Sweet Surrender

 A Facebook friend posted a picture of primary school kids in Britain getting their milk drink at lunch time and it set me off recalling my days at Saint Augustine's in Singleton where I spent the end of fifth class and all of sixth class. We used to have our milk at play lunch, that 20 minute break around 10.30am.  - unimaginatively now often called recess - when you had just enough time to gulp down the milk, have a quick visit to the toilet, and maybe get in some gos of chasings.

Photo from the National Archive of Australia of Canberra: Making school children drink milk

 
The milk came in half pint bottles, with a thin layer of cream on top if it was plain milk or without it when it came as those pastel coloured flavoured concoctions that claimed to be chocolate and strawberry. Being milk monitor for the week was the best; you got out of class 10 minutes before the bell so you could go with the other monitor and carry in the crated milk onto the classroom steps, and you got first dibs on it which meant you got it fractionally less warm than others did during summer, got to check which bottle had the most cream, and you got to grab one of the flavoured milks if you wanted and so deprive someone else of the dubious pleasure.

Licorice Allsorts

Recalling the milk set me to recalling what else I ate at school during those years. I took sandwiches to school most days so my pocket money was pretty much spent on sweets. I can still vividly remember the array on the front counter of the tuck shop which was set up in the back half of the building that housed the lower primary classes (we fifth and sixth classers had our own newer two room block across the bare gravel and dirt of the playground). The patience of the tuck shop ladies (and they were all ladies, not women back then) was admirable as the fifteenth kid untied the knot in his snotty handkerchief to find the zac (five pence to you) he would then spend 10 minutes deciding to spend.

I wasn't fond of licorice sticks or twists, but I did go for the allsorts mainly because the icing paste cut what for me was a slightly medicinal flavour. I still find licorice a bit overwhelming when it's the sweetened glossy black stuff you find in most shops, but I am fine with drinking root beer which often has licorice added to it and eating fennel, dill, anise, and aniseed which are similar in flavour but not botanically related.

Musk Sticks

Bananas

I perhaps was too fond of musk sticks. Pink musk sticks were the most popular, but I was quite taken with the pepperminty green ones too as I was of the bright yellow banana flavoured ones. It was this combination that I found in bananas - the lolly not the fruit. There is no musk oil in them but there is something musky about the bouquet. I was also attracted here to that meringue-y soft crunch they have though the only thing they share with meringues is sugar. Also in the musky bouquet category were milk bottles.  I see from the list of current ingredients that they no longer have milk in them  - if they ever did. The added pleasure here was their marshmallow-y jelly-ish texture. I

Milk bottles

Jujubes - soft

Indeed, anything with a jelly like mouthfeel was a hit. The varieties of jubes (aka jujubes) being a case in point.  At least half the pleasure with the soft sugar coated ones (purists would claim these to be the only true jubes) was having the sugar rub off and collect down the bottom of the paper bag which of course meant you just had to dispose of this residue via a spit-wet-finger-dip-and-suck.

Jelly beans

Jujube fruits - firm

The firmer resin-y fruit jellies were excellent for endless chewing and the sucking sound when you prised your jaws apart post them getting stuck together was wicked. Jelly beans were good because of the hard coat you crunched through to get to the  jelly inside and also because they stained your fingers rainbow colours.

Cobbers

Champion in the teeth sticking category however were cobbers; those hard lumps of caramel toffee coated in chocolate. The pleasure here was double. First sucking off the chocolate. Then chewing and chewing and gradually softening up the toffee as its sugars dissolved with your spit. Again there was that point at which they were sticky enough to lightly glue your teeth together. Actually the pleasure was triple; right at the end you had to use your fingernails or a sliver of stick, or in desperation the point of a compass, to gouge out the last bites of toffee from between your teeth. If you were lucky there would be a recalcitrant blob that would stick on top of a molar which you would have to suck at for the rest of the day trying to release it as you also tried - not very hard - to stop that sucking slushing sound as dislodgement failed.

Freckles

And finally the freckle, that delicious disk of chocolate topped with hundreds and thousands. Inevitably these would begin to melt half way through play lunch and you would have to lick the chocolate and  microdots of flavour off the paper bag.

I was hoping to find a picture of sherbert, that fizzy, tingly powder that was the closest thing to fairy dust you could buy and still keep this side of legal. It used to come in a flat paper bag in a sort of house shape, a square mounted with a triangle. A plastic spoon was encased in the bag, it's top sticking out in the form of a ring that you could snap off and wear or give to whoever you had a crush on that play lunch.

Finally, and to bring my hyperglycemic blog to a close, I was excited last week to find a new kind of jelly treat that would have been a firm fave had it been around back then. They are called jelly fruits, of Chinese provenance and made of the most extraordinary ingredients: water, seaweed extract (carrageenan) locust bean gum, acidulants (citric acid, sodium nitrate, malic acid), food dyes, and the natural flavour of the various fruits. The texture is like what you get when you mash up jelly; quivery and squishy and runny all in one. You cut the end of the plastic 'stem' and suck and squeeze. They would have been great as jelly cannons, great squirts of it flying across the playground to splosh on someone's face or better yet their shirt. Paintball for kindies.