The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets (10 page)
Read The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets Online
Authors: Roald Dahl
“My passion for chocolate did not really begin until I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and there was a good reason for this. Today chocolate-guzzling begins when the child is about five and it goes on with increasing intensity until the guzzler gets to be about twelve. . .
“Things were different when I was young. The reason that neither I nor any of my generation developed the chocolate-guzzling
bug early on was quite simply that in those days there were very few delicious chocolate bars available in the sweet-shops to tempt us. That’s why they were called sweet-shops and not chocolate-shops. Had I been born ten years later, it would have been another story, but, unfortunately for me, I grew up in the 1920s and the great golden years of the chocolate revolution had not yet begun.
“When I was young, a small child going into the sweet-shop clutching his pocket money would be offered very little choice in the way of chocolate bars as we know them today. There was the Cadbury’s Bournville Bar and the Dairy Milk Bar. There was the Dairy Milk
Flake (the only great invention so far) and the Whipped-cream Walnut. . . meagre pickings when you compare it with the splendid array of different chocolate bars that you see on display today.
“Consequently, in those days we small boys and girls were much more inclined to spend our money either on sweets and toffees or on some of the many very cheap and fairly disgusting things. . . sherbet-suckers and gobstoppers and liquorice bootlaces and aniseed balls, and we did not mind that the liquorice was made from rat’s blood and the sherbet from sawdust. They were cheap and to us they tasted good. So on the whole, we made do with eating sweets and toffees and junk instead of chocolate.
“Then came the revolution and the entire world of chocolate was suddenly turned upside-down in the space of seven glorious years between 1930 and 1937. Here’s a brief summary of what happened.
Cadbury’s began production of milk-bars, starting with the
Dairy Milk Bar.
The plain one, the
Bournville Bar
, came five years later.
Then came the first great speciality chocolate bar, the
Dairy Milk Flake
. This was a milestone, the first time any manufacturer had started seriously playing around with chocolate in their Inventing Rooms.
Cadbury’s
Fruit and Nut
bar appeared on the market.
A chocolate manufacturing company called Frys invented the
Crunchie
.
Suddenly, a new company appeared called Mars. A young American man called Forrest Mars came to England and in a small laboratory in Slough he started experimenting with his father’s recipe for the
Milky Way
to make it better. . . and the
Mars Bar
was born. . . and very soon 600 million of them were being eaten every year in England alone.
Black Magic
assorted chocolates appeared in boxes.
The lovely
Aero
was introduced.
Don’t forget Forrest Mars. In spite of the phenomenal success of his
Mars Bar
, this genius was still experimenting in his laboratory and came up with another classic beauty—
Maltesers
. In the same year,
Quality Street
was also put on to the market.
Another golden year during which monumental classic lines were invented:
Kit Kat, Rolo
and
Smarties.”
