Simon Hattenstone
Coco Pops
I loved Rice Krispies because of the Snap! Crackle! Pop! I loved Ricicles more because they were Rice Krispies with extra sugar. And I loved Coco Pops most because they were Rice Krispies with extra sugar and chocolate. Chocolate for breakfast – dreamy! The great thing about Coco Pops is you get two meals for the price of one. Eat them immediately and you’ve got a fabulously feisty, crunchy breakfast. Wait a minute till they’re drenched in the milk, and you get the yummiest soothing, soggy mush.
I didn’t eat them for decades because I (kind of) grew up, and Coco Pops are for kids, right? Wrong. A few weeks ago I picked up a pack of Coco Pops and got straight back into the habit. Not only do they taste just as good, but they have nostalgia value these days. Who needs a time machine? I can travel back to childhood on my Coco Pops.
I’ve also discovered they work equally well for lunch, tea and late-night feasts. So if you’re feeling lazy or self-indulgent, just stick to Coco Pops. A word of warning, though: only Kellogg’s understand the magic of what makes a true crispy. Resist Choco Pops, Coco Drops, Cacky Slops, whatever the supermarkets choose to call their own-brand fakes. Rest assured they won’t crunch, sog or taste like a true Coco Pop.
Emma Beddington
Tinned fruit cocktail
I had a violently sweet tooth as a child. In primary school I was once caught trying to organise an illegal raffle to buy myself more McCowan’s Highland Toffee. I don’t know where that early entrepreneurial spirit or audacity went, but the sweet tooth stuck, so I’m hopeful tinned fruit cocktail will still be the exotic delight I first discovered at Brownie camp. I fell hard for its tropical promise and lobbied to have it at home as often as I could persuade my reluctant mother. The warm orange peach pieces, pretty pale pear, extra-sweet pineapple chunks and the glow of jewel-like glacé cherries (two precious halves per serving): it all felt so sophisticated.
Opening the tin, I realise I had forgotten the grapes, which are a bit spooky, and everything seems smaller. Peach dominates and there’s hardly any pineapple (supply chain issues?), but pleasingly, the cherry ratio is still observed. I pour it into a nice bowl (a sophisticated dessert deserves respect) and dig in.
Much like a bag of Revels, there’s an order for eating fruit cocktail. It returns to me instantly after 40-odd years: grape, pear, peach, pineapple and cherries saved for last. I don’t even like glacé cherries, but respect the rules to the letter.
How is it? Amazing. It tastes of nothing more than a whisper of fruitiness – and I can only tell which chunk I’m eating by texture – but it’s a cosseting, delicious almost-nothing and I smash through the whole thing in seconds. Then I drink the “light syrup” as if my molars and pancreas mean nothing to me and enjoy a wild half-hour sugar rush before crashing into deep torpor. I thought adulthood would taste like this; I wish it did.
Chitra Ramaswamy
Findus french bread pizza
This may have been my introduction to the baguette (sorry, France). Or, rather, to a wan frozen truncheon constructed out of cardboard and bad breath, sliced down the middle and slathered with tomato sauce, cheddar cheese and a thousand terrifying cubes of tomato and green pepper. My sister and I, as major Roald Dahl fans, dubbed these cubes “vermicious knids” and they became our gateway to vegetable refusal. We took immense pleasure in tweezing each one off like small but entitled Michelin-starred chefs. All those hours playing Operation must have steadied our hands.
I recall my teeth sinking into the bread pillow, molten cheese burning the roof of my mouth. And the crap crunch, which like everything in childhood was nothing like it was on the advert.
Roughly 40 years later, Findus french bread pizzas are, like tomatoes and hope, no more. In Lidl I find the 2023 equivalent: two Chicago Town cheese and tomato subs for £1.25. Even the picture is right: the subs teem with vermicious knids. Back home I pop one in the oven and the smell of the 1980s – essentially over-sweetened tomato sauce and really bad cheese – fills the room. Once it’s out, I can’t help myself. I pick off the vermicious knids and let the ensuing Proustian flood wash over me. Here she is, my beloved mum, who died three years ago, presenting these new-fangled Findus pizzas to us with excitement. Who knew a Chicago Town sub would make me cry?
Sam Wollaston
Angel Delight
My childhood was, on the whole, reasonably happy. I won’t go as far as to say that Angel Delight was the reason for this, but it certainly played a part. Never strawberry (tasted pink), only occasionally butterscotch (too vommy), generally chocolate (perfect).
It was probably the first food I ever prepared. It’s not hard to add a sachet of powder to milk, but I learned that it paid to whisk longer for a lighter, bubblier mix. And I would pour it into a glass to set, like the picture on the packet, for a more sophisticated dessert. Sometimes I – whisper it – crumbled a Flake over the top, for extra decadence.
