Failed Divinity
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
The weather has turned colder. The clouds paint the sky a permanent cotton white. Branches of evergreen and shiny red balls decorate the streets and shop windows. Glitter-covered reindeer and Santas abound. Christmas is coming and I have a hankering for divinity.
Perhaps it’s just a tactile association brought on by the crispness of the air and the cool florescent white of a November sun. Or perhaps it’s a smidgeon of homesickness for Mississippi. Whatever has triggered this craving has triggered it bad. So bad that I dug into my secret and well-guarded supply of Karo syrup to try out a recipe I found in James Villas’ The Glory of Southern Cooking.
As seen in the photo above, my attempt to create divinity failed. The taste was yummy, but the texture turned out all wrong. It came out sticky and gooey when it should have become solid, soft and almost powdery. It should have looked more like this photo from the Savannah Sweet’s website.
An interesting note about the flavor and ingredients: I noticed the divinity glop tasted like something between nougat and marshmallow. When I did my research to see how nougat and marshmallows are made, I surprisingly found they are all from the exact same ingredients: beaten egg whites, corn syrup / honey, sugar and water. No wonder.
The autopsy report? Apparently, achieving divinity requires patience. Maybe it even requires a better recipe. [Sorry Mr. Villas.] It definitely requires a candy thermometer. I think these are the things that went wrong:
- Beating the egg whites first and setting them aside allowed them to return to their liquid state. It would have been better to boil the syrup first and then beat the egg whites later, just before they were needed.
- Other recipes for divinity use half as much liquid ingredients: 1/2 cup corn syrup + 1/2 cup of water as opposed to 1 cup corn syrup + 1 cup of water.
- There might have been errors when guessing the “string stage” of boiling the sugar syrup. A candy thermometer would have been a much better guage. I was so scared of getting to the caramel point that perhaps I stopped too early allowing the water content of the syrup to remain too high.
- Later I read in another recipe you should beat the divinity mixture until it loses its glossy texture. This is the step in which we should have been more patient and had more faith. We probably should have had a stronger mixer, too.
A guilty pleasure and random musing: Matthias and I have been watching the first season of Heroes on DVD. Daniela let us borrow her box set. After spending the morning trying out the divinity recipe, we couldn’t just throw away the batch. We poured it into a tray and put it in the fridge. All day Sunday, we watched Heroes, spooning divinity into our mouths for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The funniest part was looking at the tray one hour after eating from it for breakfast. The parts we had scraped out had been filled in again and it looked like we had never touched it. We couldn’t help but exclaim: “The divinity — it’s like Claire, the cheerleader; it’s self-healing!”
It’s a sad thing to confess, but I am definitely addicted to sugar.I walked to Ralph’s grocery store, less than a block away from Jacqui’s apartment, to get a hot black tea with steamed soy milk. I didn’t have to walk over to the bakery, but I did: I was curious if the Halloween cupcakes had gone on sale yet, and they had!I ate one cupcake at the coffeeshop, ate another cupcake when I got home half an hour later, ate a third cupcake another half hour later and not long after that realized I had gobbled down 8 of the 12 cupcakes in the batch. So much for the diet. :-(So, I’ve been reading up on “sugar addiction” and what I need to do to kick the habit. I quit smoking cigarettes 2 years ago, so I should be able to give up sugar, somehow. One article I read said sugar is more difficult to give up than cigarettes. We’ll see.
Even though I’m back on the South Beach Diet, I still love food and plan to have fun in the kitchen.A recipe that could be added to Agatson’s South Beach Diet cook books is grilled eggplant. I’ve always been in awe of the color of eggplants. Their skin is gorgeously black and shiny. But I could never bring myself to eat eggplant. Each time I tried, I was turned off by its slimy texture. However, I’ve discovered this summer if the eggplant is sliced thinly enough, grilling them makes them crispy on the outside and yummy! A technique I learned is to salt the slices and place them in a colander for at least 30 minutes. The salt draws the water out of the eggplant and intensifies its flavor. Just remember to wash the salt from the eggplant before grilling them. Brush them with olive oil and spice them with freshly ground black pepper and throw them on the grill! It’s too bad eggplant season is nearly over here in Germany. The recipe is great for Grill Partys and BBQs. 
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