Making Fudge with Noni
December 20, 2006
I made fudge tonight. Every few years I make fudge before the holidays. But for me the act of making fudge isn't really about making fudge.
The fudge I make is more than just a dessert, it is a magical reagent that allows the average person to transport themselves to a different place. A place devoid of logic or problems or worries about calories. This place is one made up only of emotion, sensation, and the unique orgasmic properties of chocolate. There is no other food that I know that has this ability. One bite and you're gone. You literally go "AHHHHH" and then suddenly get that funny look on your face. You know the look I'm talking about. That look of release. The look that only comes with sex and chocolate.
I usually don't partake in the fudge orgy myself. Sure I might have one or two pieces. Rather, I enjoy giving others the means to find that special place. Sure they may curse me afterwards when they feel guilty for eating 10 pieces with their 1000 calories. But hey, when in our society has wanton pleasure ever been guilt free?
Honestly though, the satisfaction I get from others' pleasure is not why I make the fudge. For me it is a time for me to commune with my grandmother. My grandmother thought she could only make people happy through food. She had difficulty expressing herself any other way. She tried, but she just couldn't connect with people on a more emotional level. Maybe it was her generation, maybe it was her alcoholic husband. I don't know. But she had a real problem expressing her feelings to those she loved. So she did it the only way she knew how - through food.
She loved sweets. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, apple pies, pecan pies, and FUDGE. Every year around the holidays she would begin making fudge. Fudge by the basket load. She'd create little care packages tied up with a red bow and send them far and wide to all her family, friends, and acquaintances. I remember how she'd make my aunt (who did not generally like to eat sweets) to have at least one piece. She'd have this wicked little smile on her face when she did it, because she knew my aunt would make that special face, despite all her will power. My aunt would be transported to that place of pleasure and sensation and my grandmother would take that expression of pleasure as validation. Validation of her love and validation that we loved her back.
While I do enjoy giving people this communion of pleasure called fudge, my intent is not the same as my grandmother's. While my mom was working or in school, my grandmother would take care of me. She raised me until I was 13. She was the rock in my life. She was the one one felt safe with. She has been dead for 14 years now. But when I take out her old aluminum pot to boil the milk and sugar and use her cooking spoon to stir the mixture to prevent it from burning, I feel her. I know she is there with me. I see her hand on the spoon, her wedding, and engagement rings clanking together because now, with age, they are too big for her finger. I see her smiling at me, showing how to pour the boiling hot sugar and milk over the chocolate, quickly mixing it all together before it can cool. Then laughing as I grab the spoon and try to lick it clean. The crystallized sugar on the spoon making it hard to do.
So what is fudge? For most it is pleasure. It is a way to experience, for just a sliver of time, a place of abandonment and pure sensation. But for me, it is a way to take back time. To return to a time and place when I felt accepted and loved.
Tonight my grandmother and I made fudge.
Noni, I love you and I miss you. - Ken