Hiding My Candy

I had just put the finishing touches on some spelt croutons roasting in a jalapeno olive oil and was looking around my soul food kitchen for adequate storage. Always a problem. A candy mason-type jar caught my eye amidst the flotsam and jetsam collection of containers sitting above one of our fridges. That, I thought, will do just fine. And it did.

And as I set them on my mise-en-place countertop (yes, don’t give me a hard time here, my fucking prep table ok?), I was suddenly taken 50 years back in time to my favorite candy dishes — probably the only genre of dishware I had any sense of at the time.

The first was actually not a candy dish per se, but actually a large olive green hand thrown ceramic blob of a thing that housed what mom felt were her pass-the-muster healthy cookies — because there really was no candy in the house. I loved that jar, its interior immenseness, the subtle uncertainty of not knowing exactly what mom had put there and the pyrrhic pleasure of scraping out the caramelised bits from the crevices. Of course, because were never had candy in the house, I was constantly scrounging for loose change around the house and buying mostly Hershey bars with almonds from the Jewish Educational Alliance not far from our house and then stashing my hoard back behind all of my socks.

And then there was the candy dish at Grandma Annie’s house, a beautiful crystal thing, which made this gotcha sound every time one (aka I) lifted the lid (and also replaced it). Unfortunately, my grandmother favored this elegant dish with red variegated and green variegated peppermints — which were OK but definitely not top shelf stuff — and these pastel colored, sugar-coated adult version of jelly beans which really weren’t for kids. Instead, I knew to look in the bottom recesses of my grandmother’s pantry, where there was always a horde of miniature snickers bars and the like. My Aunt Millie, who was responsible for the horde, would always explain patiently to my mom that these were just leftovers from Halloween. But we all knew better.

Finally, there was the candy jar at my maternal grandparents’ house in Americus. It sat on Papa’s work table in the hallway and contained an odd mishmash of stray pennies, paperclips, and stale caramels. I loved caramels. Could never quite release all of the gooeyness from my molars, but, hey, pleasure had its price. I could never figure out how the composition of that particular candy dish remained so constant over the years, with its odd bric-a-brac collection. Still, it was far better than the alternative, a fairly large collection of stale white and pink marshmellows in one of the steel bottom drawers in the kitchen. Bobo, my grandmother used them in her compote of pears and such. I was not a fan.

So here I am, half a century later, linking the title of a book by an infamous Savannah drag queen to memories about quasi-forbidden fruit, brought on by a simple candy mason jar housing spicy croutons. You make sense out of it. I can’t.