Wyn Drabble: Milk bar the place to go for an icecream

Fairy bread has survived to this day. Photo / File

Your rather unexpected response suggests you want even more. Thank you to all those who responded but, please, no more Chinese Chew recipes (it seems Edmonds Cookbook calls it Chinese Chews but earlier versions are called Chinese Chew – which is the way I met it).

So, last week I covered Maltexo, powdered milk, broken biscuits, icecream sandwiches, Eskimo pies, reduced cream, Chinese chew, bread join, smokers and animal biscuits.

Let's start this week's extras with more biscuits. Tennis biscuits were always a nomenclature puzzle. What did they have to do with deuce or 15-love? They ranked alongside arrowroot and wine biscuits as the ones that were left till last in the tins because they were too plain.

Perhaps my strongest memory of plain biscuits comes from the overnight Lyttelton – Wellington ferry. After a night of being tossed about on the seas, there came a knock on the cabin door and in came a steward with a cup of tea and two plain biscuits sitting on the saucer. Breakfast.

I guess people still dunk gingernuts but today's appear to be less robust, less fit for immersion. Am I right in thinking that the old ones were capable of breaking tooth enamel at a single bite? Dunking eliminated damage.

Last week I omitted some other major icecream contenders.

Our Saturday night movie treat in childhood was, I'm sure, named beyond our years. We ignored the innuendo and ate our Joy Bar being careful not to pull the cardboard lever too hard or the propulsion system failed.

Family packs of icecream came, not in nasty plastic, but in cardboard. Licking the cardboard afterwards was, I remember, a greater treat than the icecream itself. We didn't have a fridge in those days so, just before the midday meal, one of us had to bike to the only dairy open on a Sunday.

We would race the newspaper-wrapped treasure home and place it in the cold concrete washtub, covered with a damp tea towel where it would stay at least cool until we had eaten the main course of roasted mutton with carrot and parsnip.

If it were a scooped-cone icecream you were after, the first question the scooper asked was always the same: "Plain or flavoured?"

"Plain" is not very evocative, is it?

Wyn Drabble

If your answer was "flavoured", then the flavours – possibly as many as two – had to be named for you before you could agonise over which one to have. I hoped they wouldn't be Neapolitan or lime.

Then there was the "chocolate bomb" and the "TT2".

Where better to go for an icecream than a milk bar? My childhood milk bar served cream freeze and the joy of this soft iced confection was enough to distract me from the fact that there might have been teddy boys and widgies frequenting the establishment.

Confectionery items I failed to mention last week were lolly cigarettes (with an unconvincing red glowy tip) and lolly wristwatches. In the pack came little lolly beads and a watch face which you threaded on to an elastic wristband.

After you'd checked the time – always 10 past two – you would eat the whole timepiece minus the elastic.

Then there was fairy bread, which survives to this day.

Steamed puddings were a favourite mealtime treat and, after them, you were usually rendered immovable by the high lard content. I don't think we had dietitians in those days because they would have banned the practice of combining lard dough with golden syrup then adding custard.

I can find no reasonable explanation for other offerings such as sago pudding and tapioca pudding.

Next week I'll jog your memories of butchers, buffets and the "boat train". What fun!