My whole family had a very sweet tooth. In the 70's we were allowed to buy one candy of our choice each whenever we were at the store. My father would put his in the refrigerator while my sister and I gobbled down our treats. Then, a while later, my father would pull his out of the refrigerator and eat it. When we complained he would say, "it's not my fault you ate yours so quick". And of course he was right. Soon we were allowed to buy two candy choices, one for right away and one to savor later. My sister's favorite items were penny-candies because she kept pennies in her little purse. She'd buy a lot of wax lips and such, which had very little flavor and were like chewing on a candle. However, I did like the little wax straws or bottles filled with sweet liquid.
My favorite candy bar was the Abba-Zaba bar. It was made with white taffy lightly strewn with nuts and had a peanut butter center. You could flatten it out (to make it more chewable) with your fingers to the size of a pancake and the peanut butter would ooze out. Delicious! If you didn't play with it first, it would remain tough like those filling-pullers Super Sugar Daddies (the caramel and sometimes chocolate bars on a paper stick).
For some reason our little rural town was a test market for General Mills and other cereal manufacturers. We were able to eat Chocolate Crunch Berries long before anyone else in the country tried them. I fondly remember the Cap'n Crunch line our local market was testing out. It had the regular Cap'n Crunch which featured a punch out cardboard model (inside were the plastic masts and sails) of the Cap'n trusted ship The Guppy. The Crunchberries had a different ship; same with the chocoberries, but the one I liked the most and enjoyed the cereal flavor too, was the Vanilla Whale. It was the Cap'n's nemesis and the box had the biggest ship in the line...a whaler complete with harpoon. Not exactly very P.C., especially since the Vanilla Whale was cute, with big eyes and long eyelashes. My father really liked the two flavors (blueberry and red-rasberry) of Baron Von Redberry and his enemy for which I can't remember the name. We seemed to be the only ones eating it though since it sat and sat on the market's shelves. When we brought home their last two boxes of the cereal and opened them for breakfast in the morning, they were filled with silk and a whole bunch of little worms. We got our money back that day.
I loved Frankenberry, Count Chocula, Boo Berry and then Fruit Brute. If I can remember the premise correctly, Fruit Brute was a little mild mannered accountant who would change into a crazy werewolf that could only be calmed down with the fruity cereal. Either that, or the cereal would cause him to become the wolf. I can't remember.
My father and I were Sci-Fi nuts (and Medieval things too), so of course we loved outer space. We enjoyed the wonderful nutritious Tang instant orange flavored drink that the Astronauts ate. Then came the Space Food Sticks. They were delicious, especially the peanut butter ones. They were a bit expensive, but they were very nutritious. I can still remember their particular taste and have never quite found a reasonable facsimile. There's a nutrition bar out there (I think it's the Tiger brand) that is peanut butter flavored, and it comes kind of close.
At one point in our candy-loving days we were no longer limited to two choices at the store. Each time we came home from the market we'd have quite a large number of different bags of candy. We'd chose the types we most loved, then our second choice and then we'd even pick candy we liked but really didn't love. This would all get dumped into a large ceramic bowl on the living room coffee table. Right after dinner we'd all pile onto the couch in front of the t.v. and start snacking. It's really no wonder my father ended up diabetic.
For whatever reason, my parents grew concerned about the amount sugar we were consuming. They probably saw some kind of story on 20/20 or 60 Minutes. So my father promptly replaced the large bowl of candy with a huge bowl of carob flavored protein tablets. Unfortunately I was the only one who really liked them and would eat handfuls every day. They lasted quite a while because Dad had bought a gigantic barrel-like bottle of them, and neither he nor my mother touched them. I think I ate those tablets nearly every day for a year before they were completely gone. And then I missed them.
No comments:
Post a Comment