¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks, plus all sorts of cookbooks for celebrities, but we can't really talk about those because of confidentiality agreements, except for, uh, all of them.
Dr. Phil, but other ones we can't talk about, uh, and we've also been contributing editors and columnists for all the big food magazines back in the day, as you probably know, but this is our podcast about food and cooking, the major passion in our life. We've got a one minute cooking tip about what to do in the holidays when you're in the kitchen and you have other people around. We're going to go down a memory hole. Is that what you call it? Into A black pit. Yeah, into candy land.
And talk about candy from our youth since it is the holidays and the time of year when people do indeed eat candy. And we'll tell you Just this time of year. Just this time of year. And we'll talk about what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.
¶ Our one-minute cooking tip: serve appetizers to keep people out of the kitchen.
Our One Minute Cooking Tips. Serve appetizers. Now,
it seems
easy, right?
You're talking about when you have people in the house. Yeah, when you have people
Oh, no, when you're sitting alone watching TV, serve yourself appetizers. Did
you qualify it when you said serve appetizers? Go on, yes. Okay, so most
people think you put out pre dinner snacks so that people aren't drinking without eating. eating something or they think it's to whet the appetite. That's not the most important part of it. The most important part of appetizers is it keeps your guests busy and in another room and out of your hair while you're in the kitchen finishing up last minute things.
Now, I want to say this bit about keeps your guests in another room. That is your obsession and that is written large in your obsession. That is not everyone's obsession.
I don't want anyone in the kitchen with me. That's you.
Right. A lot of people would put out appetizers on the kitchen counter and have people stand around because that makes them feel good about people being around the kitchen and they're not alone. Bruce has a big thing about no one is allowed in the kitchen with him. Oh, get out
of my kitchen and don't try and help
me. See? See? Do not try and help me or you might have finger cut off and that happened once. Okay, so, um, but still, it is, if you're rushing around, finishing off holiday dinners of any sort, or dinners for people of any sort, it is good to have appetizers, even if you have them in the kitchen, and you're not like Bruce and you want to banish everyone to the living room, even if you want to have And believe
it or not, we live in an open concept house, so even in the living room I get to see them.
Okay. Let me just finish my point. Put out appetizers to keep people busy. You know what? I someday I'll finish my whole point. So that is
that day.
Yeah. I don't know. I didn't do it just then. So I don't know. Um, before we get to the next part of this podcast, let me say that it would be great if you could subscribe to this podcast and if you could rate it or like it on any platform, even get a rating like nice podcast that really helps with the analytics. And as you know, we have chosen to be unsubscribed. So you're doing that
¶ Our holiday candy memories! Divinity to toffee, cut candy to French nougat. And listen to Mark make a mistake! Divinity is made with corn syrup, not corn starch!
is the way that you can support us. Otherwise, let's get to the main part of this podcast episode, which is a memory lane trek into Candyland. I guess my first real memory of candy at the winter holidays is my great aunt, Ruth's divinity. If you don't know about divinity, I didn't know
what it was
when we met, you didn't know it at all what it was. Divinity is a, I think, mostly a treat from the southern part of the United States where I'm from. That's my guess, right? It's a very It's an airy, white candy, it doesn't have to have nuts in it, but my great aunt's always had peanuts in it. And isn't
it an egg white, meringue based, but it's not light and crunchy. And corn syrup y. It's a thick and chewy Well, corn syrup. Yeah. Into beaten egg whites. I think it's almost like a nougat in a way, but it's not as
fancy. No, don't go, don't go crazy. It's not a nougat. It's really, I have to say that I loved it as a kid, my great aunt. Always made divinity for the Christmas holidays, Christmas in our house. And, uh, I had it recently as an adult and wow, is it sweet. You might as well just get a glucose
bag
that they use in hospitals and suck on it. Whoa. It's so sweet. Some people put crushed up peppermint in it. Some people just eat it on its own, which is just really, it's ridiculous. With a shot of insulin. It's, it's very sticky. Um, but it's moundable. All you see. find it in kind of mounds. Some people get fancy and shape them out. My great aunt just always made little spooned mounds of it on a tray. And then it does dry out over time.
