Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Food & Drink => Topic started by: ian on 16 January, 2019, 09:59:41 am
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As Jaded mentioned Vesta curries, I feel a topic is needed to discuss the awesome foods of our childhood and wallow in nostalgia like a rasher of bacon in a gallon of HP.
Vesta was the first exotic food I ever ate. I just learned it was invented in 1961. Anyway 'ate' was a lie, because my mum made me throw it in the bin because it smelled funny.
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Vesta curries.
Boiling water turned a pile of vermiculite insulation and some dried string into an irresistible culinary delight.
Marvellous!
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Can you still buy them? They were like a proto-pot noodle. If I recall, there was a Vesta Chow Mein too. Hmm, the smell of exotic textured soya protein.
I'll also raise Bean Feast, my first foray into vegetarianism was literally propelled by these.
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Angel Delight.
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Last seen (and purchased) in Tesco. Beef curry, chow mein and paella. There used to be a chicken curry but that's disappeared.
In the late 60s/early 70s Batchelor's sold a 'casserole' too. Beef or chicken, reconstituted with water and heated in a pan. I remember these as delicious - certainly tastier than school dinners - but that was probably all the salt/sugar/MSG. There were dumplings.
Homourable mention for their packet soups. Minestrone was so exotic...
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Creamola Foam
You could eat it out of the tin for added fun and a coloured tongue.
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Angel Delight.
Only butterscotch though.
I once spent an entire summer digging through several hundred tonnes of industrial-grade Angel Delight. Fact.
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Tinned Heinz Salad. My parents refused all other salads( as they grew up in on farms in China/HK where everything was fertilised with nightsoil [human poo, wee and ash], all veg had be thoroughly washed and cooked). Coming to this country they were disgusted by the prospect of raw salad leaves, but they discovered Heinz salad, which met their approval. So growing up we'd occasionally open a tin of salad to go with our rice. I miss it immensely.
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Can you still get those "steak" pies in a tin? I am not sure that it was actually steak, or even beef but as a poor student they tasted pretty good. Were they made by Fray Bentos?
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I still would love to remember what it was I used to eat in my school days oop north. It was sold as dessert thingy, but what did they know? You took a pint of milk and tipped in this can of chemicals and mummified fruit like peaches, within minutes it had turned into something like fruit and custard.
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Can you still get those "steak" pies in a tin? I am not sure that it was actually steak, or even beef but as a poor student they tasted pretty good. Were they made by Fray Bentos?
Fray Bentos tinned pies, you'll be pleased to know, are not yet extinct. They are now owned by quasi-posh SOUP merchants Baxters.
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Can you still get those "steak" pies in a tin? I am not sure that it was actually steak, or even beef but as a poor student they tasted pretty good. Were they made by Fray Bentos?
Yes, I think they are still available, utterly awesome. We used to get large steak and kidney ones. The disappointment was that my dad took three quarters and my sister and I got the final quarter (my mother never really eats). One of the first things I did as an official grown-up was to eat an entire plate-sized Fray Bentos pie.
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Still do. Probably explains my resemblance to a Zeppelin when I'm on the motorbike...
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Angel Delight.
Only butterscotch though.
I once spent an entire summer digging through several hundred tonnes of industrial-grade Angel Delight. Fact.
Chocolate was okay but butterscotch was the best. Still is. Fact.
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Those tins of Heinz Salad where also a thing in the East Midlands too. We had an instinctual mistrust of vegetables that weren't tinned or required several days of soaking. I remember the occasional tomato. I presumed it had got lost.
Just to prove the entire 70s and 80s weren't entirely prepackaged or dehydrated (mmm, space food), we did have tinned salmon on very special occasions, mixed with butter. Only very special occasions though because it was by far the most expensive thing in the cupboard.
Salmon sandwiches was definitely one of my favourite foods. The other meal, and the first I learned to cook, was fish fingers, instant mash, frozen peas and packet parsley sauce. I used to come home from school and make this for myself and my sister, back in the days when it was fine to leave your kids to fend for themselves in front of a hot cooker.
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As Jaded mentioned Vesta curries, I feel a topic is needed to discuss the awesome foods of our childhood and wallow in nostalgia like a rasher of bacon in a gallon of HP.
Vesta was the first exotic food I ever ate. I just learned it was invented in 1961. Anyway 'ate' was a lie, because my mum made me throw it in the bin because it smelled funny.
This is an exercise I have been indulging in recently. Warning: The results, like that of searching out 'fantastic ' music of your youth, are generally disappointing at best.
I discovered Fray Bentos steak pie inna tin was still available recently. I mean, how fantastic were they?
Yuck. Disgusting soggy bottom pastry.
This week I was remembering how my mum used to produce Shipham's fish paste on toast. Searching Tescos revealed that although there didn't appear to be anything actually called 'Fish paste', Shipham's Salmon Paste was still a thing. I even bought some supermarket sliced white bread in order to experience the full joy.
Bugger :sick:
Oh well. On to the next thing.
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Oooh! Good to know that Fray Bentos pies are still around. The problem is that if I suggest to Her Indoors that she gets one I'm liable to be punched, although I must admit that I am fed a much better and tastier diet than tinned pies now. Still, it would be good to see if they still taste the same.
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When Jan and I were first married, we quite often shared a Fray Bentos pie. We had a diminutive kitchen in our flat so proper cooking was a major challenge. We would pressure cook a few veg, bake a pie in its tin, and eat it on the balcony overlooking the Thames estuary. That was the summer of '76. We could probably have not bothered to cook it but just leave it in the sun for a few minutes.
