BREAD AND SUGAR SARNIES

 

BREAD AND SUGAR SARNIES

By © J. A. Elliott 2023

I was reminded the other day about the strange combinations of food we concocted and ate as children, growing up through the 1950’s and 60’s in my hometown of Mansfield, here in the UK.

One of my sisters loved buttered bread sprinkled with sugar, it didn’t matter whether the bread was brown or white as long as she could sprinkle sugar on it, then she was in heaven. I remember another sister, I did have five of them, liking sliced banana and sugar sarnies, and yet another actually loving Marmite soldiers. Yuk! If they were eating any of these near me, then quite frankly I was retching, yes to me they were horrid concoctions. Now mother loved her cucumber sandwiches. She would make up a dish of cucumber, onion and vinegar, which was then kept in the pantry for days. I’m sure it was more to deter me from raiding the biscuit barrel that it was kept in there, knowing I hated the smell or taste of cucumber. I could even tell if mom had cut up her cucumber then my tomatoes, when she made a salad. Even our milk took on that pungent acrid taste of the cucumber flavoured vinegar, if it was unopened and left in the pantry. It was even worse when we had our first fridge towards the end of the 1950’s. At least now I thought, the cucumber might be put in a sealed container, how wrong I was, it was simply transferred into the new fridge which concentrated the smells even more, and to top it all off, the damn stuff lasted longer by being in there.

One of my all time favourite things was a mug of hot Oxo with added salt, and dipping pieces of bread into it. It was recommended by our family doctor once, beef stock, to build me back up after an illness, and I simply loved it. Sometimes, although I know it’s naughty, because of the salt content and me being diabetic, I do indulge in a mug, the beefy smells take me back to my childhood days, and more memories come flooding back as I sit in front of my computer with my trusted single digit poised. Once again I digress…

As for myself as I’ve said before I loved homemade bread and dripping, and we all loved mom’s homemade Jams. I bet everyone remembers going wild blackberry picking when they were kids, and coming home tinged in those tell tail blue purple juices on our fingers and around our mouths from eating them as we plucked the fruit into our little dishes. Where I lived on Bancroft Lane there were plenty of places for my sisters and me to go blackberry picking every year, and every year mom would make several jars of jam, labelled and sealed then stored in the coldest part of our pantry.

When our homemade jam ran out, like everyone else, when we could afford it we had Robinson’s jam, you know the one with the little Gollywog on the jar. We’d collect the little gollywog stickers so we could get those precious enamelled badges we all loved.

As a child growing up through the 50’s and 60’s, we were made to always have a slice of bread with our tined fruit and Carnation condensed milk, even to this day I’ll never know why this was. If we had a bag of Smith’s crisps, which was such a treat back then we were expected to have a slice of bread with it, we couldn’t make it into a sandwich but we still had to have a slice of bread and butter with it. I remember Smith’s crisps always had a little blue bag of salt inside, very unhealthy today, but back then at least you had the choice whether you wanted your crisps salted or not.

Back in those far away days of my childhood years, we never bothered whether what we ate was healthy for us or not, because mostly we had a balanced diet of fresh vegetables from our gardens or allotments, our portions were small but we never actually starved. Processed foods were in it’s infancy after the war, so most of what we ate was homemade or produced locally. Even our meat and potatoes would have come from local farmers, our fruits and vegetables were seasonal too from our local market. There simply wasn’t any supermarkets around to buy all those exotic foods of today from all over the world. So growing up during the 1950’s and 60’s wasn’t all bad.

FOOTNOTE
I actually like cucumber today, although not in vinegar.

The Golliwog character, used by Robinson’s jams etc. were withdrawn in 2001 for various reasons. The enamel badges produced by them are highly collectable today.
So as not to cause any offence to anyone I have chosen not to publish any images of a Gollywog with this posting, although I personally loved those little character badges and collected many as a child, as did most of my friends.

Mansfield saw its first supermarket open on Church Street, by Supersave in 1970/71, three stories, with escalators between floors, and a second entrance/ exit into a car park on Toothill Lane

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