Tag Archives: sweets

Lent

I have a draft post which will go out in the next few days but as it’s Ash Wednesday today and therefore, to Christians, the first day of Lent, I thought I’d share some of my memories of Lent when I was young. Nowadays, I don’t hear many people talking about Lent and about giving anything up for six weeks but when I was a child we wouldn’t have even considered not doing it.

Every year, for most of my school days, I gave up biscuits. What a pleasure it was, over the Easter weekend, to indulge in not only a chocolate Easter egg from my mum and dad but a couple of biscuits with a cup of tea. I remember one year, when I was old enough to go to the shop on my own, my mum gave me some money (it would have been approximately a shilling – about 5 pence in current money)) to choose my own packet. My current favourites at that time were called Milk and Honey and were a bit like Jammy Dodgers and that’s what I chose.

Image result for milk and honey biscuits
This ad says they were two shillings and fourpence per pound. A standard packet is about eight ounces.

One Lent, when I was about ten, I gave up sugar in tea. Within days I found I preferred it and still take it sugarless. In comparison, my mum gave up taking sugar in her tea every Lent for her whole life. You would have thought that by the end of six weeks she would have got used to the sugarless drink. Oh no! Every year she spent six weeks disliking the taste of every single cuppa and breathing a sigh of relief when she first allowed herself a cup of tea with sugar in.

Image result for 1950s sugar packet
A 1950s pack of sugar. I’d forgotten how different they were!

My sister often gave up sweets for Lent. One year (or maybe she did it more than once and kept it quiet?) she gave them up as usual but every time she was offered one she would take it and pop it in a tin in her bedroom. These were all saved until, when Lent ended, she had a nice little collection to munch her way through.

Image result for 1950s sweets uk
Image result for 1950s sweets uk
Some examples of the kind of sweets which might have been saved in my sister’s tin – with apologies to her for telling the tale!)

As always the images used, in order to add a bit of atmosphere to the post, are sourced from the Internet. I make every effort to avoid infringing copyright but if anyone objects to my use of an image I will remove it.

Sweet Treats.

I have covered this before in the very early days of this blog. That post covered sweets, biscuits and chocolate. This time, in a revisiting of the subject, I am sticking to children’s pocket money treats which they could buy in the local shop. There was always a mixture of packet, branded sweets on the counter. I particularly recall Spangles, Fruit Gums, Fruit Pastilles, Refreshers, Love Hearts, Polos. The chocolate bars I remember best are Fry’s Chocolate Cream, Turkish Delight, Mars, Milky Way, KitKat, Crunchie.

Then there were the loose sweets, usually sold out of jars and weighed out on scales into a paper bag. The usual amount children asked for was ‘a quarter’. This meant four ounces or a quarter of a pound. Sometimes you would order two ounces – especially if it was the end of your pocket money week! The smaller portions were weighed out into a cone shaped paper bag, the quarters into a square one. The loose sweets were myriad. I will name a few which I remember best. Shrimps (which always looked more like ears to me), aniseed balls, barley sugars, Everton Mints, butterscotch gums.

Britain's Most Popular Sweets: 1950s - Mr Simms Olde Sweet Shoppe          Original Vintage 1950s- 'Spangles' - Picture Post Magazine ...

Love Hearts                                           Spangles.

The Adventures of Bertie Bassett 1950s UK. Liquorice Allsorts ...        Flying Saucers

Liquorice Allsorts.                                Flying Saucers.

1950s sweets - a delicious trip down memory lane.

A 1950s sweet shop.

Lollies and Sweets Original Sweet Shop Tenby. 1950s Sweets Memory Pack        Mouthwatering Barley Sugar: Gluten & Gelatine Free

Sherbet Fountains.                             Barley sugars.

 

 

Remember These?

A friend of mine mentioned recently that her favourite tinned soup is Mulligatawny but that she never sees it in the shops any more. I remember it too and her comment made me think of some other food items which have disappeared or almost disappeared in the past few decades. Some of these have been mentioned before in posts about foods I remember eating and ones I remember arriving on the scene when I was young.

I am not saying that these things don’t exist any more (although some of them definitely don’t) just that I don’t hear of or see them any more.

