|
|
Feature article
|
 |
|
 |
Mama Shirley relies on candymaking instinct
By Fred Sauceman
 |
| Shirley Keith |
Shirley Keith defies the elements, never paying attention to barometric pressure, rain or humidity, yet her peanut brittle is always crackly and her cherry vanilla fudge ever smooth. She absorbed her chocolate-covered peanut brittle recipe on a trip through a Hamblen County yard sale.
I’ve been a lover of peanut brittle since childhood. My father used to cut deals with our friend Elizabeth Jackson. After hunting trips, he’d bring rabbits and squirrels to Elizabeth, who would clean them and cook them for us, in exchange for half the kill. What she made I suppose you’d call a fricassee, meat browned in flour and cooked down in a water-based gravy. Browned flour, salt and pepper were her only seasonings, but she combined them ingeniously.
When it came time to return to her house to pick up the finished fricassee, she almost always threw in a turn of her incomparable peanut brittle for me. So my attraction for it goes back a long way, and when I heard about Mama Shirley and her artistry with corn syrup and Georgia peanuts, I had to pay her a visit.
Children at Jefferson City’s Assembly of God Church took to calling her Mama Shirley, and that became part of the official name of the business she and husband Dairl created — Mama Shirley’s Old-Fashioned Candies, in Morristown.
Her peanut brittle is a rich amber color, studded with Jumbo Runner peanuts from Georgia, ordered in loads of 1,100 pounds at a time. She’s been making peanut brittle 20 years now and says she’s only thrown out two batches. In all her candy-making, she ignores weather conditions and rarely measures or times. She says the biggest mistake most people make is not cooking the brittle long enough.
Shirley’s cooking is instinctual. She said a friend asked her daughter Stephanie Brady if she had a meat thermometer to aid her in cooking some beef.
“I said to tell her friend to go down the hall, then come back to the kitchen and smell,” Shirley recalls. “You’ll know when it’s done.”
When she first started her business, Shirley didn’t think she could make it on peanut brittle alone, so she started embellishing the old-time Southern confection. Now her repertoire includes peanut brittle bark, chocolate-covered peanut brittle, brittle corn, brittle pretzels and chocolate-covered brittle pretzels.
“To make peanut brittle bark,” she instructs, “you crush peanut brittle to look like sawdust and cover it in white chocolate.”
When I called Shirley to check a couple of facts for this column, she was about to embark on a run of 90 loaves of sourdough bread. Her fully inspected kitchen, located in a separate building behind the Keiths’ house, is usually hopping from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. “At Christmas,” she adds, “we don’t even think about going home.”
Shirley has perfected tricky peanut butter pinwheels but confesses, “We still get powdered sugar all over us and the kitchen.”
Fudge, Shirley says, has almost taken over the business. She makes 23 varieties, from a basic chocolate to an exotic orange vanilla.
“If it’s in the cabinet, I’m going to try to use it in fudge. My heart has always been in candy-making.”
The Keiths’ products are sold on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at the Jefferson County Farmers Market and at the Great Smokies Flea Market in Kodak. Their candies and confections have recently been picked up by the shop at McGhee Tyson Airport near Knoxville, and Shirley and Dairl say they’re looking for Tri-Cities area outlets as well. They ship their products all over the U.S. via UPS.
Mama Shirley’s Old-Fashioned Candies
LOCATION: 185 Brady Drive,
Morristown, Tennessee
CONTACT: (423) 586-8642
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
