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Friday Food and Drink Post: Snacks ‘N ‘At
Actually, I probably should have phrased the title of this post “Weird Snacks ‘N ‘At.”
The “‘N ‘At” part is an homage to my nearest (and dearest) metropolitan area, the place I go on the rare occasions when I put on grown-up clothes and shoes, do something about my face, hands and hair (starting with, most unusually, “wash them”), and assume the role of “culture vulture,” (usually with at least one of my friends, as it generally takes some encouragement to get me to this point). I love the (very) occasional exertion, and the entertainment or meal that awaits me, although I’m sad that, while the clock is still there, Kaufmann’s is gone, and so is the Tic-Toc Restaurant, itself an homage to the timepiece, and a regular and favorite meeting place in bygone days.
When we moved to Pittsburgh in the Summer of 1964, we knew hardly anything about the place. But, thanks to my mother, Guy Mitchell, the miracle of 78 rpm vinyl, and the blue-wind-up gramophone, at least we knew this much:
Little did I know that decades later, I’d find out that a mother’s love, a wedding ring, and a pawnshop (perhaps it was the pawnshop!) would have played such a large role in setting my future husband on his way:
People who got to know [my mother-in-law] found her to be a kind, generous and gentle woman, her son said.
“The steel mill where my dad worked was on strike when I was entering Carnegie Tech in 1955,” he said. “I had received a number of scholarships, but couldn’t come up with the money for the application fees.
“Then all of a sudden, the money showed up, and the application was sent off. I found out years later that she hocked her wedding ring to get the money. I think that says a lot about the kind of woman she was,” he said.
“‘N ‘at,” I have always thought, is the Pittsburghese equivalent of what King Mongkut is talking about, when he repeatedly points and waves his finger at Anna Leonowens, intoning “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” He could have saved a lot of time, and the play, and the movie, would have been much shorter, if he’d just cut straight to “‘n ‘at.”
Wait for it: Sudden change of subject. Fear not. In She’s capable hands, it’ll all come right. Eventually. Perhaps.
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America’s manned moon landing, the first one ever. It’s a bittersweet day for us because it would also have been my stepson Sam’s fifty-fourth birthday.
But, this year, I remember where I was fifty years ago. I was in England for the summer, at our house in Droitwich. We’d rented a television for the occasion (most houses in the UK didn’t have one in 1969). It was late at night, as we watched, glued to the set, the lunar module land, and then finally, it seemed like an eternity later, Armstrong’s “one small step.” In between those two events, we munched on very British snacks ‘n ‘at. (Don’t worry; weird as they were, they have nothing to do with this post.)
Almost forty years later, after Dad was gone, my sister took his collection of slides, of which there were thousands, and had them digitized and copied to DVD. What a treasure. Pro tip: If you’re in a similar situation, please don’t wait till your loved one is gone. Get them digitized as soon as you can, and then enjoy them together. It’s so much nicer when they don’t display upside down or backwards, get stuck in the machine, or get overheated and melt into a liquid mess that gums up the works and stinks up the house. (It’s nicer, but perhaps not nearly as much fun. Yet another character-building experience, like walking ten miles each way to school, uphill in both directions, that seems to have perished from the face of the earth. Sad.)
As I flipped through the high-quality scans and images of Dad’s slides, I couldn’t help noticing, in between laughter and tears, several images that looked like mistakes. Black backgrounds. White blobs. Strange gray and white geometric-looking objects. What on earth were they?
And then I remembered. Dad and his camera, a Bell and Howell which I think had been given to him by the Ford Foundation as part of a grant to go wander around Nigeria in the throes of its civil war in 1966. Dancing with excitement, in and out of the house. Looking up at the moon. Taking a photo of it at the moment men were walking on it. Running back into the house. Taking a photo of the TV screen (in the days before LCD panels, when it wasn’t actually so easy to do that), in order to record for family posterity that we were there, when it happened.
Here they are. I was there. On the moon. With Neil and Buzz. And their Space Food Sticks. I remember:
So. Weird snacks ‘n ‘at.
Who here remembers Space Food Sticks when they were so popular, in the late 1960s? And what about “Tang?” Dreadful products. But a sweet memory of, in many ways, a more innocent time.
What other odd snacks (‘n ‘at) of your childhood would you like to tell us about? Please.
Published in General
FTR, and in case anyone else is feeling nostalgic at the moment, the closest thing I’ve ever found (and it was quite by accident) to Space Food Sticks, is Recipe #2 on this page of recipes for “Edible Playdough.” I was looking for an inexpensive solution to deliver antibiotic capsules (five at a time, three times a day) to one of my Great Pyrenees, and those handy pill pocket thingies are expensive at the best of times, and prohibitively so, when going through them at that clip.
I found that if I made a batch of this stuff, rolled chunks of it into balls, each a bit bigger than the size of a marble, and then refrigerated them, they made perfect pill pockets (give them a minute or two at room temperature to soften, or hold them in the palm of your hand for a few seconds first). Levi was quite amenable to them, and I could give him his meds without going broke in the process.
Of course, I tasted the stuff to see if it was even remotely palatable, and that’s when I discovered its affinity to SFS.
The photos are lovely, as are the sentiments!
Anyone back in the day who’d ever seen filmed news footage of, say, a control room at the Kennedy or Johnson Space Centers would recognize the “roll bar” of the TV screen’s scanning being refreshed with the motion picture camera’s own shutter in an non-synchronized way.
She’s picture, although a still and not a moving image, shows the same principle.
I loved Space Food Sticks when I was a kid in the ’70s. And you can still get them: they’re sold in museum gift shops (like at the Air and Space Museum in Washington). Until a few years ago, they were also still on the market in Australia; a while back I had a friend down there send me a few.
Unfortunately, apart from the nostalgia, they didn’t do much for me when I tried them again. Either the modern-day formulation is different from the classic version, or this is a snack better remembered than actually eaten.
Now, what I wouldn’t give for some Carnation Breakfast Squares…
Fifty years ago, I was sitting on the floor of the room I am in right now, watching our black and white TV set and marvelling that I was looking at the Moon. I was nine years old and I stayed up half the night. I don’t think I slept at all; I listened to the radio updates when finally sent to bed.
I don’t remember space food sticks, but I did pester Mom until she bought some Tang. If that was to the taste of the future, we had some work to do.
Gruesome, wasn’t it? I remember two things about it–First, how very light the powder was relative to its volume. Perhaps that was some sort of specific gravity hocus-pocus to show us what things weighed in space. It was odd, almost as if the main ingredient was something like perlite (which might have improved the taste, were that the case).
Second, what must have been culmination of years of research into packing as much artificial food coloring as possible into a small volume of stuff. Mixing the (relatively light-hued) powder with water caused a magnificent explosion of color in one’s glass. It was a chemistry experiment all in its own right.
I don’t think I saw anything as exuberantly orange again until . . . well . . . you know . . .
I think that’s true of many of the snacks of my youth. Certainly of Hostess Ho-Hos, which I remember as being delicious, rich, chocolaty, creamy, covered with a generous and thick coating of smooth chocolate frosting. I tried one not too long ago. It tasted like cardboard. Never again.
Oh, they were horrible. I remember we found a dessicated weevil, or mealybug, or something in one, one day. I suppose it upped the protein content. Perhaps it was intentional.
There was a brief resurgence in the Skylab era. I can still taste the orange ones.
Snack Mate spray cheese in a can:
Apparently it (or the modern equivalent) is now called “Easy Cheese” and is, like most things today, manufactured by OWGCI (Outsized Worldwide Global Conglomerate International(TM)). But back in the day, it came from Nabisco, and was still fascinatingly new.
I don’t really want to hear from anyone who remembers it who claims never to have debouched the “cheese” from the can straight into his or her mouth.
I love the photos! Seeing them framed, whether as globs or people, by the old TV set is so nostalgic. Great times, those were. Thanks, She. Oh, and regarding the food–my mother didn’t bring home snacks. We were always on a tight budget, plus my family struggled with weight issues. A big splurge for her was bringing home halvah to snack on–ick! I never did like the stuff, but it was a big deal to mom and dad.
My husband and I had to stifle laughs during the homily a couple of weeks ago when the priest somehow wove “great inventions we got from the space program” into the thread. He didn’t mention Tang, but we looked at each other and mouthed “and Tang!” at the end of his list.
My mom loved the cheese in a can. Used to eat it on Triscuits while watching her soaps. There was always some in the cupboard.
Not sure this was space-age, but Birdseye Cool and Creamy pudding was a treat that has disappeared. We had a mountain of the empty containers because who knows how many leftovers you might need to save…and then throw out.
I wish I could get my hands on a copy of the cookbook Kaufman’s Cooking 1970’s mentioned in the Tic Toc story. My friend and I went to the Tic Toc for the homemade thick slices of nut bread spread with cream cheese and this big thick caramel cream pie. If we went our separate ways (she’d have an appt with the orthodontist) we’d meet up under the Kaufman’s clock to catch the bus home. Keep in mind we were ten years old – there was no worry that it wasn’t safe. A couple times we were kicked out of Kaufman’s because we’d try to run up the wooden down escalators causing mayhem among the shoppers….