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I used to love Kraft Dairylea  triangles and for a while there was a box of flavoured ones being sold. I loved them! The picture is the nearest I could find to what I’m remembering but the flavours are not exactly the same.

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Turnips and swedes were once as common as carrots and parsnips when I was a child but are now they are like the poor relation of the root vegetable world. I certainly never see them on a menu when eating out! And does anyone still eat tripe? Or mutton?

I was watching a programme on TV the other night called Back in Time for Tea (recommended to me by the same friend) in which a family’s home is transported back to earlier decades. In the one where they were living as if in the 1960s – complete with 60s furniture, decor, clothes and food – there was a food item in their pantry which was Heinz tinned Vegetable Salad. I remember that there was also a Potato Salad one. There are many, many varieties of salad dishes available on deli counters now – coleslaw, rice salads, cous cous salads and tons more – in plastic pots. I had completely forgotten that their precursors came in tins!

download (1)   heinz-potato-salad

My grandmother absolutely loved butterscotch gums and I often took her a packet – weighed out from a large glass jar into a paper bag – when I went to see her. Spangles were a popular sweet when I was a child and for a while they had a packet called Old English Spangles with flavours like mint and liquorice. They were brilliant!

download (2)   196f5952f272e1173f28509819d5f4f3

Surprise Peas, which I have mentioned before, were what came before frozen peas and were ‘freeze dried’ and very quick to cook. The rise of home freezers and cheap frozen peas meant that Surprise Peas were no longer desirable so they disappeared.

womans-weekly-1964_part1-crest-surprise-peas-copy.jpg

Now we come to blancmange. Everybody of my age and older remembers blancmange. It was a set milky fruit flavoured dessert made in a mould and went with jelly like fish go with chips. It could be made from scratch but there was a packet mix which most people used. I read on a website when I was looking blancmange up that the nearest equivalent is the Italian dessert panna cotta.

blancmange.jpg    1950s-packet-pearce-duff-blancmange_360_de627073e5bc84a183883ef4953421a0

Burgers hadn’t reached Britain in the 1950s but we did have things called rissoles (I never hear that word now!) and faggots. I know faggot has a non-food meaning in some parts of the world but to us it was a kind of meatball.

faggots.JPG   download (3)

A few other edible things which are no more . . . .

3360817170_8b3c5c9205    13824818843_8d6f8177b6_z

huntley        s-l500

It’s unthinkable in this PC age but children could buy imitation cigarettes which were sweets!

01fa29a7deb74affac0b48754a2265ac     p5-smoking-b-20140106.jpg

The tinned milk products below are still available but are largely used in cooking desserts. Back in the 1950s in Britain when most homes, and many local shops, didn’t have fridges these were what we called ‘cream’ and we had them on fruit salads (tinned in those days!), trifles and fruit pies.

105914  carnation-evaporated-milk-desserts_1200x1200 ideal-milk

Twelfth Night Reflections.

As it is the 6th of January and I have just taken down my tree and my Christmas cards, I thought I would look back at Christmas 60 odd years ago. I have covered this before but I hope to mention some things which didn’t come up last time.

The build up to Christmas was nothing like as long as it is now but one thing which was always done early was the making of the Christmas cake and the Christmas pudding. My mum used to do these several weeks beforehand and it was always exciting to be a part of the preparation. It seemed very exotic when my mum added a small glass of sherry to the cake mix. When the pudding mixture was being stirred we three children all took a turn at having a stir and making a wish whilst stirring. Then came the bit where my mum concealed a silver sixpenny piece (carefully cleaned) into the bowl with the mixture. It was said that whoever got the sixpence in their portion on Christmas Day would have good luck. I have a feeling that when we were little my mum used to put three in our pudding so that we children found one each. Nobody would dream of putting a small metal coin into a pudding now in our safety-conscious age but none of us ever choked or broke a tooth!

sixpenses                                 Image result for christmas pudding cloth

Our stockings were long brown hand-knitted woollen ones. I believe a relative had knitted a few pairs for my dad to wear under wellingtons when he was out at work in the forests. We had the same ones right through childhood and the feeling of those stocking stiff and full on a Christmas morning is still with me. There was always and apple and an orange in the toes, some chocolate coins, a new hankie, a new flannel and a new toothbrush, some sweets and a little novelty peeping out of the top – a small toy or a sugar mouse, maybe. Anything bigger than stocking size from Father Christmas (I never heard him called Santa at that time) was under the tree. We always had a selection box each.

