Sugary Treats from the Itinerant Entrepreneur
“Have you ever smelled the smell of burning styrofoam?” Bee asked me.
“I don’t think I have,” quickly scrolling through my mental olfactory rolodex.*
“There’s really just nothing else like it. It’s the smell I always associate with my grandma. Living on the riverboat, burning trash, and not knowing any better.”
I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Bee Roll tell me lots of stories over the past decade. They’re raw, filled with smells, and have the geographical span of the entire United States.
*”quickly scrolling through my mental olfactory rolodex” is my submission for the Most Anachronistic Technology References writing grant. Fingers crossed.
Bee was my boss at my first cooking job in southeastern Michigan. She hired me to sling sandwiches at lunch time, and ended up training me how to cook eggs, make soup & and cook piles of french toast. Not unlike her stories, the process of teaching me how to cook was raw, filled with smells, but had the geographical span of a 2 ft x 2 ft kitchen. She got through it all with me, no matter how many of my fingers I tried to cut off, or how many times I burned myself in patches of hot griddle oil.
Click here for the Butternut Crunch Toffee Recipe
Over the years of working with Bee, stories about her grandma, and her grandma’s sweets, kept cropping up. Her smooth, buttery caramel sauce was credited to her grandma, as well as the amazing, rich crunchy toffee that hailed the coming of Christmas every year.
“She definitely really loved making sweets.” Bee told me.
“Why do you think that’s the case?”
“Well,” she paused slightly, “probably because she was an alcoholic, and alcoholics often really crave sugar.”
When Bee was just a few years old, she was dropped off to live with Lynda Anderson, her maternal grandmother, in Beaverton, OR.
The Grandmother with Many Hats and a Traveling Home
Bee remembers her first few years living on the styrofoam-burning riverboat, followed-up with the enterprising Lynda and her husband, Warren Luther, owning a dry-cleaning business.
They would set Bee up with the small but lucrative task of ironing out forgotten dollars from customer’s clothes. Being a wordsmith from a young age, Bee remembers cracking a joke to her grandma about “laundering money” – which was met with a very stern rebuke and the request to “never, ever, say that again.” Were there shady mis-dealings at the dry cleaners? We can only wonder.
An “itinerant entrepreneur” is how Bee describes her grandma’s professional life. After dry-cleaning, they bought an RV and traveled across the country selling rubber stamps, kindergarten aged Bee in tow, making it all the way to the east coast.
Somehow, Lynda managed to make sweets and cakes on the road in the RV, giving Bee her earliest food memories. A Strawberry Shortcake Cake for her birthday stands out as one of the finest of miracles.
“But we also ate lots of RV microwave quesadillas. It wasn’t glamorous.” She said, keeping the record straight.
The Ice Cream Years
When Bee was 7, she went back to living with her mom, and continued having a very rich and colorful life traveling the country. Lynda and her husband Warren eventually settled down in Marquette, MI and opened a soft-serve ice cream shop called The Dairy-Freez.
The Dairy-Freez was open in downtown Marquette from 1986-97. Lynda & Warren were known for opening their ice cream shop in February, when the rest of Marquette insisted it was still winter (which yes, yes it was).
Besides serving up soft-serve equipped with lots of toppings and housemade sauces, Lynda liked to hand out trinkets and toys to the younger customers who would stop by. She would pride herself on “playing grandma” to the 12-years old and under constituents of Marquette.
When Bee was 10, she headed to Marquette and worked in the ice cream shop for a summer.
She remembers her Grandma Lynda talking about patenting her soft-serve ice cream machine that could allegedly produce something in the neighborhood of 144 different flavors – which completely blows my mind. Bee remembers her concocting flavors that sound trendy still today, like turmeric & passionfruit.
Bee had ups and downs with her mom throughout her life, and spent a lot of time on the road and restarting life in different places. But her grandma was her first culinary orientation, and the one who planted the seed in her to create food that makes people feel that wherever they happen to be eating, is in fact, home. (If you ever have the pleasure of being in Ypsilanti, go to beezy’s cafe.)
Making the Toffee
When I asked her what recipe of her grandma’s she’d like me to recreate for this project, I was excited that she picked Butter Nut Crunch Toffee, which Bee calls “English Toffee” (I get into this at length below).
Unlike every other recipe I’ve made so far for Canned Peaches, I had actually eaten this before! Bee used to make it at the cafe every Christmas. I’d come in for my 6 am shift, and my eyes would be all a-glow with sugar plum magic as I’d stare at trays and trays of chocolate covered toffee, ready to be smashed up and put into boxes. I might be exaggerating about the sugar plum magic. We were more likely hung over and 5 cigarettes deep into our day. But this toffee? Great for a sleepy, sugar-fueled breakfast.
