It is still a good while until Christmas, so I might learn to make my mother’s divinity candy in time for the holidays. That has been on my to-do list for years now, but I have just not gotten it done.
This year, it’s a top priority. Of all the fantastic things my mother cooked for those many Christmases, her divinity candy was everybody’s favorite.
Aunts, uncles and cousins started opening those tin containers of desserts as soon as they got to our house at Christmastime. They passed over the sand tarts and fudge and tree-shaped sugar cookies and kept exploring until they found the divinity.
That white fluffy candy was famous in our family, and nobody could make it but my mother. Her sisters and my dad’s sisters tried but failed even with my mother standing there instructing them.
My dad died 20 years before my mother, and she lost her passion for cooking. The rest of us started doing the turkey and dressing and other things, but we never let her quit making the divinity.
We didn’t take time to develop that fine art ourselves, which was a terrible mistake. She had to go into a nursing home in her eighties and never did another good batch of divinity in her final years.
Not that I didn’t encourage her. She was physically frail but mentally sharp and still enjoyed coming to our house for holidays. I tried on all of her visits to learn how to make divinity, but her flair for creating the candy or teaching me to do it had slipped away.
My stirring was too brisk or too slow or I didn’t beat the egg whites long enough or I didn’t get the temperature right before adding the syrup, so she would take over. But she would get tired or impatient, mess the candy up and then dump it in the sink.
I had seen her do that a time or two over the years when the weather was not right for making divinity. Besides all the other precision required for her perfect divinity, she said it had to be done on sunny days when the humidity was low.
Regina and I discovered several copies of my mother’s divinity recipe after she died. A couple are in her own handwriting, one was typed by my dad on his Royal portable typewriter for her index card recipe file box, and two others are in church cookbooks.
There is not one grain of sugar difference in all of the recipes, so Regina and I know we have the ingredients right when we try to cook the candy.
Instructions for the cooking process are also the same in every copy of her recipe, but I think our problems with getting the divinity right has been in the technique. It’s a little complicated.
For anyone willing to offer advice, here are the ingredients: two and a half cups of sugar; half cup of white Karo syrup; half cup of water; two egg whites; one cup of nuts and one tablespoon of vanilla. She used hickory nuts or black walnuts most of the time but pecans worked too, she said.
Now here are the cooking instructions: Stir the sugar, water and Karo over low heat until it boils. Then let it boil without stirring to the light crack stage or until it spins a thread. While syrup is cooking, beat egg whites stiffly. Before adding syrup to eggs, put a half-teaspoon of baking powder over beaten eggs. Pour syrup over eggs beating constantly until creamy. Add nuts and vanilla and drop on wax paper.
I have no idea what the light crack stage is or what it means for the mixture to spin a thread. And notice that she just threw in the baking powder without listing it in the ingredients.
She was not specific about how to drop the mixture onto the wax paper, but she always used two spoons for that. She got it out of the pot with one spoon and scraped golf ball size pieces onto the paper with the other.
It would be nice if someone who knows how to cook that old fashioned divinity candy like my mother made would teach me how to do it.
Or if they are too busy for that, they could just drop a batch of it by the house during the Christmas holidays.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES