[Granny Bear]

CCR and CCC (chocolate covered raisins/cherries) were my all time favorite childhood candies.  My grandmother used to make a concoction of scrambled eggs and molasses.  She called it egg butter, and served it with her homemade biscuits.  Everybody loved it, except me.  Her biscuits were phenomenal but I couldn't stand the egg butter!!

My grandmother was a very interesting person....at least to me.  She was widowed in her thirties and had five children to raise alone.  My mother was the oldest, and the only girl.  So naturally, she had to quit school to babysit while my grandmother went to work.  She was uneducated and unskilled.  But those circumstances didn't stop people of that generation.  She would clean houses, do wallpaper (I remember her staying up most of the night to make wallpaper paste), do ironings and anything else she could do to make a living for her kids.  She finally got a good job.  She was the first school cook that was ever hired by the county.  She fed an entire school, grades 1-8 with commodities.  This woman could literally make something wonderful out of nothing.

That said, one of my sweetest memories of her was when she would make popcorn balls with me.  I think that's my favorite food memory.  She had quite a few grandchildren by this time (I was her favorite   )  so, she would pop a dishpan full of popcorn, and let me make the marshmallow "paste" that we used to stick it all together.  There were no miniature marshmallows or marshmallow cream back then, so I would take a stick of butter and exactly 12 large marshmallows.  Melt those very very slowly on a wood burning cook stove, and add it to the popcorn.  At Christmas time, she would add red or green food coloring.  This recipe and her snow cream is very firmly ingrained in my memory.