So you have to keep it covered so it doesn't get a crust on it, which you don't want. That's divinity. I can tell you another before Bruce gets to his stuff. Another memory of candy in my childhood is fudge. And my mother didn't make real fudge. If you know, fudge is a laborious process to make. It's difficult. It's temperature controlled. It's a hard candy actually to make. We wrote a candy book years ago, the ultimate candy book.
And I will say, That fudge was one of the candies that Bruce kind of ran away from at first, because it's
tough. Well, you have to cook the chocolate mixture to a certain temperature, then you have to cool it to a certain temperature, and there's a very small window that temperature is before you beat it. And you have to stop, beating it before it totally crystallizes, it's really one of those. It's an
edge candy, and humidity is its enemy. Well, it's the enemy of divinity too. Anyway, my mom never made fudge like that. My mom made the cheap shortcut microwave fudge. With margarine? Marshmallow fluff? I think she used butter. Butter, right? And she did melt chocolate chips, and then I can't remember what goes into it after that. But it was all made in the microwave. It's much denser than real fudge, because it's not whipped. So it has this very dense, like, almost watery texture.
bark like quality to it. We called it fudge. What do I know? Uh, and my mom would make it and she would make one batch without any nuts. It's all pecans in my family. We're from the south. Um, one but without any nuts and then one batch with nuts because my dad didn't like not candy or picky cakes. My dad didn't like nuts. He likes picky eater. Does he like nuts on their own salted, but he didn't like them in any candy or cake or anything like that.
He didn't like pecan pie, all that kind of stuff. So those are two of my big candy memories from childhood divinity and, and shortcut microwave fudge.
My childhood candy memories go back, I think, to as soon as I could start eating. Cause when Mark met me, my favorite food group was candy. It's true. I don't know why every
tooth in your mouth is drilled and implanted and crowned. I have no idea.
Anyway, go on. In fact, even as a child, I would hide candy under my bed. My box spring had a zipped cover on it, and I would hide candy in there and I Eat candy at night. And, oh, I was, this is how, you know, I'm a Protestant. I would hide money in
there. So that's how, you know, I was raised in a Protestant
house. Do go on there. Candy. No, it was all about candy. And unlike Mark's divinity, we had something, I don't know that he knew about. No, I didn't. When I was growing up. No. One of the things that I always remember from childhood was halva. And it was something Mark probably never heard of. It was sort of like our divinity. No way. And it's. A Middle Eastern sweet, and it is made from sesame, and so it's sesame paste with sugar, and it's cooked, and it's, you know, almost a fudge texture.
There's different textures to java, right? There are people who make it, it's almost cracky, and it's, it's harder. Depends how long you cook it,
yeah. Uh, some people make it more chewier. It can be chewy, it can be creamy. But it comes like in wheels of cheese in the store and they cut it and weigh it and you can get it with nuts you can get a plane you can get it marbled with chocolate and I loved Halva and what I didn't love my grandparents on both sides always had black tins of Barton's you Almond kisses, and I just, I don't know what are Barton's almond kisses.
I think they were chocolate covered almonds wrapped in the individual pieces of cellophane or maybe they were almonds. Oh, so this is so at Hanukkah, you don't have to have the Christmas
chocolate
Hershey kisses. But they had Barton's all year round. Now at Hanukkah, we had Plastic dreidels filled with gelt, which is money, which was chocolate coins, and it was always the worst chocolate imaginable. In fact, my guess is there wasn't enough cocoa solids to even call them chocolate, which is why they just called it Hanukkah gelt and not chocolate gelt. Okay, so Did you have the first Fruit slices, because always at the holidays we had those jellied fruit slices too.
And I didn't like the white ring at the bottom, and I only liked the middle. So I would take a bite out of the middle and leave the rind. No, I'd throw them away because my grandmother would be furious if she knew that I was eating No, we didn't have that. What
we had is two.
Cut candy, and a lot of people don't know what cut candy is, it's the rolled candy, well they make it, and roll it into long, thin, narrow tubes, and there's always a little design in the center of it, it's hard candy, it's sometimes got a poinsettia, or a flower, or a Christmas tree, or stuff like that in the center, and if you know cut Candy, you know that it's put out at Christmas and by New Year's, it's become one solid lump that you have to chip out of the candy dish because it all sticks
together in the humidity and in the changing temperatures in the house. And then it just becomes this giant wad of sugar. occur in little tube forms that you're chipping out with a knife or a fork. Don't break the candy dish. I can still hear them. One of the things I remember from childhood that my grandmother would make, and I wanted to like because they all liked it and I didn't like it, is something that I think that most people don't even know what it is anymore and that's I still
don't know what it is. We've been together 28 years and I still don't know it. You made it for the candy book. Yeah, because I bought whorehound flavoring. Well, that's how you do it. I know, but I still don't know what it tastes like. Well, it's
a whorehound candy. It's really from the 19th century and my grandpa What flavor is whorehound? That sounds really horrible. I know,
it sounds like a I don't know.
