According to Betty Crocker, the ideal S'more consists of a marshmallow gently skewered by a two foot stick, preferably a stick pulled off the fallen branch of a Sugar Pine. The marshmallow is then patiently turned rotisserie style 8 inches above a blazing camp fire. When the marshmallow is slightly swollen and just starting to hiss and complain, and just a moment before it starts to ooze its gooey white center, it is done. It should be uniformly bronzed and subtly crisped, like the skin of my kids after a week at Tahoe.
By the way, when I was a kid, my family owned a Betty Crocker cookbook. The book was thick and dense, like Bible dense, and it would thud and startle everyone present when you dropped it on the kitchen counter. The book cover was checkered red and white like a picnic tablecloth. The margin of the book cover displayed a postage-stamp sized painted portrait of a middle-aged woman who looked like a homemaker. Was this a picture of Betty Crocker? Was Betty Crocker a real person? Interestingly, however, the woman in the picture looked like she had a moustache. You didn't even have to squint to see it; it was plainly a darkened area on the upper lip. Nothing wrong with a hirsute countenance, I suppose, especially if Betty were Mediterranean. To this day, though, I wonder if my older brother, Joe, had taken a pencil eraser and "erased" the moustache onto the picture. We used to deface a lot of perfectly good pictures in National Geographic and Time Magazine back then by giving people moustaches.
Betty Crocker through the decades:
Anyway, back to the perfect S'more. Only women like my wife and daughter are able to create the perfect S'more marshmallow. Insert a Y chromosome, however, and you have instant mayhem. Just observe my boys. The boys stab the marshmallow with a flimsy stick then shove it into the fire such that the hair on their knuckles are singed. The boys are precipitously close to tumbling headfirst into the hot coals. Once the marshmallow catches fire it is removed and held aloft Statue of Liberty style. Feeble and requisite attempts to extinguish the flaming marshmallow are made simply to appease Mom, but the flame persists. Bearing their torches, the delighted boys then run around the campsite like adolescent hyenas. It's all programmed in the primordial male brain, just like defacing perfectly good pictures with moustaches.
The flaming marshmallow shrivels on the stick and becomes a sugary briquet dripping it's sticky white innards down the length of the stick. In the end the boys flick the exhausted marshmallows into the fire, then, predictably, declare, "We need more marshmallows! Ours caught on fire."
I think the mustache appeared about the same time as the middle child exhibited an interest in cooking chocolate pudding. We assumed his passion for this daily activity would wane eventually. We were wrong. We ate chocolate pudding every night until he finally went to Kindergarten. Betty Crocker was relieved too.
ReplyDeleteI remember the chocolate pudding. It came in the little cardboard boxes the size of two decks of cards. You could remove the pudding mix in its wax paper bag from the box. You would then heat the mix with two cups of milk while stirring it with a wooden spoon. When the pudding started bubbling it was done.
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