Many aspects of my childhood years are gone forever - cartoons I enjoyed as a boy have long since been cancelled, the computer systems I grew up playing have long been rendered obselete and friends with whom I enjoyed countless games of football, hide and seek and manhunt have grown up and we've lost touch.
Food and drinks that I gorged on to satisfy my healthy childhood appetite have also changed, most of them not for the better. Curly Wurlys, once a half-hour of solid chewing on a slab of toffee half an inch think, are now thin, chocolate-coated slivers of caramel providing a far smaller task to finish. King Size Mars Bars were, to my recollection, once the equivalent of one-and-a-half regular Mars Bars, not slightly bigger, as they are today.
But one hallowed foodstuff from my formative years has gone forever. Creamola Foam, a soft drink made by mixing a flavoured powder with water, has long since disappeared from our shelves.
In Scotland, we revel in our unhealthy diet. If something can be consumed, it must have sugar added or be deep-fried. Creamola Foam, I am sure, can't have been healthy. It tasted unnaturally sweet and came in a variety of lurid colours.
Although I did enjoy partaking of a glass of Creamola Foam as a child, my fondest memories of it are from my teenage years, when a group of us found that it made the ideal mixer for vodka. It was common for us to mix a litre of vodka and a whole tub of Creamola Foam (which made around four pints of the soft drink) in a basin. Even with so much vodka swilling around this mix, no taste of alcohol could be discerned, making it the ideal concoction for teenage drinkers finding their feet in the world of illicit activities.
But alas it is no more. Which is why some of my nostalgic countrymen have begun a campaign to bring back Creamola Foam.
Gentlemen, whoever you are, I wish you every success. We may be living in a world at war, where children die every day due to poverty and where the very future of our planet is questionable. But I, for one, sincerely hope that your quest to bring back this vivid brew is a success.
4 comments:
As one who enjoys a similarly unhealthy diet, and despite my living Across the Pond from you, I, too, wish you and your countrymen every success in resurrecting the Creamola foam. Should the campaign fail (heaven forbid), I would be more than happy to mail you a couple of packets of Kool-Aid.
Thank you for your kind offer Erica. I'm not sure if Kool Aid is the same as Creamola Foam or not. Apparently a German concoction called Brause-Pulver is the closest that anyone from Scotland has found on foreign shelves.
"In Scotland, we revel in our unhealthy diet. If something can be consumed, it must have sugar added or be deep-fried."
If it is good for you, it probably won't taste good.
Sounds like Creamola was a powdered form of this.
I remember Creamola Foam well, it was great stuff. Can't help but wonder though that if, by some strange combination of circumstances, they ever managed to recreate it the product would actually sell.
I suspect that in today's more health concious times the list of ingredients would make interesting reading. I would put money on the majority of the constituent parts being the byproduct of a mad scientists lab work rather than being the produce of Mother Nature.
People would probably buy the odd tin out of nostalgia but I don't think the demand would last. Look at the clamour to bring back Spangles - came back for a while and now seem to have faded into obscurity again.
I think your days of using Creamola Foam as a vodka mixer are long gone. That is a real shame as vodka and creamola foam sounds a lot more palatable than the bacardi and milk concoction that our teen gang tried when the lemonade ran out...
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