Mom’s Holiday Balls

A culinary disaster story for the season

The recipe was buried in one of Mom’s messy kitchen drawers. It had been torn from the pages of a 1972 Good Housekeeping magazine, and to my knowledge had remained there undisturbed for at least three decades.

When she announced she was fixin’ to whoop up this holiday treat I couldn’t suppress a feeling of dread that arose from the pit of my stomach and surfaced on my tongue in vague remembrance of a previous recipe she called Spanish Delight.

Spanish Delight was neither Spanish nor delightful.

She had thrown down this cookbook mystery just a few months ago after I was unable to steer her away from the kitchen as my afternoon visit had winded down.

“Honey, you’ve got to stay for dinner,” she said, as she rattled some pans from the pantry and snatched from the freezer a half-pound of ground beef — the cheapest variety sold at Kroger.

“Mom, that ground beef will take hours to thaw,” I pointed out, looking at my watch. “And I need to make Michael some dinner.”

“No problem. I’ll just zap it in the microwave and it’ll be ready in no time.” Mom is oblivious to the fact Michael and I are 99% vegetarian, and she routinely dismisses complaints about using meat in her recipes.

Within 15 minutes she was stirring a wooden spoon into a large cast-iron skillet atop her 1970s General Electric range. The semi-thawed meat was joined by a can of store-brand cream-of-mushroom soup.

This she dumped into a mixture of canned corn and half a green bell pepper. She lavished the concoction with a heavy shake of salt and pepper and then added a little water to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

But let us move on to more current events.

Dot was joyful about finding this long-lost recipe — never mind she’d not made it before. As she unfolded the yellowed page and smoothed it on the counter, she squinted at the ingredients and directions.

The recipe was called ‘Holiday Balls’, and the faded picture looked like some sort of orange, fruits candy rolled into festive orbs. It called for lots of white sugar, a can of frozen orange juice, some vanilla, a bit of lemon, and water.

It sounded simple enough but experience taught me nothing is done simply in my mother’s kitchen.

Mom enthused about the time she had tasted this dessert at a bridge club party. Weeks later she stumbled fortuitously across the recipe while sitting in her doctor’s waiting room. She’d slyly ripped the page from the magazine and tucked it surreptitiously into her purse.

She chuckled over what a naughty little thief she had been.

Her laughter soon faded when she discovered the mixture was not fashioning into any sort of balls. While she talked, she combined and stirred the ingredients — presumably in the amounts the directions called for. The whole mess had the consistency of an orange Elmer’s Glue, and it was with great effort she removed the sticky stuff from her hands.

To her credit, she remained optimistic. Dorothy Camp had not been raised to accept defeat easily, so as she fished out a rectangular pan from the pantry she announced, “Orange cookies will be just as good as orange balls.”

I stood back in wonderment as she spaced the viscous globs about an inch apart on the ungreased cookie pan. No use in me making any suggestions I thought. A few minutes later she rearranged the refrigerator and placed them inside to set.

“Mom, these will need to be set overnight, OK?” I gathered my jacket and headed for the door. She instructed me to come back in the morning so I could be the first to sample this new and improved holiday treat.

We lived only five minutes away, so I agreed.

The next day I asked Michael if he wanted to join me in experiencing Dot’s new creation, but he declined with a guffaw.

When I arrived, Mom was in a tizzy. She discovered her original mistake. “I used the whole can of frozen orange juice — not just the six ounces like I should have!”

Resourceful as always, she scraped the glutinous lumps back into the large mixing bowl and doubled the other ingredients. Now, all the quantities were exact.

“If you hadn’t been chattering so much, that never would have happened,” she chided as she pried the remaining goop off the pan and handed it to me for washing.

For good measure, she poured into the mixing bowl another cup of white sugar. “You know,” Mom mused, “I could also toss in a bit of shredded coconut. That would thicken it, and would add a little more oomph.”

The last thing you need is any more oomph I thought as I put down the scraping tool I was using to remove the last of the adhesive from the now scratched and dented cookie sheet.

“Oh no!” Mom gave a little cry of shock and pain.

Now what?

She had ripped the aluminum peel-off top containing the coconut and sliced her hand. Blood ran profusely onto the counter but mercifully not into her mixing bowl.

I guided her to the sink and we examined the wound. No big deal. I applied the band-aid while she considered the coconut. “We’ll just leave it out.

“Since I’ve just got one hand, I guess we should make it into a cake.”

How one correlated to the other, I had no idea, but I stood in awe at her enterprising decision.

“But Mom…..,” I trailed off. She was already scooping it into a cake pan and garnishing the top with a package of chopped pecans.

The oven was set to 350 and about 45 minutes later we peeked in through the glass oven window. The pecans were dancing on top of the mixture like a witch’s brew.

“Now, I’ll just let it cool a bit, and then I’m going to put it back into the refrigerator and let it finish setting.”

She said this with such conviction I was almost persuaded this orange ball thing was going to turn out after all.

“Tomorrow, then?” I asked.

She gave me a thumbs-up gesture, and I unlocked the security door and headed out.

I pulled into her driveway early the next morning. She was holding a mug of coffee and was still wearing her pink bathrobe and slippers.

She had already checked on the orange ball/cookie/cake concoction sitting in the refrigerator, and she was curious to see what I thought.

I pulled it out, and it was as if it had put on ten pounds overnight. I set the thing on the counter so we could get a better look. The top of the…this…whatever the hell it was…was as slick as an ice skating rink. And shiny, too.

I gently touched it. It was as hard as cement and was welded to the cake pan. “Do you think we can save it?” Mom whispered the words like a nurse surveying a patient whose wounds were too far gone.

“What, the cake,” I asked incredulously?

“No, the pan.”

It was a foregone conclusion the dessert would not be revived under any circumstances. The fifteen or twenty dollar’s worth of ingredients was gone forever. Good-bye, so long. I’m just glad she didn’t waste the coconut. But the pan?

I wanted no part of resurrecting that pan.

“Mom, I am not going to try to clean that thing. I just about broke my arm trying to scrub down the other. I don’t know if we can even get that stuff out of the pan.”

“OK, honey……Well, you tried,” she said sympathetically.

I jerked my head around to look hard at her. There was something in her tone, in her voice that suggested I had something to do with this orange ball disaster.

“Aww yes, Mom…we’ll do, no — you’ll do — better next year.”

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