The nostalgic power of food

Saturday afternoon was blessed with sunshine, and I spent an enjoyable half-hour outdoors demolishing half a tub of strawberry ice-cream. It was palest pink (no colourings here), deeply creamy and just sweet enough. An old-fashioned strawberry ice, in fact – ice-cream as it used to be.

This was Norfolk Farmhouse Ice-Cream from North Tuddenham, whose products I am particularly fond of. To be honest, I prefer their raspberry sorbet, which is a shocking pink, with intense fruity flavour - more of an Italian-style gelati. But I also enjoyed the quiet charms of this strawberry ice-cream.

This got me thinking about nostalgia – a powerful emotion, and one easily evoked by food. Our fascination with the past is amply demonstrated at this time of year, as weekends fill with old-fashioned fetes, wartime re-enactments (complete with Spam sandwiches) and classic car rallies. But though re-enactment societies also cover the Civil War and other distant conflicts, if less often than the second world war, our enthusiasm for food rarely goes back further than our own childhood. Actual historical food, as opposed to things we can remember, remains strictly a curiosity.

I asked a friend for his favourite foods from childhood. “Mars bars,” he replied without a second’s hesitation, adding, “Fishfingers; fried eggs; chicken supreme.” You can probably take a good guess at his age from that list alone. My strongest memories are of children’s party food – bowls of cheesy Wotsits; jelly and ice-cream – plus the dinosaur-shaped pasta we had once as a treat, and then for some reason, my mother’s fish baked in tomato sauce, of which I was not very fond.

I know an elderly lady who often says that certain foods don’t taste like they used to. To her, cheese scones are rarely cheesy enough, and oranges not as sweet as they used to be. It is hard for me to judge whether all this is completely true, or whether memory has deceived her, or whether her taste buds have declined with age. I have several fond food memories from my childhood which I have no particular desire to revisit – sherbet fountains with liquorice straws to dip in the sherbet powder, or the tuna-fish sandwiches, heavily laced with chopped onion, which my father made for trips to the beach. Like most children, I expect, sweets were among my biggest edible excitements – I remember considering giant strawberry-shaped jellies, laced with e-numbers no doubt, as a gastronomic delight.

What are your favourite nostalgic foods? Let me know using the comments.