. . . on a rose-tinted sugar rush
THERE IS A brief window in most people’s existence when sweets are not about life or death, they are more important than that. During the summer, while we were choosing DVDs, my 10-year-old niece Hannah asked me to buy her some pick’n’mix. She spent ages choosing and even managed to keep from opening the bag until we got home. We started our film and Hannah began to get stuck into the sweets, which turned out to be a major disappointment. The cola bottles were rock hard. The giant strawberry tasted offensive. She picked through the bag, her disappointment growing with every badly manufactured treat. It was the adult equivalent of a bounced cheque. “There’s an email address on the bag, why don’t you write to them?” I said. So she did.
Sweets, ah, sweets. Liquorice torpedoes. Chocolate satins. Pear drops. Dib dabs. Flying saucers. Bon bons. The memories so vivid. That tickle of sherbert on your tongue, the explosion of a fizz bomb in your mouth, the better-than-real-apples taste of apple drops and the dusty black cough drops that looked all wrong and tasted like medicine, the best medicine in the world.
Back in the day, our family got our penny sweets from Miss Roddy. Black jacks, fruit salads, giant gobstoppers that’d nearly choke you, which was the challenge and part of their appeal. My favourite was the little box of cigarette-shaped sweets. We’d pretend to smoke them as we chewed and adults would laugh because that kind of thing was hilarious back then. If you were flush, you got a quarter bag of something, tried to make them last, even eating the ones that had bits of paper stuck to them because they had been in the bag so long. You pretended to your siblings that you had no more left, then produced a still-bulging bag so that you could lord it over them.
Sweets. Recession-proof and smile-inducing. The Sweet Life stall in the George’s Street Arcade in Dublin is a joy to browse, all your favourites present and correct, like those fizzy-cola lollies, still tasting exactly the same, like a Saturday afternoon in the back of the car, 1979. Kavanagh’s on Aungier Street is probably the oldest in the country, surviving even when the corporates came in and started selling sweets in packets. Even then we still wanted the thrill of someone taking the lid off a big jar and measuring out our stash. Retro sweet websites are all over the internet selling thousands of sweets all categorised by the decade they came on to the market.
If you’d like a little sweet nostalgia but fear for your teeth, then read Damian Corless’s new book You’ll Ruin Your Dinner – Sweet Memories of An Irish Childhood. It’s something to savour this Christmas when all the good sweets are gone and there’s only the yucky strawberry ones left at the bottom of the tin.
I stood outside Dublin’s newest retro sweet shop on the site of the old Comet Records in Temple Bar the other day and watched people as they passed the door. Adults, children, tourists, gardaí were all having their frowns turned upside down by this emporium of toothache. The shelves in Aunty Nellie’s are groaning with all the old favourites. Bull’s eyes. Sour cherries. Torpedoes. Allsorts. The owners have made sure that 85 per cent of the sweets are sourced in Ireland. I kept trying to leave but then I’d spot the white chocolate rabbits or the milk teeth and I’d have a taste, a little chew on a time machine.
There was only one omission as far as I could see. The elusive fizzle stick. Pastel-coloured, stick-shaped with a soft or hard texture depending how long they had spent in the box. Chewy or hard, it didn’t matter. I remember one time hearing a knock on the door of our house and opening it to see a man with a beard carrying a brown paper bag of fizzle sticks in every flavour. I didn’t recognise him but I took the bag he was offering, such was the power of the fizzle stick. Luckily, it was my father. He’d just grown a beard while he’d been in hospital.
Tim in Aunty Nellie’s says he can’t be sure, but he heard that the man who invented the fizzle stick died and took the recipe with him to his grave. He says that’s why you just find pale imitations fizzle sticks these days, not the real thing. Tim’s background is in food ingredients and says it should be possible to recreate the chalky sticks that tasted a little like the fake cigarettes. He has a couple of Irish confectioners on the case. He’ll let us know when they crack the code.
PERHAPS there is somebody we could write to, the way Hannah wrote a studiously polite but disappointed email to the pick’n’mix people that night. She forgot all about it until one day a very special parcel arrived in the post. She fired off an email to me immediately declaring: “You will never guess what just turned up. A BIG BOX OF SWEETS! I GOT PINK AND WHITE MICE, REFRESHERS, SOOTHERS AND MUCH, MUCH MORE”. Life and death, see?