Liverpool Stories
Junk food - You are what you eat
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
By
John Williams
Chinese cooking, which represents some the oldest and finest cuisine in the world has a linguistic connection, however slight, with the worst kind of fast food the West has to offer. I jokingly invoke the term junk food.
I first became aware of it's presence during the late sixties when I became enamoured of a concoction, prepared by a firm called Vesta, known as Chow Mein with crispy noodles. There's that Chinese connection again!
I used to buy this stuff just for the thrill of watching the strips of dried pasta-like noodles writhe, curl, expand and turn golden after being immersed in heated lard. In effect, they were simply finely shredded prawn crackers, but such things were still an oriental mystery to me and so I thought Vesta's version was the bee's knees. The ingredients read like a chemistry exam and the only things I ever recognised were salt and red peppers. For years I thought hydrolysed protein was some kind of water chestnut.
Of course, the real junk foods were sweets, candy to the Americans. I can distinctly remember going into a sweet shop at the bottom of Finch Lane and being bewildered by the fact that although there were jars of sweets laid out on the groaning shelves I could only buy a couple of pence worth as sugar, and consequently sweets, was rationed.
I felt like a thwarted Ali Baba, restricted by rationing to grabbing only a handful of the dazzling treasures on view. I was lucky in that my father used to arrive home from his voyages bearing large tins of Welch's fruit drops, humbugs and, delight of all delights, a peculiarly medicinal tasting confection known as 'Uncle Joe's Mint Balls'.
I remember with affection the difficulty I had in extracting them from the cylindrical tins, as the heat on board ship would often dissolve the sugar and cause them to stick together like those scientific models of molecular structures. But extract them I did and my various dentists have made a decent living from the sweet smell of my success.
I must admit, however, that in my childhood I neglected brushing regularly. Like many kids in Liverpool I thought oral hygiene meant not swearing. In 1954 sugar and meat were finally taken off the rationed list and tooth decay was available on demand.
One particular brand of toffee proved catastrophic to my teeth, in tandem with my penchant for opening beer bottles with my grinders, and that was a diabolical confection known as a Yogi Bar.
I can't help feeling that just as Teflon was derived from N.A.S.A's need to create a viable heat shield for Apollo's re-entry so Yogi Bars were designed by cold war scientists, whose names all ended in 'ski', and whose sole aim was to reduce westerners to porridge eating mumblers who were afraid to smile and so propagate the idea that we were suffering miserably under Capitalism.
The colours of the bars alone should have warned me against putting them anywhere near my mouth as they were the most virulent colours imaginable, and their consistency ensured that the instant one bit into them a super adhesive ingredient would kick in and grip one's teeth with a force similar to the symptoms of lockjaw. I suspect that Yogi is Russian for Tetanus.
Another Satanic temptation was something called sherbet, a corruption of the Persian delicacy composed of fruit juice and ice. The only connection between sherbet and sorbet was that they both glistened icily as the former was composed of dyed sugar crystals.
It was sold in paper bags and kids would walk to school dipping their fingers into the yellow dune and suck off the adhering crystals with gusto. By the time they got to class their forefingers were as heavily stained as someone with a forty cigarettes a day habit. Oh happy days!
Nowadays I have so many crowns that I have to sleep in the Tower of London to ensure their safety, and Chinese food is my staple diet as its texture is less demanding than a baguette.
Oh how I envy Omar Khayam. He can keep his bowl of the morning, too early for me, but I would give anything for his crusty loaf of bread!