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Mmm, fish paste. Also meat paste. My gran used to get the latter from the butcher in a big pot. I never thought to question what the meat in question was and I suspect the answer would have had to await the invention of modern DNA fingerprinting techniques. I had the same problem with tongue which my child-mind never quite realised was literally just that until I saw an actual ox tongue lolling on a tray in the butcher's window one day.
For the proper preparation of Fray Bentos pies, if you didn't like the soggy bottom (I confess, the soggy hinterland between the filling and the crispy top was a place my taste buds romped), part way through you lever off the pastry top and cook it to one side.
Most hated meal of my childhood: liver. Utterly disgusted, cooked to death, and full of elastic bands that would whip the eyes from the unsuspecting. Every mouthful took about ten minutes to chew and even the dog wouldn't touch it (and he would eat his own poo).
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Oooh.. Fray Bentos pies. A big treat for my dog when I was a teenager was to cook and eat a Fray Bentos pie.
the dog got the pie tin at the end - I left him pleny of scrapings of course.
Yeah, I do know there was a sharp edge but he never seemed to notice!
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I'm pretty sure my first pay packet from the Co-op was spent on a Fray Bentos pie just for me (they did a smaller size, but that would basically be tinned disappointment).
As my wife is out-of-town, who knows would culinary nostalgia this weekend will bring... some men would take this opportunity to have sex with the au pair, on the other hand, I take the opportunity to snarf down meat pies while watching Canadian women eat Scampi Fries.
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I'm old enough to remember the days of Resale Price Maintenance, a period when people shopped at the nearest outlet. One feature was the glass-topped biscuit display tin. The biscuits were sold in paper bags, one of many factors that kept obesity at bay. There's a biscuit-tin archive at the Museum of Reading.
http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=query&p=huntley&f=generic_objectrecord.htm&_IXFIRST_=1&_IXMAXHITS_=1&%3dcms_con_core_identifier=rm-rm-1998_1_89~1_580-i-00-000.tif&t=rm-rm-tins_content1&s=NEgqBZGxkr6
(http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/asset_arena/image/500/rm/rm/rm-rm-1998_1_89~1_580-i-00-000.jpg)
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On Saturdays, because a rampaging hoard free-range kids fueled entirely by sugar is great if they're elsewhere, my mother and her sisters used to buy us (my mother had twelve siblings, so there were a lot of us cousins) huge bags of broken biscuits – and I mean huge – from the market. We'd basically then spend the afternoon running around like the Mongol hoards on an unsupervised team-building day. When Attila is away, the boys will play. Our mothers, of course, made sure they were holed up elsewhere.
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Possibly controversial but when I discovered the little independent kebab shops in Rochdale as a yoof, each one would make its own kebab meat and it would roast on a vertical spit for days. Burnt crunchy bits!
One came to know the different outputs and connoisseurs would compare the offerings from Milkstone Rd, Whitworth Rd and Halifax Rd. Textures, spices and cooking times. Nowadays they all buy from suppliers like DonerKing in Leeds and have a stash in the deep freeze, each one an amorphous lump of rendered, textured 'meat'. None of them have the meat in front of the flame for long enough to get the outside coloured and the sugars caramelised, when your kebab appears it has great swathes of grey stuff. They don't cut it correctly either, using a rotary slicer instead of a real carving knife.
Kebabs used to be exciting - and not in a 'food roulette' kind of way . . .
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On the subject of kebabs but not food of childhood, there is a kebab van that parks up in central Bristol every evening, rejoices in the name of the Jason Donervan.
(https://i2-prod.bristolpost.co.uk/incoming/article2097441.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_RM_BRI_111018jasondonervan_09.jpg)
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When I lived in west London, there used to be a kebab shop on the Askew Road that did fantastic kebabs, proper identifiable (without a DNA test) meat on skewers chargrilled to goodness. No idea if it's still there but it ought to be.
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The thing my kid sister remembers most about the freshers' induction at Oxford is how they tried to drum in to everyone multiple times not to eat from the kebab vans. I don't know whether this was patrician disdain for street food, or whether there actually had been a spate of student food poisonings attributed to them...
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Given that the average high street donner kebab exists primarily to flout every established convention of food hygiene, it's hard to believe that serving them from a kebab van could be worse.
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Were we the only kids to snort space dust like it was some kind of kiddy crack? It has similar effects and would fill your head with the most awesome crackling like your brain was on fire. It sent David Derbyshire so mad that he ran at full pelt into a brick wall and knocked out all his teeth. After which it was banned. Grange Hill had heroin, we had space dust.
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I had an inordinate fondness for Heinz tinned spag bol as a young’un. Haven’t had it for years and suspect I would find it revolting now. Do they still make it?
Also Heinz tinned ravioli, with a ‘meat’ filling that had the consistency of toothpaste.
However, even as a kid I found the viscous orange goo that coated the spaghetti hoops too sweet.
All made to the authentic recipes handed down to Giuseppe Heinz by his dear old mamma back in Tuscany, of course.
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Full English inna tin, anyone?
(https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4016/4340559137_fe1c69004a_m.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/7Byv1v) (https://flic.kr/p/7Byv1v) (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurekb/)
Still available from Iceland, apparently.
ETA - I've just Googled 'Heinz tinned salad'.
It has returned results for 'Heinz Vegetable Salad'.
Errr.... remind me of what other sort of salad there is.....