It's not W H O R E. It's H O R E. Horehand. Um, it's a medicinal flavor. And it has a very, um, Medicinally, if you like bitters like, uh, Amaro's, you might like Horhound. It's that old world bitter flavor in candy. Very, like, gentian, and, uh, you got flavors that are, like, down at the bottom of gin. It's all sitting down there in Whorehound, I think in the original days, let's say, back in the day, even before my grandmother's, we're talking the 19th century, it was considered medicinal.
Probably a cough
drop,
yeah. Yeah, suck on a Whorehound candy and clear up your sore throat.
Cough drops, that was from childhood too, I would bring that. boxes and boxes of the Pine Brothers cough drops, where those were the sort of semi hard ones, and I would eat them all day long. Didn't you get in trouble at school for eating too many cough drops? The only time
I got sent to detention is I had a box of Luden's cough drops, and I was I was eating them in class one after the other and then passing them around to friends around me and I got in trouble over it. It was a whole thing. I love that you got in trouble because of cough drops. Passing them around. I think one of my favorite, uh, candy memories from the holidays is when we lived in Manhattan.
And we would walk from our apartment in Chelsea down to Greenwich Village because we sang with the nation's favorite band. First, Gay and Lesbian Chorale, in fact, I was president of the board of that chorale, and we sang with them. So, we would walk down to Greenwich Village, and we rehearsed at the village school down there, uh, on, I don't remember, Tuesday nights or something like that. It's been a while. It's been, what, 18 years since we lived in the city? A long time. In, in the city.
If you're not from New York, you don't know the phrase, but New Yorkers call New York City the city. So anyway, we, we would walk down to Greenwich Village in the city and we would pass this British sweet shop that opened up. And it's the first time we came across boiled sweets, which are British hard candies. And Bruce fell in love with the rhubarb and custard boiled sweets.
Rhubarb and custard and the Cola cubes. They had no flavor like cola, but they were this little square, hard sugar coated sour candy with a chewy, chewy, hard, sticky filling in the, oh gosh, the lime and chocolates. What a terrible combination. The Brits had, but I bought them anyway. Some of those boiled sweets were really interesting and some were really disgusting, but I was just I was just enthralled by boiled sweets.
You didn't get sent to detention during choral rehearsal for eating boiled sweets. And before Mark moved in with me in New York, uh, down the street from us, and I think it was still there when he moved in, was the Williams Sonoma Outlet Center. Yep. Back when it was the only outlet center they had, back when an outlet center really was where all the stores sent their unsold merchandise, not like the premium outlet centers now. And their returns.
Yep. And legitimately all the returns.
And I would go in. Every other day because it was across the street from the apartment and wander down these aisles to see what was there and One day I was in there in the fall and they had these heavy metal candy molds these lollipop molds And I had never thought about making lollipops, but I bought some
yeah,
and then the next year bought some more And some more. And we still have a dozen of these, you know, like 20 pounds each. They're
unbelievably heavy. And you, you clip them together with clips. So there are two sides. Let's say, imagine a Santa face, a back and a front. And you clip them all together on both sides. And then you pour the hot sugar syrup through a little tiny opening. opening at the top of the mold, and it, of course, forms and hardens inside the mold. You have to grease it, right? You have to do something. I always
put a little oil. They said you didn't need to, but I always did. We found they shattered if you didn't. And then as it hardens, before it gets too hard, you stick a lollipop stick through that hole. So you have a stick shoved into Santa's head, or into Rudolph, or into a nutcracker, or whatever. We used to make these. Mm hmm. Christmas lollipops. Every year, we would
make them. We would make tons of them. It was my job to stick the sticks in them. That's what Bruce would allow me to do. And then, we would wrap each one in an individual plastic bag, this lollipop, just then, with the stick sticking out of the bag, and tie each one, we were crazy, with ribbon, close, so we would have hundreds of these to give away to our families and friends at the holidays. I remember, here's how it was.
