Memories of sweet snacks

The books in our kitchen have been offering up a wealth of inspiration and know-how for years.

They get read like a novel, taken to bed for soothing night-time reading, end up splattered with food (though not while in bed, I hasten to add), have pencil scribblings in countless margins, and are adorned with bookmarks a-plenty.

Some of the books date back to the time of my mother-in-law’s grandmother who filled her home-produced recipe book with a veritable cornucopia of ideas that work equally well in the modern kitchen as they did more than a century ago.

Some were last seen on a supermarket shelf before finding their way into our kitchen as regularly as the grocery shopping.

One, I’m ashamed to say, found its way into my school satchel and never found its way back to the domestic science block at Beverley High School.

And others are from the likes of America, Hungary, Peru, Estonia and other far flung outposts.

So why is it then, that when I think back to the food of my formative years it’s all the rubbish stuff I remember?

Yes, we had the roast beef dinners on a Sunday (not a slice of succulent medium-rare pink meat anywhere, but my mum’s roasties were unbeatable), fish on Fridays and mounds of vegetables the size of Whernside.

It might have been all the same veg (cabbage, usually) but we were ahead of the health police’s game because we were having our seven or ten servings of the stuff decades ago.

It just happened to be in one sitting.

But the after school snacks took some beating.

We’d bound in at 4pm absolutely starving hungry like we hadn’t eaten for a week, never mind that dinnertime, and raid the cupboard for cornflakes and the fridge for milk.

A mammoth bowl of the crinkly orange flaky stuff would go down our throats like rubbish down a chute, while we eyed up the bread bin.

Next would come three slices of kapok-like plastic white squares, slathered with butter then arranged so they overlapped slightly before the whole lot was liberally sprinkled with sugar and rolled up into a sausage. We dubbed it the Mother’s Pride swiss roll and it would serve as the amuse bouche before we sat down to tea at 6pm.

It sounds pretty disgusting now and it’s enough to harden your arteries and put on 14 stone in a day just thinking about it, but were we fat?

No we weren’t because snacking raids aside we were rarely indoors, but busy unclogging our arteries outside mucking about with our mates.

But even this was gourmet stuff compared to the sweets we ate.

We weren’t allowed many, with our dad bringing home a weekly ration on Friday nights, but what we did get we’d chomp on like contented cows chewing the cud.

Spanish gold, the pretend tobacco threads of sugar encrusted coconut, and sweet cigarettes with red tips – you can’t believe it now, can you, given how smoking is now so uncool.

Nobody thought anything of silly seven-year-olds pretending a sophistication that clearly wasn’t there as they tried to emulate adults around them smoking their Senior Service plain or Number 6 tipped.

Then there was the liquorice. Catherine wheels and pipes (smoking again!), bootlaces you’d unravel as head back, you gulped it down inch by inch, like a sword swallower.

The twisted lengths like cheese straws, and wands with the ends dipped in hundreds-and-thousands – pieces that you’d agonise over about which you’d choose to eat first.

Then we’d have competitions to see who could get the blackest teeth and tongues, grinning inanely at each other.

I loved the stuff so much that for a birthday present I once asked for a big box of it – just like the ones in sweet shops you would find on the penny and tuppenny trays –ate pretty much the whole lot in one go, and then wondered why I had to spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom.

To this day I love the stuff, and on the rare occasions I succumb, it’s still the sugar fix of choice.

But not one of those 1,200-plus cookery books in my kitchen has a recipe showing you how to make it.