1970s food memories

Thirty years ago, people who ate brown bread were thought food-faddy fools. I know, because I ate it whenever I could find it - which wasn't very often - and got called names by the kids who had Spam and tomato sauce butties made with Mother's Pride or Sunblest at the school packed-lunch table. The only brown bread the supermarkets sold was Hovis, and the life of a teenage bread eater was very dull until the grand day came when a slice of toast, white or brown, could be jazzed up by the application of a Heinz Toast Topper. This cheesy goo came in a small tin and was so packed with fat, salt and E numbers that exposure to a naked flame or direct sunlight risked touching off a terrible chain reaction that might have coated my poor old mum's magnolia-painted kitchen with luminous orange/yellow plasma and made the trio of plaster ducks take flight from the wall of our lounge-diner. I became hyper whenever I had some: all those chemicals whizzing and fizzing and tripping neuro-synapses in a most unusual way, the grease sealing my adolescent arteries, the salt making my heart pound and my throat dry, the colourants lending my eyeballs the hue of steroid rage. It was a pre-emptive chemical warfare strike of cataclysmic force on what we would come to know in the ill-starred decades that followed as healthy eating.

Toast Toppers came up in conversation the other day during a short gallop in the paddock where 1970s food memories are stored. My interlocutor's enthusiasm proved greater than my own, and she confessed to having it for breakfast on occasion. We concluded that such a product could no longer be sold legally in food-fascist Britannia. Far Too Many Bad Things. If it was sold at all anywhere in the world, it would surely only be to African dictators wanting to keep their personal bodyguards pepped up or to men who made a living mending punctures in bicycle tyres and were fresh out of suitable glue. What other possible uses could it have? Wrong on all counts. It is still for sale and I obtained four tins yesterday from the horrid Tesco in St Neots. I am assuming, BTW, that it is available in other stores too and that this is not just some cruel maltreatment or junk-food consumption experiment involving the unwitting bumpkins of old Huntingdonshire.Two varieties were on offer - ham and cheese and chicken and mushroom, each tin costing 53p. I seem to recall that the bits purporting to be meat were tiny and not especially numerous. Shredded beermat would be nearest imaginable thing.

I am going to have some for lunch later today. At least, I am going to open it, spread it on the untoasted side of a slice of jolly nice brown bread and return it to the grill until the topping is hot and bubbling. Actually eating it may be a step too far, in which case the remaining tins will go into the muddly drawer against a national emergency. A soda siphon will be kept to hand in case of spontaneous combustion.

Here are a few more 1970s food to rake up memories: Campbell's Meat Balls; Angel Delight; Walnut Whip; Cresta (a soft drink advertised by a hippy bear who said 'It's frothy, man'); Goblin steak and kidney puddings; all types of Vesta dehydrated Indian and Chinese meals; loathsome frankfurters in jars; a sort of home-made ice cream stuff you mixed with milk and put in the freezer compartment; little tins of condensed milk; big tins of chunky beef or chicken in white sauce. Finally, another Heinz product: beans with little pork sausasges (sausges containing little pork). I suppose most of these products are still available. Hope so. Ski yogurt may have existed before the 1970s but only impinged on my consciouness at that point. It was advertised on television by means of a short film showing the parents and children in a perfect family throwing a beach ball to one another. Since my family consisted of a lunatic and martinet I wanted to machine-gun the telly whenever it came on.

After the break...a brief history of chicken Kievs and more of those whacky adverts for Memory Lane Cakes and Greenall Whitley bitter.

UPDATE: I've just read the labels on those Toast Toppers. 72 calories and 1.8 grams of fat per tin. Ambrosia.