Here's a memory from my childhood, and it was the wonder at the holidays at the winter holidays of chocolate covered cherries, and they were the biggest deal because you didn't. I don't know. I mean, maybe they were around, but we didn't eat them at any other time except at Christmas. And they were those chocolate covered, glossy cherries with the white fondant stem without the stem. No stem, which has meant the fondant has melted into that creamy white stuff in the bottom of them.
And we, I don't know, we thought that chocolate covered cherries, they were such a big deal that people gave them as Christmas gifts in my family, a box of them.
They're still expensive. If you go online, you can find places like Lilac, chocolate in New York City, and their chocolate covered cherries have the stem, and then you bite in and all that gooey liquid comes out, and
they're
really fabulous. One of the things that I remember about the holidays was something that happened later in life, once Mark and I were together, I mean, I hadn't been off the island of Manhattan in years, and he moved in with me, and he said, you're getting off the island, and not just to go to the Hamptons. So he shoved me on a plane and took me to Paris for my first birthday. I had never, I could not live with a man who had not been to Paris. It just was, it was impossible to even imagine.
So it was my first birthday together with him. We went to Paris and we walked by a sweet shop and it was a chocolate shop, but also a candy shop. Now you have to understand this is Thanksgiving. So Paris is getting ready for the holiday season. It's all getting decorated for Christmas. And these windows of these shops were just beautiful. Beautiful. And they had piles and bowls of glistening pate de fouille, which are just like French
chuckles. Can I add to the story right now? You insisted they were called pate de fouille, and I kept saying it's pate de fouille, and you just wouldn't listen to me. So you went in and ordered pate de fouille. I think they probably smeared liver on yours or something, some kind of liver mousse.
And if you don't know what it is, They're kind of like chuckles, those little, those little, Yes, they're like chuckles. Chewy candy squares. Yes, exactly like that. But these are made with real fruit, and they came in flavors that who, back then, had heard of before. black currents and red currents and chestnuts. I mean, I hadn't. And so I would go and I memorized in the hotel, Mark said, and you have to go back and you have to say, you know, just sweet, desolate to voodoo.
I'm so sorry to disturb you. And the only way you will get, you can just say that's a little
bit at this point to say that's the light. No. No, I've seen it on tv. No way. De because it's important to be polite enough not, and by the way, you have to precede de It's, it's just the way you get seen in Fon. Oh yes,
which is where we were at Fauchon, and I asked for my 24 morceaux de pâte à fruits, and then I had to try and name all the flavors I wanted, and we went back to our hotel, and I thought I was going to bring these 24 pieces home. We ate All of them. We, we, such
a big word in that sentence. We ate all of them. Go on. I had to
buy more to bring home. Paris was just magical for sweets and candies. It still next trip to Paris, at the same time of year, I discovered nougat. And the only thing I No, you didn't discover nougat. Well, I You discovered nougat. Yes, well, I knew nougat from like a Three Musketeers bar. Right. This is nougat. This is a
whole different category of sweet.
Oh, God. And it is also made from egg whites, and it is almost like Tirone, if you know Italian. Divinity, which is
the worst thing I've ever said, but go on.
But nougat is, Delicious, and chewy, and not as sweet, and full of chocolate, and nuts,
and And they jammed them full of chocolate bars, and dried fruit, and And we found a store that only had nougat. If you don't know about this, it often comes in a domed shape. shaped, uh, carrot, what's, pedestal, it's on a pedestal under a dome. It's shaped like an upside down bowl and they cut it like wedges of a cake or a bum. And uh, you can get it in dozens of different flavor combinations.
Oh, I walked into a shop one day and I just said to the woman, je peux vendre du nougat? And she took a step back. Yeah, we take a step back too. Because basically what I That is, I have need of nougat. Oh, I take a step back, too. And I fell in love with it so much that I started making it at home. And that store was Rennes Astride. Oh, Rennes Astride.
I don't even think that
place exists anymore. Oh, they have the best nougat in Paris. So we came home and I started making nougat. And I decided that rather than doing it in a dome, I did this really cool thing. I got sheets of dried pomegranate leather, like apricot leather, but I did with pomegranate. I bought it in a Middle Eastern store and I spread the hot nougat all over.
