Cod liver oil? Luxury.
Our mother used to give us castor oil, we are sure that was her passive aggressive response if we played up.
Proving perhaps that not all of our food memories are flavoured with happy nostalgia.
Who remembers Haslett? I think it was Mattessons who made it. It was something you bought sliced at the deli counter in the 70s. Poor man's meatloaf. Not bad, but my dad was a supermarket manager, and the van driver would give a whole haslett, maybe 2lbs, to my dad every week. We soon grew sick of it, and my dad kept bringing it home every week.
Same goes for torton cake. Basically a large round sponge cream cake. Sponge cake layer, thick layer of sweetened cream, another sponge layer, the whole cake then covered in sweat cream, and topped with fruit pieces. Sounds yummy, but almost every Saturday at closing time, dad would box one of the unsold tortons to bring home. We grew sick of this too. We had to finish it in a couple of days and were forced to eat all of the sickly goopy cake. I know it sounds ungrateful, but you can have too much of a good thing, and unlike the haslett you could not disguise in a curry, or in beans.
