Foods that evoke childhood memories

When you think of school dinners you think chips and coleslaw or chips and bean or fish and chips or a cheese flan or steak and kidney pie with chips. You also think of desserts like jam tarts and custard or apple pie and custard or spotted dick and custard plus a whole range of snacks you’d be able to buy at play time.

School food used to be filling, tasty and memorable.

Speaking of memorable, there are a whole load of foods, drinks and sweets that take you back to your childhood. I mentioned a lot of them above but whenever I wander through the aisles in supermarkets I sometimes come across things that remind me of school days.

On our way home we’d come across this grassy knoll that had several bushes that were covered in berries. My friends and I would pick them and eat them every single day. The notion that they could have been poisonous never crossed our minds and, thank God, they weren’t because if they were I wouldn’t be here telling you about it. I still wonder what those berries were because I cannot recall their taste. I just remember them being bright red and shiny, like beads.

When my youngest sister was born, my mum had to take her to hospital for her regular check-ups, as they do with newborns in England. She’d take us all and on the way home, our mum would stop off at the hospital canteen to get us all a glass of lemonade. I never tasted that lemonade again, that is until I picked up a bottle of lemon cordial from the supermarket during Ramadan. That was the exact taste but unfortunately that brand only appears during Ramadan and is now no longer available.

Wafers also remind me of school playtime. We’d be given tuck money and with mine I’d always buy wafers and something called a bettabar. It was made from some kind of corn-like kernels compressed into a sweet bar. It was hard and chewy but tasty too. I’ve never come across that again.

Bonbons also take me back, as do liquorice of all sorts, although I haven’t been able to find the latter here. Bubble gum also does the same although it was never my favourite sweet. But there are these tiny sweets that burst with zing and intense flavour on your tongue. I remember picking them up from a sweetshop on the way home. Walkers crisps were also a regular staple on the way home for all kids and seeing those bags in some shops does bring back memories.

I am also taken aback by weird tasting colas, and I don’t mean the 2 famous brands we all know and drink. I say this because the taste of the weird ones is an awful lot like the home-made colas we used to make with the SodaStream. The soda that device made was odd tasting and not very fizzy but we had a lot of fun making them, even though I think it would probably have been cheaper buying a bottle. But summertime wouldn’t have been summertime without the good old ice pole. That’s what it’s called in the UK. In America it goes by the name of ice pop. An ice pole is a liquid, usually flavoured with orange, blackcurrant, strawberries and lemon, and frozen inside a long, thin, pole shaped, transparent plastic container that you had to cut open from the top to suck at its contents. It is not an ice cream, nor a sorbet, but close to the latter. It is actually water that has had flavour added to it and it went down a treat, especially since it wasn’t too expensive.

And finally, I used to love sponge cakes, especially those made by Mr Kipling’s. It was long, rectangular shaped and covered in pink icing. When you cut into it, you had to cut downwards, you could see 4 squares each in a different colour. They all seem to taste the same but it was fun to eat. And last but not least, their fairy cakes. They too were covered in icing sugar with a cherry on top and they looked almost too good to eat. And they were very scrumptious. I think in America, fairy cakes are called cupcakes?