The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street
Two days in the kitchen
I made the popcorn balls the way my mother made them, from the recipe card in her handwriting, the one with the grease spot in the corner shaped like the state of Ohio.
It is four ingredients. Popcorn, light corn syrup, white sugar, butter. Some people put in vanilla or a pinch of salt or food coloring.
My mother never did and neither do I. There is nothing else in them and there never has been.
For three hundred, you need about twenty-two batches. I drove to the Fareway in Centerville on Wednesday and bought ten pounds of sugar, four big bottles of Karo, four pounds of butter, and two bags of popcorn kernels so heavy the boy carried them out for me.
The checker, a young woman named Amber, looked at my cart and laughed. “Mrs. Pruitt, is it popcorn ball time already?” she said. Then her face changed, and I knew she had seen the post too. “My mom said to tell you she’s bringing her grandkids,” she added quietly.
I had been planning to make two hundred, the way I always do. Somewhere between the sugar aisle and the parking lot I decided on three hundred.
I could not have told you why at the time. I think I just did not want that post to make me smaller.
Thursday I popped corn from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, in the big dented aluminum kettle that was Dennis’s mother’s.
The whole house smelled like a movie theater, and I had popcorn in my hair and in my bra and in the dog’s water dish.
Friday I made the syrup. You cook the sugar and corn syrup and butter to about two hundred fifty degrees, the hard ball stage, and you watch the candy thermometer like it owes you money.
A minute too long and it turns to glass. A minute too short and the balls fall apart in the bag.
You pour it over the popcorn in the big roaster pan and you stir it with a wooden spoon.
Then you butter your hands and you shape them while the syrup is still hot enough to sting.
My mother used to say if your palms are not red, you are not doing it right.
My hands are sixty-three years old. By the twelfth batch I had to stop and run them under cold water at the sink, and I stood there with the tap running and cried a little, mostly from my hands and partly from everything else.