Tackling a sticky subject
The stickiest object on the planet is the business end of a branch used in the making of s’mores. We have two such objects in our side yard – sticks that first held the marshmallows we roasted over the fire but now have summer-yard things clinging to them: grass, dirt and bugs.
Our yard had a tired little fire pit when we bought the place, just a rusting cauldron with a few plastic chairs facing it. Last month the farmer made it official, leveling the spot and laying stones in a wide circle with a bricked hole in the center for the fire.
That first night it was finished, we bought graham crackers and marshmallows and chocolate bars. The farmer headed off into the woods to find sticks that were long enough and skinny enough for the job.
There’s a right way to roast a marshmallow, and it involves burning the outside to a black crisp, but not keeping it in the flame long enough to burn the insides. My method is to catch the whole thing on fire so that the marshmallow is engulfed for a good ten seconds. You then use two squares of graham cracker to grasp and pull the charred marshmallow off of the stick. After that, it’s just a matter of sliding the piece of chocolate inside the sandwich and giving it a squeeze so the marshmallow oozes out of the sides.
That was the first s’more I’ve had in at least 10 years, the last one being at Scout camp with my daughter. We took about a dozen girls to a camp north of Pittsburgh for a few days of hiking and swimming. I don’t remember much about the trip except for the last night around the campfire, when I taught the girls the song about Old Mrs. Leary’s cow starting the fire. The song seemed appropriate since we were sitting around a fire, and also, it was the only campfire song I knew all the way through.
Some of the little girls rejected my scorched-marshmallow approach to making s’mores; some barely left their marshmallows in the fire long enough to brown them and some left them in so long that they liquified and dropped into the flames. Each girl was allowed just one s’more, and that phrase right there is an oxymoron.
Back at home around our fire pit, the farmer handed me a second marshmallow, but one s’more was all I could do. Those things are so sweet they make your teeth hurt. Done correctly, the chocolate bar remains mostly solid, so when you take a bite, you are feeling the layers of crispy and then gooey and then firm and then crispy again. It’s impossible not to get the marshmallow on your chin and your hands. But the lightning bugs have come out and you’re enjoying their show, and you don’t really want to walk back into the house to wash up, and so your sticky hands and chin attract dirt and grass, which you discover when you finally go inside for the night.
My niece was with us last weekend. As we walked around the neighborhood on Sunday, I saw a long, skinny stick on the sidewalk.
“A perfect s’more stick,” I said as I picked it up. It rained that night, so we couldn’t have a fire or s’mores. I put the stick by the fire pit with the others we’d used, for next time.
Both of them had bits of grass and dirt stuck to the sticky ends where the marshmallow had been. One of them had a lightning bug.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.