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Given most kebabs end up involved in calls using the Large White Telephone, many food poisonings are probably avoided.
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Alphabetti spaghetti. The only food that can make your dog talk. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1043776/)
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Given most kebabs end up involved in calls using the Large White Telephone, many food poisonings are probably avoided.
I have eaten many a kebab. Doner, chicken, seekh & shami. Never visited the great white telephone as a result. I'm either extremely lucky or must have an iron constitution, cos I've had thousands...
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Given most kebabs end up involved in calls using the Large White Telephone, many food poisonings are probably avoided.
I have eaten many a kebab. Doner, chicken, seekh & shami. Never visited the great white telephone as a result. I'm either extremely lucky or must have an iron constitution, cos I've had thousands...
Yebutt - You and Fuzzy go back a long time. No?
(See also the food rant thread)
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Alphabetti spaghetti. The only food that can make your dog talk. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1043776/)
Also the medium through which Trump issues decrees, allegedly.
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Given most kebabs end up involved in calls using the Large White Telephone, many food poisonings are probably avoided.
I have eaten many a kebab. Doner, chicken, seekh & shami. Never visited the great white telephone as a result. I'm either extremely lucky or must have an iron constitution, cos I've had thousands...
Yebutt - You and Fuzzy go back a long time. No?
Yeah, I'm pretty old ;D but I didn't actually meet Fuzzy in person until about 12 months ago...
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Alphabetti spaghetti. The only food that can make your dog talk. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1043776/)
Also the medium through which Trump issues decrees, allegedly.
Actually it's more that you or I could eat a tin of alphabetti and then poop out a better argument than the Hamberdler. :demon:
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You just made it clear to me that my claim never to have had pasta before I was 18 to be a big fat, tomato sauce smothered lie. I'd forgotten about Heinz spaghetti bolognese in a tin and yes, the ravioli with the peculiarly mushy filling like you were eating some small soggy animal's brains. Yet curiously more delicious than any small animal's brains.
My parents wouldn't eat it any of that pasta stuff, for obvious reasons. Their culinary circumspection, chary of anything but the most insipid of British food, more mummified than cooked, endless sad plates of overheated and burnt despair, used to drive me up the wall. My mother was sent home from Morrisons (where she worked) because someone dropped a jar of korma sauce and the smell made her sick (and thereafter she refused to work on the 'ethnic food' aisle). My father is still going on about the time he ate a piece a rocket – ten fucking years ago. My sister and niece aren't a lot better, they'll physically recoil if presented with an olive. It's not just that they scared to try something new (and they probably are), it's that they lack the curiosity. They're just not interested in anything that's not primarily potato or overcooked meat product. My mother doesn't even eat, she's survived the last forty plus years on a diet of drizzle and cigarettes. I did go a bit mental at our wedding where the inlaws had hired an actual Parisian bistro (I know this because it was in Paris) for a meal (at no small expense) and all my parents did was shuffle the food (excellent) around their plate and refuse to eat. Honestly, french fries are still fucking chips. The bloody irony, as a kid I had to eat everything or I got served it again later, even the unchewable liver that our mental poo-eating staffie wouldn't eat. Sorry, an escaped rant.
And breathe.
But yes, alphabet spaghetti. You ever think they somehow ration out the letters to limit the number of rude words you can spell out on your plate?
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If you hold a tin of alphabetti spaghetti to your ear you can sometimes hear the ‘C’.
Smash.
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If you hold a tin of alphabetti spaghetti to your ear you can sometimes hear the ‘C’.
Smash.
Very good.
I thought that only worked with pasta shells.
I think I have your coat over here.
(and mine, appears to be just next to it)
Our taxi appears to have been summoned.
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You just made it clear to me that my claim never to have had pasta before I was 18 to be a big fat, tomato sauce smothered lie. I'd forgotten about Heinz spaghetti bolognese in a tin and yes, the ravioli with the peculiarly mushy filling like you were eating some small soggy animal's brains. Yet curiously more delicious than any small animal's brains.
My parents wouldn't eat it any of that pasta stuff, for obvious reasons. Their culinary circumspection, chary of anything but the most insipid of British food, more mummified than cooked, endless sad plates of overheated and burnt despair, used to drive me up the wall. My mother was sent home from Morrisons (where she worked) because someone dropped a jar of korma sauce and the smell made her sick (and thereafter she refused to work on the 'ethnic food' aisle). My father is still going on about the time he ate a piece a rocket – ten fucking years ago. My sister and niece aren't a lot better, they'll physically recoil if presented with an olive. It's not just that they scared to try something new (and they probably are), it's that they lack the curiosity. They're just not interested in anything that's not primarily potato or overcooked meat product. My mother doesn't even eat, she's survived the last forty plus years on a diet of drizzle and cigarettes. I did go a bit mental at our wedding where the inlaws had hired an actual Parisian bistro (I know this because it was in Paris) for a meal (at no small expense) and all my parents did was shuffle the food (excellent) around their plate and refuse to eat. Honestly, french fries are still fucking chips. The bloody irony, as a kid I had to eat everything or I got served it again later, even the unchewable liver that our mental poo-eating staffie wouldn't eat. Sorry, an escaped rant.
And breathe.
But yes, alphabet spaghetti. You ever think they somehow ration out the letters to limit the number of rude words you can spell out on your plate?
My bold.
I've had to work with an invective filter on a scrolling display board on a number of occasions.
FWIW The filter isn't insurmountable....
