Grandfather Fudge

At dinner tonight I was totally blindsided by the revelation that my grandpa, my farm grandpa who I've never seen prepare any kind of food whatsoever, has been making fudge since he was a little kid. Not that any of us have ever seen him do it. Until now. He recited the recipe and instructions right there at the dinner table, off the top of his head. Apparently his mother taught him to make fudge. Well, I lost no time. As soon as we'd finished eating I gathered up the ingredients, measured out the amounts he specified, made him measure out the the amounts he had only approximated, and set to cooking it. Over the wood fire in the very same wood stove that his own mother had cooked on, and probably made that same fudge on. I stirred while grandpa monitored the boiling and periodically checked it for doneness. He did this by dropping the hot mixture into a cup of cold water. That's the old way. Now we read a thermometer, and when it gets to the line marked "soft ball" we stop cooking. Well, grandpa's way is to drop the molten candy into the water and see whether it forms a soft ball. Ah, authenticity. Once it was done we stirred and stirred until it stiffened, put it in a glass dish, and waited. And scraped the bowl and licked the spoons.

It was the greatest thing, making my grandpa teach me how to make his fudge! Of course I already knew how to make fudge and what soft ball means, and all that, but that isn't the point. Now I have made my great-grandmother's fudge with my grandfather, and over a wood fire.