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John Rooney |
Hi Nicey
Hope you and The Wife and the rest of the NCOTAASD crew are fine...not too bloated from onerous cake- and biscuit-sampling activities.
Please could you open a review thread on Cheese Footballs (for the more sporty types out there) and also Cheese Sticks? I think Cheese Footballs were made by Huntley & Palmer but I don't know who made their slender cousin, the Cheese Stick.
They used to remind me of Andre Maurois' most excellent children's book "Fattipuffs and Thinifers". It was about two neighbouring tribes of people. One tribe was short, round, fat and jolly and the other was tall, thin, stick-like and morose. Bit like their cheese-filled biscuit relatives, really. Quaere: Can biscuits be jolly? Or morose? I think we may need a philosopher of the Biscuit World to rule on that one...
The Cheese Footballs (spherical - about 20mm dia) and the Cheese Sticks (cylindrical - about 10mm dia x about 75mm long) had significant things in common. Both were constructed of a wafer covering (a bit like Askey's cones and wafers for carrying ice cream) with a very salty, slightly gritty and VERY moreish and strongly cheese-flavoured paste inside. The wafers sometimes were faultily moulded so that a careful and dedicated deconstructor could part the two halves with thumbnails judiciously inserted, and expose the yumulicious filling which could then be consumed "neat", so to speak. This salty, cheesey paste would really go for any slight abrasions in the roof of the mouth, rather like over-liberally spread Marmite soldiers do. The filling did smell a bit odd, though. A girlfriend of many years ago claimed they made my breath smell "fusty". Or could she have meant "lusty"? No matter. But nothing that a Nice Cup Of Tea couldn't wash away pronto.
I haven't seen either of these masterpieces of the savoury biscuitmaker's art for years. This could be because they're out of production (like Chocolate Olivers - Hallowed be their Blessed Name - and Abbey Crunch) or because I'm getting too short-sighted as I've got older to see them as I slowly surf the supermarket aisles. Have any other NCOTAASD readers spotted them recently? I think we should be told.
***Technical Note***
The volume of cheese-flavoured filling within a standard Cheese Football can be found by applying the formula V = 4/3 x ? x r3 (where r = 10mm) giving a result of 4190mm3 (4.19cc) of cheese-flavoured filling per football
The volume of cheese-flavoured filling within a standard Cheese Stick can be found by applying the formula V = ? x r2 x L (where r = 5mm and L = 75mm) giving a result of 5893mm3 (5.893cc) of cheese-flavoured filling per stick
Both calculations make no allowance for the wall thickness of the enclosing wafer, and assume there are no voids within the wafer; i.e. each artefact is perfectly filled and, in the case of the Cheese Sticks, each stick has circular ends square to the length
Best wishes
John Rooney |
Nicey replies: John,
I certainly remember cheese footballs and concur that Huntley and Palmer were the main protagonists in this regard. I'm sure Marks and Spencer also had their own label ones. I think that could get cheese and celery ones also, at at Christmas time they liked to travel in tins. From what I remember of them the smelt quite a lot like rampant foot odor. This meant that unless you really liked them you had to get yourself quite psyched up or moderately drunk before tucking in. Much the same thing is true of oysters, I feel. There was also a round cheesy potato snack, cheese balls/puffs with bright orange cheesy stuff on it which smelt worse, so much so that I won't even mention what it reminded me of.
I haven't seen them in years, I think they were displaced from their ecological snacking niche by Scampi fries, much in the way Grey Squirrels have kicked out the red ones.
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