Making Fudge, According to Girl

Making Fudge according to Girl: One of my favorite current shows on television is called "The Closer." Kyra Sedgwick, who plays the adorable Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, the driven, transplanted from the south, right by the book, emotional, menopausal chief.
She is respected and admired. On last night’s show, two of the detectives working under her were having a rocky affair. She was ending a long day, alone and relieved to be finished working. Brenda Leigh pulled out what looked like a chocolate bar, nibbled a corner off, when suddenly her door opened, revealing two of her bright young detectives in the middle of a mindless spat. With the toughness and melodramatic mindset of one very angry boss, she slam dunked her chocolate bar into the trash basket.

After promptly dealing with their issues and laying down the rules in her blunt matter-of-fact way, she dismissed them. Once they left, she remained sitting at her desk cultivating an angry countenance. Then, remembering the discarded chocolate bar, she dove into the trash, retrieved and ate it.

I think back to the time when our girls were young. We would sit down for dinner together, and Mike and I would patiently wait for them to tell us the storyline of the shows they had watched after school on those afternoons. From the intro to the end, we would hear all about Sesame Street, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family and the Smurfs.

These shows became part of our dinnertime each evening. They were, in fact, the major topic of conversation, keeping all of us so engrossed that it could be difficult to request the salt to be passed. It was important to listen to our little girls. I wonder where they got it from. Who passed that gene down to our five and six year old?

I have to admit that I would have done the same thing Brenda Leigh did—I would have jumped in the trash can for chocolate, I would grovel for fudge, I would lick the pan until all traces were gone.

Mike got the recipe from his mom, and we would take it out of the three-ring binder at least one Saturday evening each month. We would open up the sugar, cocoa, butter, vanilla and milk. We even experimented with different typs of fudge, from the Mackinaw famous recipe to the sugary crispy crunchy style. It didn’t matter to us—they all were good.

One of the nice things about making fudge is that it takes a lot of practice (which means there has to be a lot of taste testing). One of the recipes had us drop a small amount of the boiling fudge into a cup of cold water. We would do this time after time, until the perfect state of creamy chocolatey "yummyness" had been attained. We would know we were there when the fudge could be formed into a soft ball in the cold water.

Of course, tasting was the only perfect way to tell for sure that the fudge was cooking properly. This was my job. I was the taster. Much like a wine taster from the vineyards in Southern France, I would smell it, wafting it gently toward my face, I would examine the colors, the uniformity, the bouquet and finally, the taste. I would then pause for a moment, my eyes staring into space.

But, unlike professional wine tasters, I never spit the fudge out.

So, as the story ends, Brenda Leigh closes her eyes, reflects on the tough decisions, the important office she holds, her charges, and the terribly difficult job she has.

With her finger she wipes off the chocolate that remains in the corners of her mouth, and then slowly licks her finger clean.

There she is, alone at the end of the day, sliding down in her chair, kicking off her shoes, and in her famous Southern-fried fast talk, she addresses the empty chocolate wrapper, and says, "Thank you, thank you so much."