Tag: dailyprompt-1976

Custard creams

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Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

My favourite biscuits when I was a child were custard creams, a layered sandwich of two biscuits with a creamy vanilla layer in the centre. You would twist them apart and lick off the filling, then dunk the biscuits in a cup of tea, carefully soaking them and eating them before they got too soggy and fell apart.

Sometimes mom would buy a crispy slightly oatier version with a lemony centre to it which would be eaten in the same way.

Just reading the prompt took me back to our living room, sitting at the dining table with a China cup and saucer and matching plate. Milk jug and teapot. The biscuits were eaten after heinz  sandwich spread sandwiches on white bread.

I also remember the rusty orange settee and the wallpaper with tiny rosebuds and ribbons printed on it.

Dad bought home a wallpaper book once, full of swatches of paper patterns in various colours. So exciting to look at.

It has to be trifle

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Trifle

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Christmas and Easter, we always had trifle.

It was a concoction of jelly (strawberry or raspberry) in the base with trifle sponges, hard fingers of dry sugary sponge that swelled up and absorbed the jelly. This made it firm when it set for the next layer. This was always blancmange, not custard. A raspberry, strawberry or chocolate layer made with blancmange powder, sugar and boiled in with a pint of milk. Then the top was double cream whipped to stiff peaks.

Mom used to decorate the top with silver coloured balls and hundreds and thousands (coloured sprinkles), or maybe some tinned peach slices or glacé cherries? When I was young we didn’t have strawberries or raspberries or blackberries in the winter or spring. Fruit was more seasonal than it is now. It was usually grown here, so it just wasn’t available.

Memories like this are great. Whenever I think of comfort food it has to be trifle. Mom’s secret ingredient as we got a bit older was sherry added to the jelly. Nowadays I prefer a small amount of port. I don’t use sponge fingers as they are full of sugar. I use sugar free jelly and sweetner in the blancmange (which is getting hard to source). It’s still full fat cream though. I usually put blueberries in the jelly, unheard of in my childhood days.

Maybe I could try pomegranate seeds in one? I like blackberries, maybe blackcurrants? And I’ve even considered making my own jelly with sheets of gelatine. However I make it, it still brings back good childhood memories.