastic sandwich baggies (perhaps once in waxed paper), this was a wholesome treat that I always looked forward to. You really had to gnaw on it.. I would always be sure to find one with more syrup...

And I had a distant memory of making actual pulled taffy --which is all syrup! My mother spoke of taffy often, and we made it just once, with greased up hands.
So last night, on Halloween, happy that I had all the ingredients (and even a marble slab!), we made taffy-- Anne and I, after a nap. The recipe, again, is in the Joy of Cooking. We pulled and pulled for half an hour or more, then snipped the rope with buttered shears. No trick-or-treaters called.