S'mores of Yore
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| Don't burn your fingers in the painted orange flame. |
S’mores once required a conflagration of some sort, either in a fireplace or out-of-doors. Here’s how a child’s introduction to the making of this sweet treat might have gone in the old days:
A demolitions expert, who works for the Army Corps of Engineers and plays with dynamite for a living, leads a jeep brigade to the gravel bar of a remote Ozark stream one moonlit night, with the promise that "Kids, you're about to learn the single most effective way to make a campfire." The adults have crammed into the front of the rusty open vehicles, while the children ride in the back, the lucky ones standing up and holding onto roll bars, the unluckier clutching the bouncing sides as their shins get banged by heavy metal beer coolers and lawn chairs. Mist rises through the bottomland fields, white and weed-scented, while the whippoorwills quit their whipping, disquieted by the passing roar.
At water's edge, youth is dispatched to gather flood flotsam along the dark banks, with admonitions not to grab a cottonmouth by mistake. The men unload the coolers, and one woman carries a paper bag full graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars.
Soon sticks, branches, and tree trunks in various stages of rottenness are piled onto the rocks. "Forget the Boy Scouts,” states the Expert, and picks up a gallon of gasoline. All hang back as he pours a 20 foot wick of the fuel, then douses the pyre with the rest of the can. Returning to where he first began pouring, he lights a Strike Anywhere match off the back of his jeans, and sets its blaze to the end of the fuse. Blue flames snake across the chert, seeking deadwood. A ball of orange fury erupts. The children laugh and scream.
When the inferno turns into a fire, the men hunker into their lawn chairs and beer, while the woman with the bag attempts to teach the art of s'more making to what is clearly the wrong room. The chocolate is devoured, unmelted, within moments, and a trail of discarded graham crackers sprawls soggily across the damp gravel. A few of the youngest children leap around with marshmallow torches, while the older ones are busy beyond the circle of firelight, striking matches on the back of their jeans and inhaling the subsequent hits of sulfur.
Nowadays there is an alternative to that sort of hazardous behavior, which could never happen on the safety of your own kitchen counter. This week’s featured piece of cooking clutter, a handy campfire-shaped s’more maker, serves as a wholesome, low-carbon substitute for just such authentic experience, and is therefore ranked in the very highest echelon of kitchen gadgetry. So why was it discarded? A quick plug test revealed that it was still fully functional.
Probably because starting fires with gasoline and a box of Strike Anywheres will always be more fun than sticking the prongs of an electrical cord into a grounded outlet.