Anne of Green Gables

SALTED CHOCOLATE CARAMELS

When I was six years old, my dad’s dad, my Grandy, passed away after weeks of refusing to eat. He had been sick in a vague and insidious way ever since my grandmother died years before I was born. There was a subtle but persistent ache in his chest that no doctor could diagnose. When asked how he was feeling he always answered the same way—he rolled his eyes back in his head and dragged his hand across his chest until it rested, fingers splayed out over his heart. As young as I was and as sick as he got, my memories of him are still startlingly clear, and in them he is always tall and strong and silly.

The night of his wake, my parents left my sisters and me at his apartment with a babysitter, a stranger in a floral muumuu who immediately put on a rerun of Donahue and distractedly fed us Apple Jacks from Grandy’s cupboard. Grandy had an upstairs neighbor, a woman named Lila who was around his age and who always brought him peanut butter cookies. Grandy hated peanut butter, but he never had the heart to tell her, so his cabinets overflowed with Lila’s peanut butter–filled, peanut-studded cookies. We ate them whenever we came to his house, armfuls of them. They were good cookies, chewy and salty, each one pressed with fork tines in a crisscross pattern. I think she loved him.

That night she must have heard the TV on in his downstairs apartment, and she came to the door, knocking gently with her finger, holding a Tupperware container of cookies. When she asked for Grandy, the babysitter announced loudly, too loudly, that he had died. I remember there was a sound of physical pain, like someone being socked in the stomach or a dog getting his foot stepped on, and suddenly the cookies were in the babysitter’s hands and Lila was backing away from the door, glassy-eyed and trembly.

The babysitter, unfazed, poured milk into jelly jars and placed the container of cookies in front of us. My mouth was watering from the warm smell of them, but there was a pain in my throat, an actual lump that made the thought of eating unimaginable. I kept thinking about Lila alone upstairs in her apartment, the sound she had made, and the wild, stricken look of sorrow that had washed over her face. My throat felt so tight, the lump in it so enormous and painful, that I started to panic, and I cried until the babysitter tucked me into bed in Grandy’s guest room, where I stared at a smudged chalkware bust of the Virgin Mary—her eyes crazed with grief—until I fell asleep.

I had no idea how to process the choking sadness I had felt that night until I started reading Anne of Green Gables two years later. In the third chapter, Anne, who is grappling with the reality that Marilla and Matthew don’t want her, tells Marilla that she can’t eat breakfast because she is “in the depths of despair.” Her explanation of this phenomenon was so strikingly similar to what I had experienced the night of Grandy’s wake that I remember actually gasping aloud as I read it. “It’s a very uncomfortable feeling indeed,” Anne says.

When you try to eat a lump comes right up in your throat and you can’t swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel. I had one chocolate caramel once two years ago and it was simply delicious. I’ve often dreamed since then that I had a lot of chocolate caramels, but I always wake up just when I’m going to eat them. I do hope you won’t be offended because I can’t eat. Everything is extremely nice, but I still cannot eat.

Realizing that your emotions and experiences aren’t yours alone is one of the great powers of reading, especially when you’re a child. The feelings that I hadn’t been able to pinpoint or understand were there on the page in front of me, and I was both awestruck and comforted. As melodramatic as Anne often is, her feelings here are real, and they speak to the incredible power that grief has over appetite.

L. M. Montgomery’s food writing is legendary, especially in the Anne of Green Gables series—which includes raspberry cordial, vanilla ice cream and lemonade, plum pudding with vanilla sauce, pound cake and raspberry tarts, coconut macaroons—but these unswallowable chocolate caramels are, to me, the most powerful. In a book that so often tumbles toward the slapstick and ridiculous, this scene is a tiny glimpse into the tragedy and sadness that this eleven-year-old girl has experienced—tragedies not dissimilar to those in Montgomery’s own life.

On Wednesday afternoons when I was in elementary school, my neighborhood friends and I would walk to Andrews Pharmacy and sit on the carpet beneath the magazine racks, doing quizzes from teenybopper magazines and eating chocolate until our stomachs cramped. Christie always chose milk chocolate buttercreams and I always picked the gold-wrapped cherry cordials that gushed liquid so sweet it stung my throat. When our friend Lisa came she always chose chocolate caramels, big, chunky squares sunk deep in paper wrappers. I can still hear Lisa’s laugh as she bit down on one end and pulled the sticky sugar up, up into the air, thin spiderwebs of caramel clinging to the tip of her turned-up nose.

It was right before Christmas 2012 when my sister called to tell me that Lisa had passed away after battling cancer for a little over a year. In what was either a massive cosmic coincidence or some kind of comforting wink, I was in the middle of rolling and enrobing a thousand chocolate candies for a wedding when I got the call. The restaurant was too warm to roll truffles without melting them, so I had been standing in the walk-in refrigerator, shivering under a puffy parka for hours, melted chocolate stuck deep beneath my fingernails, cocoa powder coating my hair and eyebrows in a dull mist. I felt that familiar lump in my throat, that choking, alarming sadness, that stomach-twisting gut punch. I cried with my whole body alone in the fridge, my hands still working in a flurry of angry energy. I cried until my throat loosened and my mouth uncramped, thinking about Grandy and Anne and those Wednesday pharmacy visits, about Lisa and Lila and grief so palpable it sticks in your throat like burned sugar.

I left the walk-in and set up an induction burner. I unwrapped the good salted butter from its gold foil wrapper and cut it into even cubes. I weighed dark brown sugar and measured the thick, heavy cream. I warmed my hands over the pot, watching as the mixture thickened and boiled to a creamy fragrant amber, stuck my spoon into the caramel, and pulled it away from me, up, up into the air.

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Salted Chocolate Caramels

Makes about 80 caramels

1½ cups heavy cream

1⅓ cups granulated sugar

½ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

½ cup light corn syrup

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

3 tablespoons salted butter

Seeds of 1 vanilla bean

1½ pounds good-quality semisweet chocolate, chopped

2 teaspoons flaky sea salt (such as Maldon)

Grease an 8-inch square glass baking dish. Cut a piece of parchment paper so that it is a little bit less than 8 inches wide by 14 inches long. Press the parchment into the baking dish, leaving 3 inches of paper hanging over the sides of the dish (this will make it easier to lift the cooled caramel out of the baking dish). Coat the parchment in more butter and set the baking dish aside on a metal cooling rack.

In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, bring the cream to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir in both sugars and the corn syrup. Bring this mixture back to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, until the sugars have completely dissolved, about 3 more minutes.

Reduce the heat and continue to gently boil the mixture until it reaches 255°F on a candy thermometer. Don’t worry if the temperature rises quickly to 225°F and then plateaus for a little while—this is normal. It should take 20 to 25 minutes for the mixture to reach 255°F.

Once the mixture has come to temp, remove it from the heat and add the unsalted and salted butters and the vanilla bean seeds, stirring until combined. Pour this mixture into the prepared baking dish and allow it to cool on the cooling rack until the surface is set and the baking dish is warm but not hot, about 1 hour.

At this point, transfer the dish to the refrigerator to chill for 15 minutes (don’t leave it in there longer than that!). After 15 minutes, run a knife along the edges of the baking dish and use the parchment paper ends that are hanging over the dish to carefully lift the caramel out of the pan.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. With a very sharp knife, cut the caramel into ¾-inch squares, set them on one lined baking sheet, and place them in the refrigerator to continue to harden while you temper the chocolate.

Set up a double boiler: Fill a medium saucepan with 2 inches of water and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Place a heat-safe glass bowl over the pot and add two-thirds of the chopped chocolate, stirring until the chocolate has melted and a candy thermometer registers 118°F. Remove the bowl from the double boiler and add the remaining chopped chocolate, stirring until the temperature of the chocolate reaches 80°F.

Return the 80°F chocolate to the double boiler and bring it back up to 88°F (it’s important that the chocolate stay between 87°F and 89°F while you are enrobing the caramels, because this is the temperature at which it will set and harden to a smooth shell).

Take the caramels out of the fridge and dump them into the melted chocolate. Use a fork to remove them, one at a time, allowing the excess chocolate to drip off before placing them on the second lined baking sheet and sprinkling them with flaky salt. Make sure the caramels are not touching, and let them sit until the chocolate completely sets, about 30 minutes. The caramels will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.