Like a lot of you, my childhood memory of popcorn is not instant gratification taking too long. It was oil in a pot with a lid. (My grandmother used bacon grease, which was pretty great.) I remember when I was about 5, my dad got my mom a Sunbeam electric machine shaped like a circus train car, which was amazing to my small brain because you could watch the kernels pop, and then when it was ready, you dumped it upside down and used the top as a bowl. I don’t think bacon grease entered into that equation.

One year, when I was 5 or 6, my mom took an entire day and made a billion caramel popcorn balls for a Christmas caroling party we had been invited to. I am pretty sure this only happened because we lived in California; if we had been invited caroling in Illinois, my mother would have assumed those people were crazy, she was not about to go running around the tundra in single-digit temperatures at night singing to strangers. I have to admit, I don’t remember the caroling. I do remember the caramel. That stuff was amazing, but she never, ever made them again. I asked her later for the recipe and she vacillated between “too much work to bother” and “I don’t remember.” I suspect a plot.

My first job was for a movie theater, and I was extremely disappointed when I discovered that we would pop bags of corn ahead of time in a back room to ensure that we did not run out. The movie theater was also where I was schooled in the difference between “butter” and “butter FLAVORED topping”—the “flavored” part was very important and management would lecture you if you omitted the word when offering it to customers—and this was well before the days of food allergies being an acknowledged thing.

I still love butter flavored topping, even though I know it’s probably 100 percent carcinogens and I have seen how the buildup around the machine’s spigot becomes a sort of silicone-like consistency that you can peel off and play with.

And, of course, the microwave entirely changed the popcorn game in my teens. My adulthood has involved virtually no bacon grease at all. When we went to such things, we would routinely get kettle corn made in giant kettles at festivals and farmers markets and so on, but I think my son was 15 before he was aware there was another way to make the stuff at home. We made some on the stove once, and once was enough; we all rushed right back to the 40-seconds-or-less approach and the jar of kernels sat untouched in our pantry until we threw it out when we moved eight years later.

When my kid was a Boy Scout for about 15 seconds, he sold popcorn for a fundraiser. We fell in love with the chocolate drizzled flavor. Then he followed in my footsteps and went to work in a movie theater, and we found the stuff again under the name Zebra Popcorn from Popcornopolis.

We have also done a lot of popcorn add-ins over the years. Cheddar flavoring powder. Ranch flavoring powder. Throwing a bunch of M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces in the bag at the movies. It’s good stuff pretty much any way you present it.

But I do wish my mom would tell me how she did those caramel balls.