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Swindon has a Jason Donervan in the Dorcan industrial estate. Maybe there's also a Doner Summer somewhere. There is also Magic Kebabs...on the Magic Roundabout.
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Ah, this thread has prompted memories of sandwich spread and crisp sandwiches. And the soggy pastry of tinned steak pies is food nirvana.
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Have we had Cadbury's Smash yet? With a packet of Smash, a Fray Bentos pie and a tin of garden peas, I had some decent fridge-free meals as a student.
Also...Heinz Invaders which, years after the initial video game craze* had worn off, were own-branded as the crappily-named Sainsbury's Space Shapes.
*someone needs to make GTA shapes of a hood blowing out some crackwhore's brains and a boosted Shelby Cobra.
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We had freeze dried peas that mum got from the cash and carry (Bookers in Tunbridge Wells) using her Meals in Wheels discount card.
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Ah, this thread has prompted memories of sandwich spread and crisp sandwiches. And the soggy pastry of tinned steak pies is food nirvana.
Heinz Sandwich Spread: salad cream with small vegetable pieces. I loved it but Mum hated it...
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AKA 'sick on toast.'
Apropos instant mash, at the end of every Warner Brothers-produced TV show, I will loudly sing FOR MASH GET SMASH because I swear it's the same music, though my wife remains unconvinced.
Given the amount of instant mash I ate as a child, I'm still actually 3.4% dehydrated potato. If I fell in a big gravy boat I'd soak it all up.
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Have we had Cadbury's Smash yet? With a packet of Smash, a Fray Bentos pie and a tin of garden peas, I had some decent fridge-free meals as a student.
Are you talking about the Smash that was advertised with aliens saying "For mash get Smash"? You mean that instant mashed potato was made by the Dairy Milk people? ??!??!!?! How come it wasn't available in a Bournville version as well?!!?!!?!
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I think, and I may be wrong (which I am pretty much all the time, no need to remind me), it was originally made by Mars. Hence the entire Martian thing. And Mars is now Cadbury.
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Cadbury's Smash originally, sold off to Premier Foods now paort of their Bachelors brand. Cadbury's sold to Kraft and now hived off as part of Mondolez. Mars was and is still owned by the Mars family.
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Sandwich Spread, definitely not missed. 56 Varieties are more then enough.
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I was quite fond of Heinz little blue tins of baby food in my last years at primary school.
I suppose there had to be some compensation for being the oldest of (then1) five children and changing nappies before I left Infants' School.
1) #6 was born when I was 19 and had gone to university.
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Sandwich Spread is still on sale, deal with it
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We should not forget how dreadful the sandwiches of the '60s and '70s were.
Sandwich spread was the acme...
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Acne, more like.
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Puke in a jar, as someone already said.
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I have fond memories of Appeel dehydrated orange (the colour) drink. I think the raw product came out of one of my current factories and was a long long way from any actual fruit. That and a single chunk of Yorkie (6 chunks in a bar, one for each of us including the dog, as back in the day dogs were allowed chocolate). It fueled all my childhood cycling.
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Kids won't remember this, but remember that orange juice came dehydrated in a packet. It was impossible to reconstitute, no amount of stirring and agitation would produce orange juice, just a glass of pale orange liquid that looked like it had dripped out of someone in the late stages of kidney failure and a peculiar gritty orange sand that might have come from a beach closed for 'reasons of public health.'
Eastern European hotels were still serving it at breakfast into the nineties. They might still be, I'm classier these days. No really, I am.
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I don’t remember that, but we very rarely had the exotic treat of frozen orange juice concentrate. It came in a sort of cardboard tube.
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Have we had boil in the bag meals yet? I particularly remember the chicken curry meal. Cant recall who made them tho, maybe Batchelors?
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I don't remember dehydrated orange juice crystals and Jaded's frozen orange juice sounds like one of those ice lollies in a long plastic tube, but we did have concentrated orange squash. It was in a bottle of pimpled glass divided into sections and was in some way connected with visits to the doctor or something. Maybe just because it was supposed to be healthy.
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The concentrated orange juice was provided on the NHS. Not sure if you had to pay for it or whether you got issues with so much for children under five but it was all we ever drank as kids.
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I had an inkling it might have been something like that. It wasn't just concentrated juice though – definitely had added sugar.
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On the subject of orange, it must have been the post-school milk era, but our school started issuing (or selling) a violently orange fluid in unopenable tetrapaks at break time. Basically sugar and toxic food colouring. What could go wrong?
Usually ended up down your shirt or blouse too, like you'd murdered someone with strange orange blood. To be honest, it wasn't a shade of orange that existed in nature.
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I don’t remember that, but we very rarely had the exotic treat of frozen orange juice concentrate. It came in a sort of cardboard tube.
I remember that. It was my dad's weekend breakfast treat. Too good for the kids.
On the subject of orange, it must have been the post-school milk era, but our school started issuing (or selling) a violently orange fluid in unopenable tetrapaks at break time. Basically sugar and toxic food colouring. What could go wrong?
Usually ended up down your shirt or blouse too, like you'd murdered someone with strange orange blood. To be honest, it wasn't a shade of orange that existed in nature.
I remember those as well. No idea if they had a name though.
You know that Kia-Ora crows advert? That was actually created in the stupor of a hallucinogenic nightmare brought on by whatever it was they put in Kia-Ora to make it that colour.
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School milk. :sick: Two varieties: frozen solid or rancid.