One of the dept stores (they all decorated the windows with animated scenes and it was an event to go see them) had a Christmas Shop set up for kids only – to shop for gifts for parents and friends. It was like a wonderland. I remember while my aunt waited for me, I went in and chose a corn cob pipe for my Uncle Bob – he loved it and smoked cherry tobacco.
The Christmas windows were lovely, and the occasion for many a family from the surrounding area to take the bus or trolley downtown to gaze at them. Kaufmann’s were generally held to be the best, but I really liked the Horne’s window (in my time they only did one, but it was spectacular, I don’t know if they had more in earlier days). Some buildings continue the tradition, in a small way, to this day, even without the shops to go with them. The geography of Pittsburgh lends itself to seasonal and family festivities–the rivers to the North and South, meeting at “The Point” compress the downtown area, and walking distances between buildings and events are short, even for families with small children. I miss “real” Christmas in the Golden Triangle, although the ‘winter wonderland’ complete with skating rink that PPG place sets up every year is quite pretty. And the twenty-year tradition of the Pittsburgh Creche continues.
lol. It was the iconic “space drink,” for sure.
God bless your mom.
I’d forgotten about that. Now that you mention it, I think my mother-in-law threw out several hundred of the containers when she moved into a small apartment about twenty-five years ago. Some of them probably dated back to the Pleistocene epoch. And there weren’t nearly enough lids, which I think is part of the fun of the thing.
I like Tang. You do have to water it down a little, though. We would mix it with Country Time Lemonade mix and call it ‘concoction’ for our kids. Nothing like liquid sugar.
My favorite snack was Hostess Snowballs – chocolate cake wrapped in rubber-like marshmallow covered in coconut. Still like them, too.
For sure.
Praise indeed. And a reminder that sometimes, the very awfulness of the snack was what was most endearing about it.
Take candy corn, for example (please). Absolutely revolting stuff. I’ve eaten tons of it.
The friend I spoke of, my best childhood friend, just went back after 50 years (on her bucket list) – she went to our old neighborhood, grade school, homes, rode the incline to Pt. Washington, and was driving her husband’s truck over one of the bridges to get to downtown…….she was terrified to drive over water….so she told me she drove down the middle of two lanes, too afraid to get to the right….her husband mentioned it…..she said “don’t worry about it”,as she drove with a vice-like grip, “they’ll see the Florida tags – that’ll explain everything and they’ll leave us alone”- :-)
PS Tang was in every kitchen and frig in my neighborhood – we knew we were drinking the drink of astronauts…
In 1965 John Young and Wally Schirra conspired to smuggle a corned beef sandwich on board Gemini 3 because it was a favorite of Young’s capsule-mate, Gus Grissom. Grissom took one bite of the sandwich and then had to stow it because little flecks of rye bread started floating all around the cabin.
It then became the subject of hearings for the House Appropriations Committee, the members of which were concerned that a multimillion dollar space shot could have been lost to a $.99 sandwich from Wolfie’s Restaurant and Sandwich Shop in Cocoa Beach.
In his memoir Young recalled, “Today the theater that took place inside the meeting room that day strikes me as totally comic, but I can assure you that those testifying for NASA at the time were not smiling.”
I don’t remember any of this. But I’ll take your word for it.
And your word (taking my word) is good enough.
In my family we drank Tang in hot tea, but I never really liked it much by itself in water.
Thanks @she for the great old Pittsburgh video. West View Park was the closest amusement park where I grew up. One of West View Park Danceland’s claims to fame is that the Rolling Stones played there before the Beatles hit the big time and brought in the wave of British rock groups. I was too young then to take note when it happened. Of all the streetcar end-of-the-line amusement parks, only Kennywood remains.
Thank you! I wasn’t in the States when the Rolling Stones floated to the top of the heap–I was at boarding school in the UK. We were expressly forbidden from listening to the RS (too much wriggling below the waist, I think), and only allowed to indulge in the Beatles on the weekends and in our free time (which was a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons). Kennywood remains, indeed. And I love the old wooden roller coasters. Not so wild about some of the newer rides, though
I remember tasting Tang shortly after my maternal grandfather died in 1959. It didn’t become famous until 1962 with John Glenn. My maternal grandmother, who live in India most of her life, liked the dry storage aspect of the drink. I liked the sugar in it, as concentrated orange juice was relatively bitter at that time.
Yes, most concentrated orange juice tasted, as my mother always put it, like “battery acid.” We used to buy what I think was a blend of tangerine and orange, because it was sweeter. The frozen kind, it was.