As memory serves, she attempted to teach me how to make the toffee at one point, but being the crappy disciple I was, I failed.
“I f***ked that one up, right?” I said, when she told me her recipe selection at the end of the interview a few weeks ago.
“Yes, I think you did. But you know more things about sugar now.”
English Toffee vs. Butter Nut Crunch Toffee
I’ve always heard this style of toffee referred to as English Toffee, which is also what Bee calls hers, so I was a little surprised by seeing the name “Butter Nut Crunch Toffee” on the recipe and wondered where that came from.
According to this history of toffee, “buttercrunch toffee” is of distinctly American invention. Turns out what we call “English Toffee” in America is a little different than what English people are eating. Toffee in England is more likely to contain molasses (in the format of brown sugar) or treacle, but in America we use granulated sugar. Americans also like to throw nuts on their toffee, while the British ask theirs to run for Prime Minister. (Though, sorry. It’s not like we’re ones to talk.)
As to why the name English Toffee stuck around, the article says it’s a bit of a mystery, but the best guess is it was either distributors of the candy not knowing the difference, or assuming consumers would gravitate toward the name English Toffee sooner than Buttercrunch.
I think that’s a *crazy* assumption, however. You put the words “butter” and “crunch” next to each other, and I start walking forward. Throw some nuts in there, and I’m skipping.
I decided to flip open my 1967 Joy of Cooking, and let it decide the whole thing for me (A mid-century copy of JOC comes in handy a LOT). Behold, they had a recipe for English Toffee AND a recipe for Nut Crunch Toffee.
Here in lies the differences:
The JOC Nut Crunch toffee was the same method as Lynda’s toffee, starting by boiling together granulated sugar, water and butter to the soft crack, but Lynda takes her toffee a little darker (hard crack, about 305F).
The JOC English Toffee recipe calls for boiling together granulated sugar, cream of tartar, and cream, then adding butter after 3 minutes of boiling. It also gets taken to the soft crack stage. The recipe makes note that if you want dark chocolate and nuts on it, you should refer to the Nut Crunch recipe, because that’s what you want to make.
I think it’s interesting to note that the JOC recipe calls for granulated sugar and cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is a lightly acidic ingredient that is a by-product of the wine making process. It gets added to lots of different recipes – often you’ll see it alongside baking soda, because baking soda needs a little acid in order to work.
As the sugar boils down in the cream, the cream of tartar in this recipe functions to divide the glucose and fructose molecules in the candy, making an invert sugar. This modifies the kind of crystal structure you end up getting in the candy. Adding a little dash of acid helps the process of creating the invert sugar.
While I’m sure that’s fascinating enough on it’s own (it kind of is), it’s interesting to me for this reason: why not just do what the British do, and use brown sugar? Brown sugar has a higher molasses content, which is quite acidic, and will function the same way as cream of tartar. The cream of tartar & granulated sugar combo is essentially mimicking what brown sugar does, but without the flavor of molasses.
My guess as to why the JOC wrote the English Toffee recipe this way is for one of two reasons: 1) it’s hard to predict the exact molasses content in brown sugar, and adding an acid like cream of tartar helps make the recipe more consistent or 2) the primarily upper middle-class white Yankee consumers of mid-century Joy of Cooking did not prefer the taste of brown sugar, or potentially didn’t have access to it.
Henceforth and furthermore: the JOC English Toffee recipe was using cream of tartar to mimic a similarly textured toffee as the kind eaten in Britain, meaning the name “english Toffee” makes a LOT of sense, but is a bit too vague and technical for everyday toffee-snackers to remember.
I feel satisfied with my findings. There ARE actually 2 different toffees, though now they get so mixed up that they’re nearly interchangeable. The English Toffee recipe was imitating the texture of a toffee made with a molasses content, and Lynda’s recipe is indeed the American “Butternut Crunch” toffee, topped with chocolate and nuts. Bee and I are amongst the thousands of Americans calling it “English Toffee.” Though I’ll probably start calling it Buttercrunch now, because, gosh, that name is so sexy.
Butter. Nut. Crunch. MMmm…sugar…
As I made the toffee this time around (p.s. I nailed it), I liked thinking about Lynda and her love for sugary treats. I like that Bee’s stories about her aren’t what I typically expect people to say about their grandmas. Lynda burned styrofoam on a riverboat, and traveled around the country selling rubber stamps! She wasn’t busy sitting in a rocking chair drinking lemonade – she was an itinerant entrepreneur with questionable habits.
I crunched into her toffee, licked the chocolate off my fingers, and gleefully thanked my lucky stars for the journey that recipes and people take.