Child Of The 1980's

Foamy and jelly penny sweets came in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and flavours. They were also the type of sweet that had the most variety in price, mainly due to the fact that they came in so many different sizes. For example, nondescript jelly shapes might be one pence, ranging through jelly cherries at two pence to long jelly snakes at five pence. If you were really lucky you might even get some of the smaller sweets, such as midget gems, for half a pence each (when the half penny still existed) or two for a penny (once the half penny had been phased out).

The pictured jelly false teeth were great fun. Sometimes they were a fruity flavour, and sometimes they had a dusty coating with a more milky taste, a bit like the white milk bottle sweets (of which there’s one hidden in our banner! Can you spot it?). Now, own up. Who didn’t sink their teeth into the back of the sweet, and then pretend that the jelly teeth were their real teeth?

I’ve grouped foamy sweets, such as the pink shrimps pictured, in with jelly sweets. The foamy ones had a similar sized based pricing structure, with pink shrimps at the lower end, and foamy bananas at the higher end. Indeed, shrimps and bananas will probably be the foamy sweets most people remember best. I recall there being one variety I really liked as a child though. I remember they were different shapes of some kind (possibly animals) and came in pale pastel colours. I particularly liked these because they had a sort of fizzy quality, which meant you could leave them on your tongue and they would make it tingle as they slowly started to dissolve.

Jelly cola bottles were another favourite, and these came in a range of types too. The standard colour bottle was a jelly shaped like a traditional Coca Cola bottle, brown at the bottom, and clear at the top. They had a nice taste, but in my opinion it wasn’t really cola. You could also get them covered with a really sour sugary coating, which at least made them taste a bit more like the drink due to the fizzier taste. Both types were also available in “giant” versions, which were about twice the size of the standard ones.

Finally, you got the mix of foamy and jelly varieties. The best example of this type were the fried eggs where the white of the egg was foamy, and the yolk was a blob of yellow jelly melded to the top. I also recall there being jelly crocodiles, which were a jelly croc shape, usually green but also red and yellow for some reason, with a white or yellow underbelly made out of that weird half mixture that wasn’t quite jelly, but wasn’t quite foam either.

For the above sweets and more I recommend paying a visit to online sweet shop A Quarter Of.

• Tweet

This entry is filed under Sweets and Snacks and was posted on September 10th, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.