After stockings and breakfast and before opening the rest of the presents we would walk to the village church for the Christmas morning service which was always one of the most exciting services of the year. The church would be packed, even though our village was tiny as everyone made the effort to attend on Christmas morning.

stockings_socks          sugar_mouse_white

There would be presents from a few relatives and presents from and to each other. Board games were very popular gifts and sometimes at Christmas there might be a compendium of games with five or six board games in one box. Other presents which were often given were paintboxes, weaving, sewing, raffia and painting by numbers kits, magic sets, dressing up outfits, Meccano and card games like Snap and Happy Families.

compendium-of-games-spears-toys-draughts-dominoes-ludo-_1           happy-families

In the 1950s in Britain chicken was quite a luxury and that was what we had on Christmas Day. Turkey came on the scene later.

The afternoon was always punctuated by the Queen’s speech. We listened to it on the radio through the 50s and then watched it on TV from 1961 when we got out first television.

biscuit-tin           roses

On Boxing Day there was always a circus on the TV in the afternoon which we all watched (with the curtains drawn as we did in those days!) whilst dipping into or selection boxes.

 

50s-christmas-paper-lanterns-1                                       baubles

Tree decorations were mostly baubles and the baubles were made of glass. I still have three of the ones we had on our trees when I was small.

50s-toys                  toys-walldisplay

We always received a new diary each for Christmas and in the back of the new diary I would carefully write down my New Year’s Resolutions. The other writing task was the composing of thank-you letters to relatives who had sent us presents. My mum always made sure these were done before we went back to school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where did they go? Part 2

Once I started thinking about words, phrases, items and brands which have disappeared from use since the 1950s, I kept remembering more and more!

Some of the sweets and chocolates which have gone are Spangles, Bar Six, Tiffin (my favourite!), Five Boys and Fruit Polos.

               

As for clothes, does anyone remember wearing a Liberty Bodice? It was an extra warm button through vest which most children wore all winter when I was little. As girls rarely wore trousers in those days, winter wear was a warm skirt or pinafore dress in wool or corduroy. Kilts were extremely popular and for the very young they had straps like the one in the photo. Disappeared brands I recall – Cherub and Ladybird clothes. Birthday, Start-Rite and Tuf shoes.                     

The golliwog is an extinct toy now for all the right reasons. However, in the politically incorrect days of my childhood, they were very popular toys. Robertson’s Jam’s golly badges were extremely collectible! To the children of the times a golly was a colourful soft toy and completely innocent. Many of the toy cars my brother, sister and I played with were Dinky Toys. They were made by Mecca I’ve discovered when researching for this post. Now that’s another toy brand which has disappeared!

        

One last food memory – who remembers rissoles, faggots and spam fritters?

Sweets, Chocolates and Biscuits.

All children love sweet things. The fact that we didn’t have them all the time (mum was fussy about our teeth, money wasn’t plentiful, we didn’t live near any shops) made them even more of an attraction. When Nana came to live with us, she started giving us 6d each on a Saturday morning. We would either walk the mile to the village shop to buy sweets or, if Dad was working on Saturday morning, we would go in the car with him to the town and spend it there.

As well as the packets and bars, some of which are shown here, there were the large glass jars with loose sweets in which were weighed out in 4oz portions into a paper bag. If you bought 2oz, the paper bag was triangular. Some loose sweets I remember
– aniseed balls, barley sugar, Everton Mints and pineapple chunks.


T


I remember there often being a sugar mouse poking out of the top of my Christmas stocking.

The biscuits I remember being offered most often when out for tea are – Nice biscuits, those horrid pink wafer ones, custard creams, Bourbon and ginger nuts. Cadbury’s chocolate fingers were strictly for birthday parties!