Cambridge Edition October 2019

FOOD & DR INK

CHEF’S TABLE

ALEX RUSHMER DISCOVERS THAT HIS ABSTEMIOUS-MEETS-GLUTTONOUS APPROACH TO SWEET TREATS IS DOWN TO HIS DNA E x cess in m odera t ion

ong before it was either sensible or fashionable, my mum was a fervent anti-sugar advocate. As frustrating as this was as a child,

it is something I am eternally grateful for now, being in possession of a cheese tooth, rather than a sweet one. The cereal cupboard contained nothing approaching anything of excitement for two young boys growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, recipes for baked goods had sugar quantities drastically reduced, sweetened fizzy drinks played no part in my childhood, and as for sweets, they were absolutely and utterly verboten. As a concession, we were allowed chocolate, but even this was as part of a weekly and, in hindsight, rather ceremonial, treat: every Saturday the Manchester Evening News would publish a round-up of the day’s football reports on lurid pink paper, after which the publication was titled. On returning home, Dad would hand my brother and I the rolled-up newspaper, inside which were two chocolate bars which would inevitably fall rather dramatically to the floor. The Pink would be dispensed with and we would spend a decent half an hour enjoying the treats, in much the same way that I’d read about in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – taking time to make the most of them in the knowledge that it would likely be another week before we tasted anything quite so sweet again. To modern ears, this may sound extreme. Indeed, writing it all down, it sounds fairly draconian even to me, but it has left me with both an appreciation of the sweeter things in life and little desire to eat a substantial quantity of anything at the saccharine end of the scale, in any great quantity or with any regularity. Mostly I’m content for a meal to finish after the savoury courses, or at the most with a couple of squares of chocolate. Trips to the supermarket rarely include visits to the panoply of colour that is the confectionery aisle, and I never so much as glance at the snack selection when paying for petrol. It’s as if that section of my brain was switched

Swedes, usually rather puritan in outlook and not often prone to indulgence, have a long-standing tradition that children are only allowed to eat sweets once a week and when they do, wowee do they go for it. Swedes consume, on average, 17kg of pick ’n’ mix per person per annum. Seventeen kilos! As a point of comparison, in the UK we each manage to munch through a paltry 11kg of chocolate a year. This ‘excess in moderation’, to borrow a phrase from US comic Doug Stanhope, seems to explain the Swedish approach to consumption of sugary treats and also my own. Little did I know my desire to shovel fistfuls of sour-sweets, salty liquorice and chocolate buttons into my face (but only occasionally) was hard-wired into my cultural DNA. So while I’m grateful to my mum for the mostly puritan nature of my approach to sugar, I’m also appreciative of the little greedy devil that appears so

“I never so much as glance at the snacks”

off, or more likely was never even switched on, thanks to my mother’s efforts. Except for the very occasional situation when it flickers into life and I find myself rather mindlessly gorging on bags of Haribo or handfuls of pick ’n’ mix that have somehow made it into the house. This happens rarely, maybe twice a year, but suffice to say that sweets do not have a long shelf life when their presence has been noticed. It was only recently that I was able to figure out this particular gastronomic quirk that has developed over the last few years. Only when reading about the Swedish tradition of lördagsgodis (the literal translation of which is ‘Saturday sweets’), did it begin to make sense.

rarely on the other shoulder, wearing a Viking helmet and convincing me to make just one more visit to the paper bag that was, until so recently, filled to the brim with treats.

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