Trawling round the supermarket last week on automatic pilot, reaching for the regular staples, I stopped by the freezer cabinets and had a Proustian moment.
There it was – a thing I hadn’t seen in years, had completely forgotten and presumed it long since discontinued. Viennetta!
You must remember Viennetta – a frozen confection the size of a house brick, composed of crisp meringue layered with razor-thin shards of dark chocolate and ice-cream. An ambrosial treat occasionally served in modest slices as a summer Sunday dessert. I drove home and, abandoning the rest of the shopping on the kitchen floor, opened the carton, slid out its contents (considerably smaller than I remembered) and nearly broke the blade of the bread knife sawing at it, still rigid as a stone. And yes, texture and taste were as I recalled, if perhaps a little less rich. My palate is probably ruined by over-indulgence in ice-cream Mars bars and even scrummier ice-cream Snickers, both of which I heartily endorse.
Like most of my generation, I wasn’t reared on readymade puddings or ‘bought’ desserts. I can still smell my mother’s nutmeg-dusted egg custard or rice pudding with raisins in it blipping away in the oven. There was sherry trifle for high days and holidays, enhanced with a tin of ‘fruit cocktail’, a mix of chopped peaches and pears in viscous syrup with a single faintly alcohol scented maraschino cherry per tin – which I never got. My mother was mistress of portion control and I always felt two spoonsful short of bliss. I’m sure it was psychologically damaging.
Ever conscious of domestic economy, another treat in our house was ‘flummery’. Half-set jelly was whipped to cloud-like airiness with a tin of evaporated milk and put to set on a high shelf, inaccessible to a small child armed with a teaspoon. (Just my luck to encounter it again at college, where because of its unsubstantiality, it was known by the students as ‘sunshine and fresh air’.)
Ice-cream was a rare treat, since (a) we didn’t have a fridge; (b) I was told it ‘chilled the stomach’ and (c) that stuff you got in the cinema was made of whale oil. On one unforgettable occasion my childhood friend and I pooled our pocket money and bought what was known as “a shillin’y block,” aka ‘family size’. We scoffed the lot in two soup plates behind the bushes in her back garden and never got caught.
Not that we here in the northwest were short of the authentic artisanal article. With four Italian ice-cream making families in the city, we were spoiled for choice. Cassoni’s at the “enna-the-bridge” (in Derry parlance) had the edge, because the owner’s daughter was at my school and her dad generously supplied Sports Day ice-cream every year. Battisti’s (invariably and erroneously pronounced Baptisti’s, which is harder to say) was opposite Woolworths, so Saturday shopping was a double delight. Yannarelli’s was where you went to meet College boys accidentally and Fiorentini’s (always miscalled ‘Florentini’s, which must have irritated them intensely) was where everybody took their kids for a sit-down treat. Daughter Dear’s ambition as a child was to become a ‘Saturday girl’ working there, making Knickerbocker Glories. They were also the places where, as adolescent poseurs, we were first introduced to proper machine-made coffee. It was considered ‘cool’ (a term back in vogue) to order it black, rather than the Coke you really wanted. I must’ve downed gallons of the bitter stuff sooner than admit I hated it, but was merely an accessory to flirtation – and we must all suffer for love. Student days in a flat inured us to hardship, since nobody ever remembered to buy milk and it facilitated many an all-night session of last-minute study.
Now all four ice-cream parlours have vanished, much mourned, and we’re buying mass produced salted caramel soft-scoop in supermarkets or extruded polystyrene-tasting cones from a van with a relentless jingle that would drive you doolally.
Oh, how I miss my Sunday afternoon butterscotch nut sundae….