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School milk could only be served lukewarm, preferably after sitting in the corner of the classroom for two-thirds of the day. Bonus points for leaving it by the radiator. The cream would curdle into a bokish sludge that you had to jab a straw through to reach the liquid beneath.
The orange stuff came with a straw too, but tetrapaks aren't so easily defeated, so the straw was made out of flimsolium and thus couldn't be jabbed into the container, so you had to pull and tug and strain at the top until Miss, I spilled orange down my front!
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Kids won't remember this, but remember that orange juice came dehydrated in a packet. It was impossible to reconstitute, no amount of stirring and agitation would produce orange juice, just a glass of pale orange liquid that looked like it had dripped out of someone in the late stages of kidney failure and a peculiar gritty orange sand that might have come from a beach closed for 'reasons of public health.'
Eastern European hotels were still serving it at breakfast into the nineties. They might still be, I'm classier these days. No really, I am.
Birds Eye frozen 'Florida' orange juice?
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The concentrated orange juice was provided on the NHS. Not sure if you had to pay for it or whether you got issues with so much for children under five but it was all we ever drank as kids.
Little bottles with 9 little oranges on the label.
Mum says it was good with gin...
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School milk. :sick: Two varieties: frozen solid or rancid.
I loved school milk.
My sister Susan HATED it.
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I had an inkling it might have been something like that. It wasn't just concentrated juice though – definitely had added sugar.
I think orange juice of my earlier childhood came in various forms:
'Welfare' orange: little glass bottles of FREE concentrate.
(http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/INF-13_194-_1_1939-1945.jpg)
Sunquick concentrate: Danish syrup which came in a ribbed bootle. I don't think this was free.
Vile little tins of bitterness
Birds Eye frozen 'Florida'
This last was palatable, though pricy and fiddly.
Modern kids who quaff Tropicana don't know they're born!
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Sunquick is a name I remember and googling it reveals a bottle very similar to what I remember, though this might be a conflation of more than one memory.
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I don’t remember that, but we very rarely had the exotic treat of frozen orange juice concentrate. It came in a sort of cardboard tube.
I recall Florida frozen concentrate, in cans.
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School milk. :sick: Two varieties: frozen solid or rancid.
I loved school milk.
+1 Though I only got to experience it for a term or two, before Bloody Thatcher (or was it Kenneth Baker?) did away with it.
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Modern kids who quaff Tropicana don't know they're born!
There's still Capri-Sun, which (for want of something quaffable and non-fizzy halfway through a very hot ride) I recently discovered is a pale imitation of its 80s self. The original idea seemed to be to cut costs by making hallucinogenic sugar[1]-filled 80s orange drink without the luminous colouring, but now it's turned into a sort of Mostly Harmless ready-made squash.
What happened to Sunny Delight?
[1] Or sometimes alcohol. I was once made to drink half a very fermented pouch of the stuff, because in those days children who won't eat/drink something that's gone off were by default lying.
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What happened to Sunny Delight?
Donald Trump drinks it all.
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^ Very good ;D
Does that mean that Judith Chalmers has stopped drinking it?
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I thought Sunny Delight was Stormy Daniels' little sister until I discovered Smirnoff.
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+1 Though I only got to experience it for a term or two, before Bloody Thatcher (or was it Kenneth Baker?) did away with it.
"Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher"
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There's still Capri-Sun,
If you ever pour the contents of a Capri-Sun sachet/pouch/bladder into a glass, you'll understand why they don't sell it in see-through containers.
Doesn't taste too bad thobut.
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Capri Sun has gone the way of "adding sweeteners" even to its non "sugar free" version, which is annoying as the modern version was drinkable...
Googling Sunny Delight it seems to be selling itself as high in vitamin D (not sure how that works in a non fat soluble medium) and is full of sweeteners :sick:
Wasn't there some weird rule about sunny delight and marketing...
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You could get 12 portion packs of Batchelors dehydrated stew, chicken supreme, curry etc. Many Scout and Venture Scout expeditions into the boondockd were fuelled by this, with a twelve portion pack enough for four or five underage drinkers before sloping off down Thee Pubbe.
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Wasn't there some weird rule about sunny delight and marketing...
Yup.
They neglected to tell you not to give it to your kid if you were also giving the kid a Mars bar.
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For some reason for Sunday breakfast Mum and Dad would have eggs and bacon* whilst we children were served some weird reconstituted baconesque thing called Breakfast Strips or simla, from Mr Sainsbury's House of Toothy Comestibles.
After half a grapefruit, obvs.
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Half a grapefruit with a capful of gin1, perchance?
1The recommended amount.
(See also HRH The Queen Mother) Allegedly.
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Half a grapefruit with a capful of gin1, perchance?
1The recommended method.
(See also HRH The Queen Mother) Allegedly.
Although you didn't have the pleasure of meeting my mother, I'm sure she would have approved of/tried such pleasures.
(HM not HRH, Shirley)
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HM, Indeed.
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Wasn't there some weird rule about sunny delight and marketing...
The retailers were contractually required to display it in fridges, even though it's about as likely to go off as Marmite. The (fundamentally flawed, at least for anyone with functional colour vision) idea presumably being to promote an image of wholesome freshness.
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That's the badger!
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+1 Though I only got to experience it for a term or two, before Bloody Thatcher (or was it Kenneth Baker?) did away with it.
"Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher"
There's a bit of good in everyone.
Although she did it too late for me. I'd already passed the crucial age. Was it 7? Maybe 8? Certainly wasn't the whole of primary.
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We had an opportunity to put a milk bottle on a scarcely viewed windowsill and conduct what would now be a banned 'Biological Experiment'.
