popping memories

I have a confession to make.


I have a vice: I love popcorn.


Not the Gershon Kingsley song. The snack.


It has everything that I love in a snack: salt, grease, bulk. And comfort.


Like most food vices, there is a back story to my obsession.


When I was a young lad, I would often stay with my grandmother in Powers. Her property had vegetable and flower gardens filled with fascinating insects, a chicken yard filled with chicks, and a popcorn popper.


The popcorn popper looked ancient to me. Its electric cord must have been designed in the 1920s. But it was the glass lid that fascinated me. You could watch the popcorn kernels build up their internal water pressure -- until they exploded one after another into my evening delight.


Because popcorn was always an evening snack food. There was no television. There was a usually-silent radio. But the evening's entertainment was usually to flip through World War II photography books. While eating the popcorn.


I know life was probably never that naive. But it seems that way in my memory. And a bowl of freshly-popped popcorn will bring it back faster than the smell of oranges at Christmas.


I had never noticed popcorn on my trips to Mexico. That seemed strange to me. Mexico is the very heart of North American corn culture. Not having popcorn here would be like not having popcorn in -- Iowa.


But it is here. I must have missed it in the past. In those old-fashioned plastic wrappers -- just like at cousin Ken's Powers Market.


I should have said this earlier. Popcorn out of an air popper. Popcorn out of a microwave. These are not popcorn. For whatever virtues they may have, they are culinary abominations.


Popcorn must be popped in a heavy skillet with a good-grade corn oil, and topped with just a small dash of sea salt. (There was a period when I dated a woman from Miami. We would put a 50/50 mixture of butter and tabasco sauce on our popcorn. That practice ended with the relationship.)


When I found what appeared to be popcorn Just Like My Grandmother Bought, I slapped my pesos on the counter, and scurried home to pop up a memory. Pan on the flame. Oil. Popcorn. Sea salt.


And you were ready for this, weren't you? It was beyond disappointing. It smelled like popcorn. It looked like popcorn. It tasted like packing material.


Anyone who has ever eaten corn on the cob in Mexico knows why. Most Americans have become accustomed to hybrid varieties of corn with an extremely high sugar content. And that is the type of corn that ends up in Orville Redenbacher's jars.


Mexican corn tastes more like field corn -- what Americans would serve to good old Kansas beef.


In its popcorn form, it tastes like -- well, popped field corn.


If I could get into my time machine and head back to Powers in the 1950s, I am certain the popcorn would taste almost like the popcorn I bought here in Melaque. Our tastes were not as sugar-oriented then as they are now.


And considering how well I have done on losing weight and reducing my blood pressure (Monday's reading was fantastic), I really do not need to reverse that progress in pursuit of memories.


A vice, not quite conquered.