The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Angel Delight; Fig Rolls

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Angel Delight

Ultra-processed food is one of the great ills of our time (and for good reason) but whatever Angel Delight was or still is, I don’t really care – it was, indeed, sent from above and I could have eaten an entire bucket of it.

Banana, strawberry or chocolate, I would have any of them. If I had to choose, I would have picked chocolate, which my mother, if she was feeling fancy, would decorate with Jaffa tinned orange segments (a chocolate orange experience nonpareil) or even added a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I remember eating it at the kitchen table after dinner, the sunlight coming in from the window behind me, setting behind the hill, casting rays on the tiled floor, with just me and her in the kitchen. She’d be washing up and tidying things away, chatting to me while BBC Radio Ulster babbled away in the background. And once she’d finished she’d say, with an air or relief mixed with triumph at another evening’s meal cooked, served and cleared away, before moving onto the next thing, in one short, swift exhalation: Now.

Fig Rolls

At my grandmother’s house in Westlands, Crossgar, pretty much everything in the cupboards was almost always out of date.

Milk: sour.

Biscuits: soft.

Denny’s Sliced Ham: whiffy.

And there would always be a couple of Muller Corner yoghurts lurking in the fridge which were, you guessed it, pretty ancient.

It takes a lot to stop a hungry child though, and, unsupervised, we would rifle through the cupboards like starved aardvarks, fleetingly looking at the best before dates, smiling wryly and guzzling down whatever we could find. Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother was complicit in this act of letting us eat the stuff that had gone off as part of a covert stock rotation.

One of the goods you could always rely upon being there (and soft) were Fig Rolls.

Westland’s was a council estate which was one of the first in Northern Ireland to be built with houses occupied alternately with Catholics and Protestants. Sometimes I would watch the news (which was unavoidable as child growing up in the 90s in Ulster) and wonder where was this place with all this horror and trouble? The Northern Ireland I knew was between our bungalow on the Killyleagh Road in the quite countryside and Westlands this peaceful estate on the way to Downpatrick where Protestants and Catholics were civil to each other, and where there was always a packet of going-stale Fig Rolls in your granny’s cupboard.