On top of the pomegranate and put another piece on top of that when it cooled I cut that into squares and we wrapped each one And I did the nicest thing for somebody we had friends who owned a restaurant and they were getting married and they were going to They were going to poland for the wedding And I brought them A shopping bag with 200 pieces of this delicious pomegranate enrobed nougat for them to give out as wedding favors. Yeah, that was
crazy. May I say, I was part of that. I was the wrapper. You were the
wrapper. Of all of those
pieces of pomegranate, uh, covered nougat. And your nougat was not as crazy as the stuff you can get in Paris. It didn't have the No. You know, I don't know what marsh called chocolate covered marshmallows and all the billions of nodes, everything into their new gun. They do. It's insane. And of course, lace it with honey. It's all a wild extravaganza of Parisian sweets. So there's a trip down memory lane for candies and sweets, referencing the holidays ahead of us that are happening.
In fact, right now, we want to hope. That you have a sweet holiday season, too. And that you have fond memories of candy, even though probably most of us don't eat it so much anymore. Ha ha. You know, there are fond memories we can have of these kind of foods. And I think that's one of the most basic and wonderful things about cooking and food, is that it connects so deeply to our sense memories, all the way back to Proust and his Madeleine.
But beyond that, to all of us, we're We connect deeply to these things from our childhood, and I hope that you can connect deeply to these things from your childhood and that you can help others connect now to their futures through what you make in your kitchen. Okay, what's traditional in the last episode of our podcast?
¶ What's making us happy in food this week? Pretzels with dried cranberries & turkey rice soup!
What's making us happy in food this week?
I've graduated from eating candy like I used to, and now I eat candy. Pretzels and dried cranberries. Not that that's not like candy. Is that, is that graduating? Last night I was watching TV and I wanted something sweet and I grabbed some extra dark, I buy these extra dark burned pretzels. And I wanted something sweet with them so Mark had bought me some dried cranberries and so basically I ate Pretzels and dried cranberries. And boy, that was
a
really good treat.
And that's a good treat. And before that, as Bruce had made for dinner, one of my favorite things, which is turkey rice soup. Earlier in the week, Bruce roasted a turkey. And I want to tell you that when I moved in with Bruce, he was the only human I knew who roasted turkeys just out of the blue and not for the holidays. It's kind of an amazing thing because it really provides you dinner for dinner. Days, especially just the two of us, right? This turkey, what, how big was a 10 pound
turkey.
Okay, 10 pounds. So we've been eating on this thing for days, having salad, turkey salad, and turkey sandwiches. And we had, of course, we had a hot dinner with it, first of all. But last night, Bruce made one of my favorite things, which is turkey rice soup. And he made it in the Instant Pot. He took the carcass and all the meat. He put it in the Instant Pot with vegetables, right? And you cooked it, and then you, Undid the pressure and let it boil for, what, an hour or two to reduce?
I took everything
out of it, I reduced it, and then I pulled the meat off the carcass, I threw the meat back in, I cooked rice separately in the rice cooker with stock. I think this is
the, the key. He cooks his rice with stock separately. So the rice doesn't cook in the turkey rice soup, so the turkey rice soup isn't just a big rice ball when it's done. And I don't want all that delicious turkey stock to be lost. Right. And so, he puts the rice in just basically as he serves it. And I think that that's really key to how delicious it is. Cause the rice stays really, um, toothsome, you know, it has a really nice texture to it. And I, I just love it. The other thing
I leave on the side to put in is cartilage. I pull that out cause you like it. So when I'm pulling the meat off the carcass, I pull the cartilage.
You do. You know, all that white stuff on the top of bones and all, that's the stuff I eat. So, um, he saves me this little bowl of cartilage. I ate
halva. You ate meat. Drop
it in my soup. Wow, that's crazy. All right, so that's our podcast for this week. We do wish you a happy holidays, whatever sort of holiday you celebrate. We hope it is the best. And if you don't celebrate any holiday, we hope you make one up to knock off the winter chill this year. And that you create your own celebration in whatever way that makes you happiest.
And every week. We tell you what's making us happy in food. So go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and not only tell us what's making you happy in food this week, but share with us a few candy memories from your childhood or from any holiday or from any amazing candy you've ever had. Because I want to know about it because I think I want to try it. And then we can talk about it here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.