Grandma's Popcorn Balls

I recently had the pleasure of re-connecting with a childhood friend.  No matter how many years pass, Peg and I always have lots to say to each other.  In our conversation, she mention how fondly she remembers coming to our home because "your mom always was doing something fun, like making popcorn balls."  This surprised me - because, honestly, never had thought of my mom as "fun".  But I had already planned on writing a post on Popcorn.

I am a huge fan of Popcorn.  The family story, from my mom, popcorn bribery is how they got me to walk at one year old.  When my brothers and I were cleaning out my mom's home after she had moved into a retirement home, we found the following:

These items universally brought huge smiles to all our faces.  The pot, according to my oldest brother, started life as a stove top pressure cooker.  But our memory of it is as a the popcorn maker.  A lid that didn't fit well - so we used a paper towel between the lid and pot - the towel served to soak up the oil and also allowed the lid to fit a little tighter.  The big colorful bowl was filled with butter (actually margarine) topped popcorn.

So in this age of making popcorn in a bag ... it is quite easy to make popcorn without the bag.  You pour oil in the bottom of a pan.  The oil should cover the bottom.  You turn the burner on high, and drop a popcorn kernel or two in the oil.  You wait until one of those kernels "pop" and then you pour a 1/2 cup of popcorn into the pot. Quickly add the paper towel and lid, and start shaking the pot.  Moving the pot back and forth across the burner makes sure you don't burn any popcorn.  In the age before microwaves, you also were melting butter in a small sauce pan.

During the 1950s and 1960's our family lived on one of the "main" streets in our neighborhood. We lived less than a block from the elementary school.  Halloween was BUSY at our house.  My mom ALWAYS made popcorn balls for the trick or treaters.  I don't have any idea how many she had to make.  But it was a bunch.  And we all helped. I remember the hot sticky goo being poured over the freshly popped popcorn, and how hard it was to mix it all together.  We would wrap the hot gooey popcorn in waxed paper. We stopped handing it out to everyone in the 1970s when homemade candy became a no no.  But we still made it for friends that would stop by for the special treat.  I remember as a teenager, my friends would come over just to get the popcorn balls.

The recipe actually came from my grandmother. I include the following page from one of her diaries (For the day Dec. 23rd from the years 1957 - 1961)  On Dec. 23rd of 1959, she writes "made popcorn balls and ironed"

Here is Grandma Greenley's recipe from my mom's recipe book: