Whenever I see stacks of ready-made snacks or happen to carry home packets of freshly fried banana chips or needle-fine murukku, or read advertisements about irresistible modern day snacks and hints about how you can get your children to drink smoothies, eat spiced cheese sandwiches, wondrous millets, etc., I think of the rough and ready snacks we ate as children.
Was it half a century ago?
Who can forget the joy of bringing down fresh star gooseberries from a tree and dipping them in salt and chilli powder? They bruised easily, so one had to be careful. The sharp rasp of the berries as they burst between your teeth and tongue was unforgettable, as was the strange sweetness coming through the water you drank afterwards, in order to recover. Equally attractive and equally forbidden were raw poly-mangoes slit into pale gold fan-shaped slices sprinkled with chilli-powder and salt, alongside their cousins—half-ripe guavas guaranteed to give you an ache in the gut exactly an hour later. They were placed casually on sacks spread on low tables just outside school gates. From time to time the authorities tried to shoo the sellers away but they always returned to lure school children into ruining their appetites and stomachs.
Jaw-breaking sticks of candy were also a part of the school-goer’s daily diet, along with soft chewy peanut candy stretched into misshapen sticks and wrapped in cellophane. Coconut was the other versatile favourite. Slices of it chewed alternately with roasted pappadam was the all-time monsoon favourite when nothing else was dry or warm. Jaggery played a leading role in our lives: coconut scrapings mixed with it or the all-conquering puffed rice and sugar with bits of jaggery as well. A village speciality was the dregs of pounded rice roasted and stirred into sweetened evening tea. This sludge settled heavily at the bottom of your cup and was to be spooned up slowly—a way of ensuring that children didn’t go hungry between tea time and supper. Colas and soft drinks were still a decade or two away, so the great treat was orange squash stirred into water or plain old lime juice.
Dashing in and out of each others’ homes in between bouts of energetic play ensured the eatables of one kind or other were picked up hastily and shared before one raced back into the game. Jumblams, now available largely only in stores, reached us directly from trees when we played, till the street lights signalled the end of fun and the start of hours of homework.
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