The data collected was how high the tin foil cap would go before the tumescent stalk of rancid cream fell.
Such fun.
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We had an opportunity to put a milk bottle on a scarcely viewed windowsill and conduct what would now be a banned 'Biological Experiment Warfare'.
The data collected was how high the tin foil cap would go before the tumescent stalk of rancid cream fell.
Such fun.
:thumbsup:
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For some reason for Sunday breakfast Mum and Dad would have eggs and bacon* whilst we children were served some weird reconstituted baconesque thing called Breakfast Strips or simla, from Mr Sainsbury's House of Toothy Comestibles.
After half a grapefruit, obvs.
Those strips, a bit like thin, rubbery and rather salty spam as I remember...
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Weren't they Mmmmmmatterson Breakfast Strips (or slices). We had them, I think their only selling point was that they were cheaper than the cheapest bacon and made out of mechanically recovered abattoir misfortunes. I'm sure I used to like them. But I like spam fritters – best school meal ever. When the fat would bubble out when you jabbed them with a fork to form a slick across the plate sufficient to innoculate against any benefits from the veg. Though the veg always looked like it been boiled since breakfast, the day before.
I think there was a cheer from my school when Thatcher came round and took the milk away.
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Weren't they Mmmmmmatterson Breakfast Strips (or slices). We had them, I think their only selling point was that they were cheaper than the cheapest bacon and made out of mechanically recovered abattoir misfortunes. I'm sure I used to like them. But I like spam fritters – best school meal ever. When the fat would bubble out when you jabbed them with a fork to form a slick across the plate sufficient to innoculate against any benefits from the veg. Though the veg always looked like it been boiled since breakfast, the day before.
We didn't get anything as posh as Matterson's ones- pretty sure they were Sainy's own. I remember quite liking them, then again they were an overall improvement over my Mum's cooking.
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All this sploshing around the sewage outflow on the beach of nostalgia reminds me of a fraught issue in The Asbestos Palace. My wife and I remember a product from our childhood that doesn't seem to exist, yet weirdly we both remember it.
Firstly, let's introduce The Pop Man. Kids these days won't believe you could get stuff just delivered to your door, but back in the 70s and 80s, a man (there may have been Pop Women, but I never saw one) would come around once a week and take away your empties and leave fresh bottles of fizzy sugary confection coloured with luridly hued industrial chemical process byproducts. It was the happiest day of any week because we were all sugar junkies. Don't drink it all, wailed our mother's vainly, that has to last all week. Fortunately, diabetes had yet to be invented, in fact, I think we were working on that very invention.
Anyway, the product was a variety of pop. We think it was called Grandcham. Neither of us can find any record of this childhood nectar or anything similar. It was a like Iron Brew (that's what unofficial Irn Brus were called) but lighter in colour and with a taste never before encountered in nature.
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Firstly, let's introduce The Pop Man. Kids these days won't believe you could get stuff just delivered to your door, but back in the 70s and 80s, a man (there may have been Pop Women, but I never saw one) would come around once a week and take away your empties and leave fresh bottles of fizzy sugary confection coloured with luridly hued industrial chemical process byproducts. It was the happiest day of any week because we were all sugar junkies. Don't drink it all, wailed our mother's vainly, that has to last all week. Fortunately, diabetes had yet to be invented, in fact, I think we were working on that very invention.
Anyway, the product was a variety of pop. We think it was called Grandcham. Neither of us can find any record of this childhood nectar or anything similar. It was a like Iron Brew (that's what unofficial Irn Brus were called) but lighter in colour and with a taste never before encountered in nature.
Oh yes! Ours was improbably called Mr Bacon, which is absolutely the best name ever for a purveyor of fizzy sugar water. He* used to come round with a flatbed lorry laden with crates of bottles, filled with such delights as Dandelion & Burdock and Golden Lemonade. I don't recall Grandcham or anything similar, but there was the ersatz Iron Brew.
*More likely it was actually one of his minions, much like those red-suited, fake-bearded bastards who try to pass themselves off as Father Christmas, although apparently there really was a Mr Bacon, he wasn't just a Col Sanders-type marketing fiction - Henry Thomas Samuel Bacon, to be precise.
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I suspect my wife and I may have somehow concocted a fictional drink that really should have existed in our childhood. A sort of kiddie champagne (which we assumed it was, hence the name), the Queen of carbonated beverages. It's quite possible we've convinced each other as to its existence as we can both not only remember drinking it but can recall the taste and colour. Oh well, if you're going to have a false memory, fictional fizzy pop is probably better than satanic ritual abuse. That said, I really want it to exist. Grandcham, not Satan.
I think our pop came from Alpine. I also remember pineappleade. Honestly, that had never been near a pineapple and glowed like an unattended nuclear reactor. The cherryade was similar, and you had be very careful not to spill it, as it would indelibly stain anything it came into contact with. There are council house front steps still bright red forty years later because someone dropped a bottle of the stuff.
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Pineappleade. Don't remember that. But as I was passing through the Bearpit a couple of days ago (the Bearpit is a sunken area in the middle of a roundabout with subways in and out in the middle of Bristol, a delightful gem of 1960s or 70s town planning but it does have a bear), one of the residents tried to convince me by means of a painted bit of board that the pineapple is the new fruit of peace. He was definitely on something stronger than any -ade.
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I loved Mr Bacon's Cherryade, which I presume was made to the same or very similar recipe (or perhaps that should be 'chemical formula' rather than 'recipe').
