12 days of Christmas – nostalgia snacks

One of my favourite prezzies this year was a family sized bag of Monster Munch. Anyone of a certain age will remember Monster Munch as a puffed corn snack that must have been invented by a mad food scientist pushing the very limits of how much artificial flavouring you could add to a crisp before it became more practical simply to sell a sachet of powdered taste.

Certainly, pickled onion is not a flavour found in nature, it’s found in jars. Yet it has to be said that pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch, while not tasting anything like an actual pickled onion, tasted exactly like the idea of pickled onion. Eating a bag of pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch was not an act of pleasure, it was an adventure – the additives, flavourings and so on set off a chain of pain on the tongue that had you gasping and pulling a face like a gurning lemon sucker, before going back for more. By the time you finished the bag you were sweating, your eyeballs felt funny and your fingers stank to the extent that you identified easily with Macbeth.

I used to have a bag of Monster Munch together with a plastic cup of instant soup every time I finished a swim at the local pool. What an attractive creature I must have been, eyes red-rimmed from chlorine – hair like straw, skin pruned from prolonged immersion and reeking of pickled onion.

I’m happy to report that the taste met the expectation. Years on, the things are probably manufactured in Pakistan to get around the EU rules that bans food like this but the taste explosion on the tongue and the itchy eyeball sensation is still the same. You can feel it doing you glorious harm. Now that’s a snack!