It’s reassuring to find, in an age of bitter dark salted Belgian nonsense, that chocolate Angel Delight still exists, even if the glass on the packet has gone. Ingredients: sugar, modified starch, palm oil, fat-reduced cocoa powder, gelling agents (diphosphates, sodium phosphates) … OK, so maybe we don’t need to look too closely at the ingredients.
Quick, tear open the sachet and inhale … mmm, straight back to the 70s. Then sprinkle into milk, whisk, leave for five minutes, and here goes …
I remember it having more texture. Maybe there’s too much milk; probably I under-whisked in my eagerness for time travel. But it just sort of oozes around the mouth and slides down without requiring much swallowing. Tastewise, I’m getting more sugar than cocoa, maybe a hint of the palm oil – not quite the chocolatey heaven I remember.
I need to try it on the next generation; here’s one of my own delightful little angels. He takes a spoonful, then another. “It’s OK,” he says, which might not sound like a ringing endorsement, but that’s about as effusive as he gets. The proof is quite literally in the pudding, a bowlful of which soon disappears.
You know those things you only get to appreciate as an adult – coffee, shellfish, smelly cheese, bitter dark salted Belgian nonsense? Well, I think Angel Delight is the opposite of them. For me that means: best before 1984.
Morwenna Ferrier
Smash
I discovered Smash in Morrisons in Leeds, where I was at university. When I arrived, I had barely drunk, had never had a takeaway, been to a gig or smoked a cigarette. The idea that you could make mashed potato in minutes from a desiccated powder was pure alchemy. And it was the perfect dinner carbohydrate when you had seven minutes between lectures and pubs, and had spent most of your loan on Diesel clothes and Unkle LPs. I was too embarrassed to buy the tin so I bulk-bought the sachets. I stored them upright in my cupboard, lined up like a little library.
I often ate them late at night. My friend Roz and I would mix the ingredients with boiling water, a little milk, some butter and some salt while we defrosted peas in the halls microwave. We then sprinkled the peas on top, like so, before adding something Roz, a vegetarian, had discovered in the Arndale centre, which I can only describe as “imitation meat”. A well-rounded meal, we thought, night after night.
I didn’t know you could still buy it, but you can! I’m writing this from a small hotel room in Paris, during fashion week, where I prepared my Smash in a mug using the free hot water provided in reception, and a pack of demi-sel butter snaffled from a restaurant. I don’t have a whisk so I’m using a wooden takeout spoon I stole from Carrefour. But the result looks the same: off-yellow. The consistency is just as I remember it, too: wet, slightly too thick. But it tastes as fine and potato-like as it ever did, at worst a little cloying. Et voilà, Le Smash.
Arifa Akbar
Batchelors Super Noodles
When I was growing up, my mother cooked the most amazing fresh south Asian food for us on very little money, but refused to teach me or my siblings to cook because she wanted us to have bigger, less domestic, lives than she’d had. So I ended up with zero kitchen skills and a utilitarian approach to meals. Batchelors Super Noodles appealed for their wartime bunker convenience: cheap, hot and made inside of six minutes. I ate them religiously from my late teens until, shamefully, my early 30s.
I would twin them with tinned mushy peas – for nutritional value, you understand. But these turned out to be my biggest love. I would eat mounds, sometimes with a twist of ketchup on top and often straight from the tin, so that there wasn’t even a pan to wash up afterwards.
Today, these items are a reminder of how far I’ve come. I forced my mum to teach me to cook about 15 years ago and now, aged 50, it’s one of my biggest pleasures. The noodles look especially inedible: a hard white brick that disintegrates into glutinous yellow mush in boiling water. The chicken flavour comes in a sachet and smells of chemicals. But as I begin to open the mushy peas, I can’t resist the urge to eat half of them from the tin. They are superior to the posh, bland, liquefied variety I’m served in gastropubs, and I feel the familiar but long forgotten hit of stodgy, salty, mood-lifting delight. They’re definitely being added to my shopping list.
The noodles don’t bring the same thrill, but I am surprised by how much I enjoy their chewing gum consistency and zingy, gloopy high. I would happily eat them again, perhaps with a few capers and slivers of anchovy or fried tofu and chilli. It’s not exactly Babette’s Feast, but there’s a strange comfort in it.
Emine Saner
Sosmix
When I was about eight, my best friend and I set up the Animal Protection Club. It never did become an international NGO, but my vegetarianism has lasted to this day. It’s easy, now, to be vegetarian, but it wasn’t in a rural town in the 80s, which had a high street with two butchers and an actual livestock market.
Looking back, my childhood feels strangely old-fashioned. Other people had holidays to Spain, and ready meals and microwaves; we were impoverished, wore homemade clothes, grew vegetables and didn’t have a car. My mum, who often couldn’t face cooking for various reasons – not least because it was so difficult on our coal-fired Rayburn – was now faced with a daughter with dietary requirements.
At some point, on a monthly trip to Leicester, she discovered Sosmix – a powdered wheat and soya mix – at a health food shop. You mixed it with water and could shape it into sausages, and other exotic things: sausage rolls, pies, pasta sauces.
