Peanut Brittle
Haynes Gass, 1943-1994
When I think of Haynes, a lot of memories and images come to mind, but the one that stands out for some reason is peanut brittle. Most of you have probably made peanut brittle: the recipe sounds simple enough: sugar, corn syrup, water; cook it till it's done; add some butter and soda and nuts; break it up when cool. It sounds simple enough; unless you try to make 150 pounds of the stuff as a fund raiser. Which we did. Once.
Before we launched into this major effort we were smart enough to make a sample batch as a test; we just weren't smart enough to take warning from the test results. I was cooking the sample batch in wife's upstairs kitchen. I poured the wet ingredients in the pot, found the sack of sugar in the cabinet and added it and cranked up the heat and began to stir. Forty-five minutes later I was still cranking and stirring. The sugar hadn't even dissolved. When I finally looked to see what type of indestructible sugar I was using I learned that you could also buy salt in a five pound bag. I never knew that salt came in anything except shakers and blue tubes.
Since the Gass' liked to only go shopping once a month they naturally looked for larger than usual quantities. That shows you two things about Haynes: he wasn't afraid to do things differently or even downright unusual. Everybody else I knew went to the store once a week -- usually on Tuesdays because that used to be double-stamp day at Winn-Dixie; but not Haynes. He found a way that he liked and that worked for him and that's what he stuck with, no matter what anybody else did. Whether it was shopping or spelling or moving his electric meter indoors or putting his faith and beliefs in action; he always did things the way he believed to be best whether anyone else did or not. You could learn a lot about standing by your word and your convictions from staying around Haynes.
Another thing I learned from that mess was that you've got to have the right stuff for things to turn our right. I could have stirred and cooked the rest of the night and never had candy. It didn't matter that on the outside the bag looked like sugar -- what matters was what was on the inside, whether it's a bag or a person. You can't make peanut brittle with two cups of salt, even though to the unsuspecting salt looks a lot like sugar; and you can't make a real person--a youth leader, a Sunday School teacher, a church leader, a father, a husband--if you don't have the right stuff on the inside. And Haynes did. No matter what problems or trials or aggravations came along he could handle because what was on the inside was the same thing he wore on his label. When he was put to the test, his sugar never turned out to be salt.
Even though we'd had a foreboding of how the project might turn out we decided to proceed and bout massive quantities of peanuts and other ingredients. There were a lot of misgivings about this project; I think it had originally been my idea, but Haynes went along with it because we were his kids and whatever we wanted to do was fine with him.
Things actually went rather well, especially considering that none of us had ever been candy butchers before. We'd established a rather efficient assembly-line operation. The only flaw in our set-up was that when we set the trays of brittle to cool to cooled pans were next to the freshly poured and exceedingly hot ones. The two look a lot alike. The only way to test them is to poke them with something and see if the brittle envelops it. Using your fingers will work but isn't recommended. Haynes used four of his on a batch just off the stove. We assumed that it was still hot by the way his fingers sunk to the bottom of the pan and by the way he screamed out and ran to the bathroom. The four blisters he showed us when he returned confirmed our suspicions. He could laugh about it a year or two later but at the time he took a somewhat more serious view of the matter.
How would any of us have reacted? If there were ever an occasion that seemed to call out for anger and cussing and knocking over hot peanut brittle pans and in general taking a bad fit; then sticking your hand to the bottom of a steaming hot pan of melted 290 degree sugar would seem to be it. But Haynes didn't. He never forgot all the young eyes watching him, looking up to him. We were always in his thoughts and in his prayers and he helped build us just like the playhouse and the log home - not cabin. He remains in us just like he remains in the things he built. He helped grow us and cultivate us like the potato patch he planted and tilled and irrigated and looked after every year, not for himself or his benefit but for ours. I wish I could better remember the young eyes that watch me and the young minds and hearts that need building up and growing well when I face my own hot pans and blisters.
Injuries not withstanding, we finally finished our peanut brittle project. We'd underestimated and time required by three or four hours and the cleanup time by three or four weeks. One of the few things harder to clean up than granulated sugar is sticky sugar, and we had plenty of both. Patricia didn't think the floor would ever be clean. You'll have to ask Eddie or Tammie if it still crunches when you walk on it.
Of course the late time didn't matter too much to Haynes because whatever he had he gave freely. Time, energy, money, all these things only matter to him because they were things he could share with others. If we wanted to stay up half the night messing up his kitchen and eating nachos or watching movies; or if we wanted to go to Carowinds, King's Islands, Six Flags, or Opryland and drag him around until he took a nap on the sidewalk using the curb as his pillow; or is we wanted to grow an acre of potatoes or cook 200 pounds of beans; whatever it was he was willing to give and give without hesitation or complaint. Those of us who are often content to limit our participation in church projects to criticism of the activity and participants should remember the example of a person who thought the only worthwhile things were the ones he could share and give away.
And those of us who find trouble where our wallets and checkbooks open should remember a man who gave so generously that he was audited by a skeptical IRS that had trouble believing that he'd actually contributed as much as he claimed. The audit did indeed find an error. The found an extra donation that he'd forgotten to add in.
We didn't make much money with our peanut brittle and we never tried it again, but we had a good time. We usually did. Haynes believed in having a good time -- whether it was burning his fingers or sawing his foot in half or sleeping in flooded tents or selling doughnuts or driving to middle Tennessee in an old bus with a doberman in tow or rolling Cedric downhill in a barrel with a dead cat or getting stranded on the interstate in Kentucky -- he enjoyed himself. It was part of his faith; he said that his definition of being a Christian was being as content as Elsie the cow. He also said that he'd be the happiest person at his funeral, and I'm sure he was.
I felt pretty bad and sad and depressed when I started this the morning after he died, but the further along I got the better I seemed to feel and the day seemed brighter and a little happier and more hopeful. This must have been something Haynes reminded me of again. Something he wanted me to learn one day when we made peanut brittle.