We also had a Sodastream, of course. Always did too many pumps of the gas in a bid to make it more fizzy, inevitably leading to it bubbling over.
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We had a SodaStream at some point, the novelty was mostly dented by the foul taste of the syrups, but on the plus side you could superstrength your drink by mixing half syrup with half water. Like everything in my childhood, it was rationed, so I had to eek out the carbon dioxide until the cylinder could do little more than a gentle, resigned sigh into the bottle. To this day I like flat soft drinks, and this is probably why, it's a learned response from a pikey-parented childhood.
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Sodastream + milk + impressionable little brother. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. :demon:
(Its day job was carbonating tap water[1] so my mum could listen to it fizzing on her bedside table, or something. Though there were also experiments with super-strength cherryade. The Amiga 500's mouse cable became irrevocably contaminated with the stuff, and we had to wrap it in insulating tape to *reduce* the stickiness.)
[1] Which IMHO had more than enough carbon in it already.
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To take away the smell of the chlorine gas...?
Bloody tapwater around stinks like cheap Domestos or Formula 77 which incidentally used to be made in Middleton...
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Is there some unexpected interaction between milk and sodastream (I'm treating 'it's fizzy and rank as an expected one...)? I vaguely recall my childhood mate's one having dire warnings against trying to carbonate dairy, and somehow we never dared try it.
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Foam. Lots of foam. :hand:
(Lovely. Milky milky.)
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Yes, I vaguely recall trying that experiment too. We were trying to invent kefir before it was fashionable, obviously.
Only tried it the once, obviously.
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Where does the Pop Man, mentioned up thread, end and Tom Lehrer's Old Dope Peddler begin?
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You know Sodastream is going high end? They're trying to move away from the machines we grew up with that honked like disc brakes when putting fizz into things. They are trying to persuade people to buy high end machines and glass bottles with push buttons and servos to control exactly how much fizz goes in. I think they saw what Nespresso can charge and thought they'd like some of that.
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The Alpine Lorry , that's a childhood memory. Bright green Cream Soda, Orange, Pineapple & plain white fizz. Don't remember the Cherry.
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Oh yes the Alpine man. American Cream Soda though, what was that about? About the same time my brother lived off fizzy Vimto, which is probably one reason why his teeth are so crumbly now.
Then we moved to Aberdeen and it was all Bon Accord drinks instead. Moray Cup :sick:
I loved the cherry cola sodastream though.
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Have we had boil in the bag meals yet? I particularly remember the chicken curry meal. Cant recall who made them tho, maybe Batchelors?
Boil in a bag fish meals, Vesta curries and crispy pancakes. I was introduced to all these at the age 17 on a 2 week YHA cycle tour by my best mate. I guess they were common fare in his house, I'd never seen them before.
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Powdered Oxtail soup.
I liked it. :P
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Powdered Oxtail soup.
I liked it. :P
Cooked or straight from the packet? :D
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In a mug, with the sludge at the bottom
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Boil-in-the-bag fish in parsley sauce was a childhood staple. Our freezer was a battle between the forces of Captain Birdseye and Findus. Battalions of crispy pancakes, squadrons of fish fingers, and a corps of various extruded, reformed, and breaded potato products.
A large part of childhood is submerged in parsley sauce. I imagine that if you could build a pipe that goes back in time to drain my childhood we could basically form a large lake of the stuff. And who wouldn't want a lake of historical parsley sauce? Out of bags or the staple Knorr packet. You had to keep stirring it, a moment of inattention meant it clagged on the bottle of the pan and guaranteed washing up fun. My parents only had children because they couldn't afford an electric dishwasher. It was quite a shock for me to realise that sauces and soups didn't have to come out of a packet. I even assumed that soup in a tin was probably out of a packet originally. My best friend's mum was proper middle-class and used to cook things from actual recipes which was both astounding and troubling. He wasn't allowed to eat crispy pancakes unless he came round my house, which I think he did all the time. The only thing my mother ever really cooked was meat and potato pie. This was a casserole dish filled with potatoes in Bisto covered with a piece of frozen puff pastry, a sort of DIY Fray Bentos. There was supposed to be mince in it, but in my entire childhood I never found any meat in one of her pies, the best you could hope for was a lump of undissolved gravy powder.
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Have we had boil in the bag meals yet? I particularly remember the chicken curry meal. Cant recall who made them tho, maybe Batchelors?
Boil in a bag fish meals, Vesta curries and crispy pancakes. I was introduced to all these at the age 17 on a 2 week YHA cycle tour by my best mate. I guess they were common fare in his house, I'd never seen them before.
I don't think I have EVER had any of these!
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There was an urban legend at primary school relating to the free milk (I went to primary school before Thatcher snatched the milk).
Our local dairy was Express Dairies, so most of the little bottles were theirs and had an italic "E" on them. A few bottles from other dairies used to creep in from time to time, probably because they were mistakenly returned to the wrong bottling plant.
It was believed by almost everyone that the bottles with the Co-Op logo contained goat's milk, so they were always the last to be taken.
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Parsley sauce:
Never had this a home.
Made some from scratch for David in the microwave.
Packet was on Special Offer from Sainsbury's recently so I thought I'd giv it a whirl. NOW WAY was I going to use a saucepan so I adapted the instructions to make in a Pyrex jug in the microwave. Result was OK but HOW MUCH did I pay for a little seasoning and flour? Even on Special, this seemed like a rip-off!
