I must admit that when it came time for this month’s experiment in food and fiction, I was a little unprepared. I spent the weekend traveling, and arrived home yesterday to relatively bare cupboards and a nearly-empty fridge. This clearly was not going to be the month I attempted to recreate Beezus and Ramona’s baked chicken and banana-yogurt cornbread or Anne Shirley’s raspberry cordial and plum cake.

Then I thought of one of my all-time favorite series: Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. These delightful books follow Betsy Ray (and her best friend Tacy) from age 5 all the way up to the first years of her married life. Modeled heavily on the girlhood of the author herself, they provide a vibrant vision of life in a small city in Minnesota during the first part of the twentieth century. There are many things I love about these books: Betsy’s struggles with her own identity as a writer, the overpowering warmth of the Ray family, their traditions and love for one another, Betsy and Tacy’s friendship, the countless humorous vignettes and the sense of fun that permeates Betsy’s life.

And then, of course, there is the food. Betsy and Tacy’s life-long friendship is founded on much more than food, but it’s also inextricably wound in to the story. From the suppers they share, each bringing her plate outside and sitting together on the bench at the top of their street, to the battered and blackened cocoa pail they take along on their tramps in the hills for picnics, food serves as a tangible symbol of the bonds between the characters.

As the books advance into (my favorites) the High School years, we get introduced to even more delectable treats. Betsy’s circle of friends expands to a Crowd of her school-fellows, and we begin to hear about the Ray family tradition of Sunday Night Lunch:

The meal was prepared by Mr. Ray. This was a custom of many years’ standing. No one else was allowed in the kidchen except in the role of admiring audience. [...] If nothing else was available he made his sandwiches of onions. He used slices of mild Bermuda onions, sprinkled with vinegar and dusted with pepper and salt.

~ from Heaven to Betsy, by Maud Hart Lovelace

We also read about the trips to the local ice cream parlor after school events (or while avoiding reading Ivanhoe) filled with “pineapple sundaes” and “ice cream swimming in syrups, topped by whipped cream, nuts and cherries”.

And then there’s the fudge. Betsy and her friends always seem to be making delicious pans full of toothsome fudge, as often as they roll up the carpets for their impromptu dances and sing-alongs. I had cocoa and butter and sugar and milk. How hard could it be? Especially since, as any fan of the books knows, Betsy is not particularly skilled in the culinary arts. If she could make fudge, I could too. Right?

A bit of googling revealed a wide array of fudge recipes, from the “easy microwave” variety to the “old-fashioned” type that involves mysterious candy-making terminology like “soft-ball stage”. In the interest of literary accuracy, I decided I would go ahead and try the “old-fashioned” recipe. I used this one.

Measuring out the milk, cocoa and sugar and boiling them up was easy enough, but when it came time to judge the “soft-ball” stage I fear I was about as savvy as Betsy when she was asked to baste the chicken in Domestic Science and wasn’t sure how to do it without a needle. I must have dropped two dozen droplets of chocolate ooze into ice water, trying to determine if I had attained the mythical soft-ball stage.

In the end, I fear that what I produced, while definitely sweet and chocolatey, is not exactly fudge. Any resemblance to actual fudge in the following picture is entirely due to my having stuck the pan in the freezer for several hours before cutting it.

I think I should have tried making the the onion sandwiches instead. I always did wonder how those tasted!

About The Author

Deva likes searching for patterns, which is how she explains both her degree in mathematics and the echoes of old fairy-tales in her stories. She also loves tea, gardening, and playing the fiddle. She lives in Maine with her husband and her dog.  Read more about Deva Fagan.

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