I haven’t had Sosmix for nearly 30 years, but amazingly it still exists, though it’s sold by only one shop in the UK. It arrives by courier. Add water and it becomes pink and sticky; I make sausages – you can add herbs but I keep it pure – and fry them. Not to be too disloyal to this childhood staple, but vegetarian food and fake meat has come on a lot over the decades. Nevertheless there’s comfort in its blandness, it’s surprisingly juicy, and it reminds me of my mum, who would go out of her way – 20 miles by bus – to get it.
Tim Dowling
Betty Crocker cake mix
When I was growing up in the US, cake came either from a bakery, in a box, or from a cake mix, in a box. Specifically this would have been Betty Crocker cake mix in the standard sponge flavour known as “yellow”. I think I was in my 20s before I knew what the ingredients for an actual cake were.
There was also a mix to make a lumpy icing, but the real innovation arrived a bit later: frosting in a can. After that you could have your cake and eat it inside 45 minutes. Betty Crocker cake mix can be sourced in the UK – I know of a shop in London dedicated to fulfilling the guilty pleasures of expat Americans – but I don’t think I’ve tried it in 30 years.
The recipe does not inspire confidence, only awe: in addition to the powder within, three eggs are required, along with a cup of water and half a cup of, erm, vegetable oil. Once the mix is in the oven, a strange aroma of synthetic vanilla fills the kitchen, then the house. “What’s that smell?” says my youngest son. “The 1970s,” I say. “Welcome.”
I had forgotten about the generous assumptions of American convenience food manufacturers – the resulting cake is huge, and there’s enough frosting left over do another one. My family are not impressed when, with much ceremony, I finally slice into it. “It’s not terrible, but it has a very weird texture,” says my middle son. “Are you kidding?” I say. “That’s cake!”
“It tastes of something very odd,” says my youngest son. “It tastes of yellow,” I say, meaning: bland and insanely sweet. With the first bite I’m overwhelmed by a rush of associative memory: bicycle rides and burning leaves and people leaving their cars running in the parking lot while they buy milk. But by the second slice I’m feeling as if I need a dark place to lie down.
Claire Armitstead
Sweetened condensed milk
Once long ago, when banoffee pie had yet to be invented and, to a bookish preteen, dulce de leche sounded like something nasty behind the woodshed in Cold Comfort Farm, there was one thing that could be guaranteed to see off the glums: a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk. There was always some lurking on the kitchen shelves among the jars of Bovril and tins of vegetable soup.
It was never a solitary pleasure: cranking the can open was a self-help ritual for me and my mum on those days when everything seemed out of sorts. Her excuse was that she suffered from chronic migraines, and as a child of postwar rationing she had discovered that the sugar rush it offered could restore her to herself; mine was that I was keeping her company. It was comfort and comradeship – our sickly little secret.
But as adolescence kicked in, I started to associate it with acne, and humiliating struggles to zip up too-tight loons. I cast it so far from my mind that I had almost forgotten that it existed as a pleasure in its own right.
Opening my first can in more than 40 years felt like breaking into an ancestral tomb. My first impression was how much runnier it was than I remembered: could we really have managed it with teaspoons? My second was: yes we could. Sucking it off the spoon remains an intrinsic part of a sense memory that starts with texture – it’s like clingy sateen – and unfolds into flavour, a duet of cream and sugar that schmoozes your palate. But almost immediately the guilt kicked in, so strongly that (once I had finished the can) I could almost feel the pores prickling on my chin. It opened a door in my memory, but I won’t be going through it again.
Rich Pelley
Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney Pie
The first thing that strikes me as I attempt to eat my first Fray Bentos pie in 20 years is: who, in this modern world, owns a tin opener? Everything I enjoy that comes in a tin (tuna, baked beans, lager) has a ring pull. What is this? 1998?
I used to love these pies. I would regularly pick up one for lunch on sixth form half-day Thursdays to scoff home alone. Maybe it was the ease? Stick it in the oven and Ainsley Harriott, eat your heart out. Or perhaps, even then, I subconsciously knew they were a guilty pleasure; guilt that I would grow up to be the sort of man who eats pies out of the tin for dinner. Which I’m not. Honest. Well, until now.
So, after finally locating a tin opener, let’s have a looksee. Jesus. Why is there a wet flannel on top? Oh, it’s the uncooked pastry. Maybe things will improve after 30 minutes at 230C. My mature palate can certainly detect the sugar that my teenage taste buds happily ignored. It’s not quite a pie, in that way a Big Mac is a fast food version of a burger, but it’s strangely delicious. Filling: easy to chew; sweet, sweet gravy. Pastry: nice and puffy. I’m taken right back to desperately revising for my A-levels, shoving the empty tins to the bottom of the (pre-recycling) bin so nobody knew what a slob I’d become. I want another. How many more tins can I hide at the bottom of the recycling, I wonder.