And there was the obligatory single-use plastic sachet.
Will not repeat.
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There were lots of wonderful fried things you could have for lunch. Findus Crispy Pancakes, obviously, but also Chicklets (reconstituted chicken arses and eyelids in coarse beige breadcrumbs) and a cheese and potato triangular thing in orange breadcrumbs, whose name I can't remember.
It's a wonder I'm still alive.
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There was an urban legend at primary school relating to the free milk (I went to primary school before Thatcher snatched the milk).
Our local dairy was Express Dairies, so most of the little bottles were theirs and had an italic "E" on them. A few bottles from other dairies used to creep in from time to time, probably because they were mistakenly returned to the wrong bottling plant.
The glass milk bottles in which my pints are delivered do not all bear the 'Milk and More' branding: I frequently get Cotteswold Dairies and many bottles now have no branding. Kirby and West were the Dairy that supplied my Leicester childhood. I had one of their bottle not long ago and got all nostalgic.
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Lunch? Lunch. It's dinner. And in the evening, tea.
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Our freezer was a battle between the forces of Captain Birdseye and Findus.
Both brands owned by Nomad now, of course.
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I am reminded of Ruskoline, but I can't think of any childhood meals that were slathered with it.
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Our freezer was a battle between the forces of Captain Birdseye and Findus.
Both brands owned by Nomad now, of course.
Shocking, the two sides of the grand frozen battle reconciled. Clarence will be spinning in his flash-frozen grave.
Ah, the school dinner joke of I've just been fingered by Captain Birdseye while waving around a fish finger. It's hilarious when you're eight and evidently have no clue what being 'fingered' is other than it's probably rude, and for boy, unlikely as it wasn't a Catholic school. If you wanted anatomy lessons there was a girl with the exotic name of Francesca who'd apparently pull down her knickers for 20p and frankly quite scared us all. It's telling that rather than available ourselves of that opportunity, we'd buy four packs of Football 77 cards in hope of not getting another bloody Trevor Francis and instead the near-mythical Sheffield Wednesday badge that everyone needed. And I didn't even like football.
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Goblin Meat puddings. Individual little tins (like a small beans tin), the method was put a small hole in and pop in a saucepan of boiling water for 10 mins or so. It was a suet pastry outer casing with mince (?) filling.
Smash instant dried potato mash. Remember the adverts? The tins were dead handy for storing things in afterwards.
Jacket potatoes with cheese. Baked in the oven, a little slice off the top, innards removed and mixed with grated cheese, replace in shell, slice of cheese over top and back in oven for a bit. Saturday night treat as we gathered around the small portable telly to watch Dr Who.
I never liked fish fingers.
Meat paste (beef or chicken) sandwiches using white sliced bread. Felt naughty and decadent (we were normally only allowed Allinson Stoneground Wholemeal medium sliced bread, eaten until it was finished no matter how dry).
Oven chips were the sort of thing rich middle class people had. Mam only allowed us the chips she made in the old-fashioned chip pan. (Oven chips were far nicer).
Orange juice was Apeel powder or something expensive in a pub.
Birds Custard powder. Used to make Banana custard (yum).
On the whole I prefer food these days to when I was a bairn.
GC
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We still use Bird's custard powder, though I make custard in the microwave now.
It's cheap comfort food that keeps The Man quiet...
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Apeel, that's the stuff I was talking about earlier, the faux-orange juice mix that never quite dissolved (or taste like orange juice, but who really knew what orange juice tasted like back then). Orange juice was too posh for my house. Well, everything was too posh for my house.
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The only things worse than chips cooked in the oven are McCain's MicroChips. The person who invented them should be tracked down and forcibly relocated to Edmonton, where he can eat MicroChips and dead dogs for the rest of his short and unhappy life.
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The only things worse than chips cooked in the oven are McCain's MicroChips. The person who invented them should be tracked down and forcibly relocated to Edmonton, where he can eat MicroChips and dead dogs for the rest of his short and unhappy life.
I dunno, they're the Pot Noodle of chips, and have natural PSO-appeal.
Oven chips are just crap. (Especially if you cook them in a gas oven that's so low-end they come out with the consistency of MicroChips, or a fan oven that renders the crunchy bits into little flakes of carbon.)
Special mention to the hot chip vending machine that appeared in my last year at $sniversity. It appeared to function by taking pre-cooked oven chips and heating them for a minute or two in a stream of hot air of the type normally used for stripping paint. The results were as cardboard as you'd expect, and the obvious target market (drunk people) wouldn't have had the attention span to wait for them to be delivered.
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I quite like oven chips. Never had these MicroChips. Are they actually tiny or does it just mean they're somehow optimised for cooking in a microwave? I can't imagine the latter working well, but in any case I'll take a texture of silicon as read.
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I quite like oven chips. Never had these MicroChips. Are they actually tiny or does it just mean they're somehow optimised for cooking in a microwave? I can't imagine the latter working well, but in any case I'll take a texture of silicon as read.
The latter, and it doesn't.
They come in a cardboard box with a magic insert that's designed to somehow concentrate heat (I assume it's poorly electrically conductive). The result is steamy soggy chips (so not particularly siliconesque) whose main appeal is that you can have hot food in 3 minutes without any washing-up or chip-pan fires.
ETA: In a futile attempt to google for how the magic insert works, I've discovered that they've been re-branded as "Quick Chips", presumably because people stopped talking about microchips (in the integrated circuit sense) in about 1989 and the otherwise excellent pun is now lost on their target demographic.