A few years ago, I saw a recipe in Martha Stewart Living for homemade marshmallows. Even for a make-it-yourself guy like me, this was a bit much: Store-bought marshmallows are already cheap and tasty, and they seem like the very epitome of a mass-produced confection, so why bother making your own? The idea felt like Martha-ism at its worst.

But over the past year or two, I’ve eaten at several dessert cafes that made their own marshmallows, and was impressed by the results, which were puffier and lighter than the store-bought variety. One of these eateries, the Chocolate Room (86 Fifth Ave., Park Slope, Brooklyn; 718-783-2900), has had such a positive response to the house-made marshmallows they serve with their chocolate fondue that they’re now selling the marshmallows in little cellophane-wrapped four-packs for $2. This, along with the onset of toasted-marshmallow season, got me thinking that it was time to revisit the notion of making these treats at home.

You may be surprised to learn – as I was, when I began doing a bit of research – that marshmallows originally came from the marsh. Specifically, they came from the mallow plant (Athaea officinalis), which looks a lot like hollyhock. Its roots yield a mucilaginous sap, which may have been mixed with honey as far back as ancient Egypt, although European confectioners didn’t come up with the modern, molded marshmallow, made from mallow root extract and sugar, until the mid-1800s.

As mass-production techniques advanced, mallow extract disappeared from the marshmallow recipe, replaced by gum arabic and gelatin. Americans now consume more than 90 million pounds of marshmallows annually (the mind boggles), most of them sold under the Jet-Puffed brand, named for a patented air-infusion process devised in 1953. Mini marshmallows – the basis for many a suburban salad and that annoyingly catchy Swiss Miss commercial jingle – came out about a decade after that.

The best restaurant-made marshmallows I’d eaten were pretty similar to Jet-Puffed in terms of flavor but were lighter and less chewy, and that’s what I was after in my own rendition. Most recipes I found fell into one of two categories: those made with egg whites and those without. I figured the egg whites would yield a fluffier texture, but I wanted to make the process as easy as possible. And besides, Martha’s recipe fell into the egg-free camp – if omitting the egg whites was good enough for her, I figured it was good enough for me.

My version is essentially an amalgam of several others (see accompanying recipe) and features three very simple steps: mixing water with unflavored gelatin in a bowl, heating sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan, and then pouring the cooked sugar into the gelatin mixture while beating with an electric mixer. This eventually creates a thick, white batter, which you pour into a baking dish.

After letting the dish set for a few hours, you’re left with a big, spongy slab – sort of like a rubbery cake – which you can then cut into whatever shapes you like, either with a knife or – even better – a pizza cutter.

My marshmallows turned out a little chewier and denser than the best restaurant versions I’d sampled, which means the restaurants were probably using egg whites. Still, mine were pretty good, and definitely better than Jet-Puffed.

But when you’re talking about marshmallows in June, there are two crucial questions that must be addressed, the first of which is,”How are they for toasting over a grill or campfire?” So I got myself some charcoal, fired up the grill, stuck a few of my ‘mallows on a skewer, and put them to the test.

The good news is that they brown up beautifully when held a few inches from the flame. The bad news, at least for those who favor the torch or flambe approach, is that the homemade marshmallows stubbornly refuse to light on fire (another egg white issue, perhaps?), so you can’t get that pitch-black outer char. Still, I’ve always felt that the browning method is more sublime. Browning also plays into our second key question, which of course is, “How are they for s’mores?” This raises all sorts of tangential issues, because s’mores – the elemental conjoining of toasted marshmallow, chocolate, and graham cracker – have their own storied history. There’s no authoritative story regarding their invention (one Web site amusingly invites readers to “E-mail us with your version of the history of the s’more!”), although it’s generally agreed that they were conceived as a campground treat and that the first printed reference to them was in a 1927 Girl Scouts book, “Tramping and Trailing With the Girl Scouts.”

Unsurprisingly, Martha Stewart also has a s’mores recipe. It entails – get this – crushing graham crackers into crumbs, mixing them with melted butter and sugar, pressing the resulting mixture into a pan, and then baking it to create reconstituted uber-graham crackers. Okay, that’s Martha at her worst – I’ll just stick with regular commercial graham crackers and a Hershey bar, thanks.

And as it turns out, the homemade marshmallows make exemplary s’mores – rich, gooey, and just messy enough without becoming a total slob-fest. It tastes like summer, childhood, and play, all sandwiched into one.