The Craving

It was too late to call—10pm in Los Angeles and midnight in Sugar Run. Mom went to bed reliably at nine.

Google would know, Claudia consoled herself. She typed “fudge recipe” into the little white box and scrolled through too many microwaved chocolate chip recipes before typing “fudge that you make with a candy thermometer.” This was better. Condensed milk sounded familiar, but the more she read, the more Claudia doubted her own memory. Condensed milk or evaporated? Had it been sugar and cocoa powder, or some baker’s chocolate? There were a hundred variations.

She was pretty sure that there was vanilla extract (that, she knew, was her family’s power ingredient), and she was certain that all of these variables would matter when it came to getting the exact flavor and consistency she craved—something you could hold in your mouth savor as it slowly melted away. Like a good memory. The supple kind of fudge that wrinkled and cracked like leather. If she could lose herself in a mouthful, maybe it would smooth over the terrible week.

She tried to concentrate: Grandma Nora’s kitchen. Yellow linoleum, dark brown cabinets with old brass knobs in the shapes of flowers. Claudia had usually been there when Grandma made her fudge. With the cousins, decorating felt ornaments with puff paints, out of the way. Now she tried to reverse-engineer the smells. Butter. Vanilla.

By the time she was old enough to actually help, Claudia had found other interests—speech tournaments, volunteer projects, study groups. In the back of her mind, maybe Claudia had always thought there’d be more time.

Grandma Nora had stopped cooking after the stroke. Mom tried the fudge for a while, but lost momentum after a few years, after the cousins stopped gathering together for Christmas. After it turned out that Grandma was the sugar or condensed milk or whatever it was that held everyone together.

Claudia tried to remember. It was a family recipe—the kind that should never need to be written down. It was written in their mitochondrial DNA, Claudia suspected—the pieces of molecular coding passed unaltered from mother to daughter every generation. Moms and grandmas and daughters had been making this fudge since at least the 1800s, probably on temperamental stoves fueled by wood or coal.

“I remember when my Grandma Ira would make this fudge…” Grandma Nora would say sometimes, her brown eyes sucking up all of the light in the room and spinning it into something that sparkled in her mind.

Claudia pictured them, a chain of women living close together, gathering in dowdy blue-checkered kitchens, around wood block counters and formica-topped bars to make fudge and rum cakes and fingerprint cookies. And here she was, two time zones away, Googling recipes. Asking a computer.

Claudia had always considered herself a mold breaker, and had always considered that a good thing. Now, standing alone in her kitchen with cream-colored porcelain tile floor and sleek bar pulls on the cherry cabinets, she just felt broken. She was going to be the one to break this tradition.

Mom would remember. She could call in the morning. But the craving was so deep and immediate that the thought of waiting barely passed through Claudia’s mind. That need consumed her as she rifled through her walk-in pantry. Sugar. Cocoa powder. Vanilla.

She had learned to cook, but always new recipes, her own discoveries. Claudia recalled her dad’s perplexed eyebrows at Thanksgiving. “Why would you want to put apples in the stuffing?”

Why not? To be different. To take things up a notch. Back last month, when being different didn’t quite mean being separate. Now the stakes had changed, and all Claudia wanted was a family recipe.