Divinity

Standing on a footstool beside my grandmother Cille in the kitchen when I was too small to see above the stovetop without it, I received the secrets of this notorious home made candy from the South. It is a candy that requires patience and watchful eye for time. Cille saw that my mind was growing, she taught me my left from right at about that same time, and how to tie my shoe, and she could see that like other children my age I was anxious and impatient and my life adventures were squeezing through the seconds and minutes without understanding how to get a grasp of them. I wasn’t ready to read a clock and a few minutes could seem like an hour, just like an hour could pass in the blink of an eye. I was lacking the constant meter that comes with rigor and habits, so she taught me, in her patient careful way, the stepping stones to Divinity.

Bright sunny days are divinity days. Crisp winter days were best where we grew up, because then there is a draw between playing outside or staying in to make divinity. Honestly, when Cille was visiting, I’d give up anything for some one on one time with her.

First you have to get the sugar boiling. Then when it is a syrup and it begins to bubble, the syrup moves through easily recognizable stages from a foamy rapid boil, through several swells and changes in appearance that rise and fall like predictable tides, and then finally reaches the point when it settles down and the bubbles grow and pop in a certain thoughtful kind of way. That’s the time to begin the testing. Every few minutes we’d drop a little bit of the hot syrup into ice water. After an agonizing wait the sugar finally acted right and became a hard ball. These landmarks are easy enough for a child to grasp.

As the beaters turned in the stiffly beaten egg whites, she poured the sugar syrup so excruciatingly slow that I thought I might just die from the suspense. She insisted that adding it in a thin almost hair-like stream was the secret to a successful divinity. When enough had been added to give it some body, the flavorings came, vanilla, or some brandy, and the color. When Cille and I made divinity together, she always let me choose the color. Then the rest of the syrup went in, ever so slowly but fast enough that it never hardened in the pan.

The end comes quickly when making Divinity. One minute you’re shuffling from one foot to the other wondering when it will ever end, and the next minute the sheen fades and you find yourself spooning it down on the waxed paper in rich voluptuous dollops. Cille often pushed a pecan into the center of each one just after spooning it down. The candy grips the buttery nut like the head of a sleepy child in the pillow at nap time.

My mother reminisces about Cille's teaching days, and says she used to make pink divinity for her class every year on Valentines day. This year I decided to make pink divinity.