23. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...FINDUS CRISPY PANCAKES

The absolute very first time I made Findus Crispy Pancakes was in the 80s. I was very proud of myself because it was the first food I actually cooked on my own. 40 years later, they would no doubt have remained my culinary pièce de résistance if the bastards at Findus still made the bloody things. Apparently Birds Eye make them now “with no artificial colours or flavours, new & tasty ingredients AND (their capitals not mine) with more filling”. It doesn’t sound like they’ll taste much like the originals anymore then.

My sister used to work for the Findus company when they were part of Nestle and she gave me a few packets of ex sales samples on my birthday (I was quite a bit younger than her and still am). They’d clearly defrosted a bit by the time I unwrapped them but my mum said they’d be fine to eat and not to be so ungrateful.

To be fair, my mum wasn’t big on food safety and treated best before dates with a mixture of suspicion and mild amusement. Even as she got older and looked to pass on her wisdom to a new generation, she’d pull out dusty old cans of alphabetti spaghetti to feed my kids (her grandchildren), ignoring the fact that the best before dates had expired while their father was at college in the late 80s. She had the same approach with the equally dusty box of old toys which, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, had been deliberately designed to endanger life (not by my mum, to be fair) and so were lead-painted, sharp-edged death trap equivalents of the salmonella-rich cans of pasta (which, even if they were inedible, at least gave my kids the opportunity of arranging the contents to spell the word 'boobs', just like their old dad had done before them - so proud).

Findus Crispy Pancakes became a staple lunch for me and, inspired by our only celeb chef at the time, Fanny (may all your doughnuts look like Fanny's) Craddock, I began to experiment with accompaniments. There was obviously enough goodness in the pancakes themselves to mean I didn’t need any veg but you could really bring them to life with some mashed….and, as all 70s/80s kids know, the only processed potato product available in those days was Smash. It took me quite a while to realise that it was actually potato. I assumed it was a tasty snack. It was made by Cadbury after all and they were sneakier bastards than Findus because they bombarded us with those addictive Martian adverts (here's one, voiced by Zippy of Rainbow - true story) specifically designed to make us badger mum to buy this fantastic sprinkling of chocolatey heaven…..only to find out it was powdered potato. And, with no social media, to spread the news to less enlightened kids and their mums, they got away with it.

It's little surprise that this dry powder, even once you mixed it with hot water, tasted, well, dry and powdery. If you put a buttercup under its metaphorical chin, there's not much chance it would glow yellow. And, by the way, the clever scientists at Cambridge University have in recent years worked out that the strong reflective properties of the flower are down to epidermal layers designed to attract pollinators and nothing to do with whether you like butter or not. So, that's one more innocent children's game that can be consigned to the dustbin of playground history. At the same time, Oxford University scientists developed a cure for COVID. That’s the positive impact of intense academic rivalry for you.

With mains sorted, the options for dessert were a little more limited. GṺ hadn’t been invented so Arctic roll was our special treat (we were given Angel Delight normally) but otherwise ice cream on sticks were only available in corner shops or from Mr Softee vans. You couldn’t buy them in bulk from Gateway or Fine Fare and fish them out of your fridge whenever you felt like one. You had to travel to get a lolly and it was illegal in those days to eat one indoors. The only ice cream you had at home in your freezer were the tubs of vanilla which frosted over into clumps and tasted so sweet you’d gag. Just imagine if, like now, you could dip into your fridge whenever you liked to pick out a Count Dracula's Secret (black ice, red jelly…ooooooh) or Funny Feet or Zoom or Splits & Mivvis. Absolute heaven. And, don't forget, you got a joke written on the stick too. Why were five and six terrified? Because seven ate nine. So, funny AND educational - they taught you to count though not necessarily to spell (I still write 8 as 'ate' to this day).

Purchase options for drinks were much the same but with one crucial difference. You still couldn’t buy any of your favourite brands in the supermarket (except R Whites lemonade which was only a favourite because Elvis Costello’s Dad - I’m not kidding - told you he was a secret lemonade-drinker) but you COULD get the exact Coke or Pepsi experience at home……with a sodastream machine. And when I say ‘exact’ I clearly mean ‘nothing like it’.

Sodastream drinks tasted truly awful. Like ice cream tubs, everything came out super-sweet. You never made one because you were thirsty or fancied a cool refreshing drink. You made it because you could pretend to be an evil scientist intent on poisoning the world - a case of fact and fiction colliding.

Most of the time though, my mum couldn't be doing with the palaver of the sodastream so, when she wanted me out of the house (which was every day during the holidays), she simply handed me juice drinks in cartons and a couple of packets of Smiths Salt 'n' Shake crisps (do you know anyone who didn't sprinkle the whole of the blue sachet into the bag? So what was the point of that then?) and packed me off to the playing fields with either Guy (an annoyingly good footballer) if it was pouring with rain or, if it was just heavy drizzle, Budgie (an equally annoying and good cricketer).

In those days (except for the summer of 1976, yes even Scotland) it always rained and so it was either irony or cruelty which drove drinks advertisers to sell their products to British audiences on the basis they were the perfect thirst quenchers for baking hot climates. My mum fell for it and either gave us Um Bongo which, according to Libbys, was extremely popular in the Congo or Kia Ora (maori for 'hello' so my NZ wife tells me) because it was adored by dog-impersonating crows in the Deep South of the USA (and, wow, wouldn’t social media explode if the "I'll be your dog" advert was aired today??). Watch them both here and here.

And if you wanted something to tide you over between meals, a finger of fudge, as we all know, was just enough to give your kids a treat….which, in practice, meant it was far too small to satisfy any growing young girl or boy but, on the plus side, its slogan kept a million of us occupied devising crude versions to sing about female teachers or your mate's mum.

Home economics was only taught in the girls' school in my home town and there was no national culture of celebrity chefs to encourage us boys. In those days, Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were sitting next to us in class throwing ink bombs rather than encouraging us to cook (well, not Hugh perhaps - he was studying Latin at Eton) which just left Findus, with their crispy pancakes, and Fanny, with her unusually-shaped doughnuts, to inspire us in the kitchen.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME......XMAS No.1s

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