Confessions of a chocolate eater and a pastie lament

I don’t "do" social media but much of the trivia which circulates on it rises to the surface and gets a run in mainstream media.

Recently, gripes about chocolate products got a headline or two. At one time I was a chocolate eater — not an addict, of course, but in a book of poems produced at school my 7-year-old daughter outed me with, "My Dad — He steals the dark brown chocolate / from dark cupboards high and low". These days, I can take it or leave it, but her last line still rings true, "He sits in a chair all day and reads a book."

The first recent chocolate headline was about something I’d never heard of, but it had the great minds of Facebook either condemning or applauding Cadbury’s Perky Nana bar, described as "a bar of light, almost foamy, banana chew coated thinly in Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate".

English papers ran the story with headlines like "Rare Cadbury Chocolate Bar Returns to UK". What made me read on was the opening sentence, "Originating from the other side of the world, the sweet treat was famously created in New Zealand and is renowned for its divisive chewy banana filling." 

"Divisive" was used to reflect the range of opinions of the Facebook crowd which ranged from, "Just the thought of them makes me gag" to "Love them, I buy 10 at a time". Facebookers are an emotional breed, it seems. 

One wrote, "They are a monstrosity, and I will make it my life’s work to banish it to the depths of hell."

That last contributor should, perhaps, be seeking counselling.

The mention of "a New Zealand creation" set me off. Could we add the Perky Nana to the impressive list of Kiwi ingenuity, joining the paint tin lid and eggbeater in the Hall of Fame?

As a diligent student of New Zealand social history, I was soon probing the Perky Nana story, prompted by the newspaper’s claim that the item was still made in New Zealand, but we know Cadbury left us years ago. 

The item you’ll find in New Zealand (and English) shops these days is made in Australia, but in Cadbury’s halcyon Dunedin days they tumbled off the Cumberland St assembly lines. Ah! Great times! 

As recently as 2009 this newspaper was able to report that Dunedin’s Cadbury factory was regarded as the company’s "centre of excellence" and was the sole manufacturer of Roses, Milk Tray and Continental chocolates, Turkish Delight, Jaffas, Pebbles, Moro, Crunchie, Perky Nana, and a dozen other temptations.

Even earlier, the Dunedin site was the home of Hudson’s biscuits, a firm which Richard Hudson set up in 1868, and it was a Hudson’s product which promoted the other chocolate headline recently, Sultana Pasties. 

Griffin’s bought the Hudson’s biscuit line from Cadbury in 1990 and moved manufacturing to Auckland so the current scandal is actually about Griffin’s Sultana Pasties.

Sultana Pasties first appeared in 1933, and the early ads were temptation personified: "a light puff pastry biscuit sandwiched with delicious plump fruity sultanas ... a new idea in biscuits. Very flaky and delicious. You’ll like them! Ask for Hudson’s NEW SULTANA PASTIES. Made by Hudson’s, Dunedin."

Not surprisingly, they were something of a luxury item and the more well-heeled or chocolate-addicted customers served them at afternoon tea. I certainly never encountered them unless I was visiting rich relatives.

But it seems the sultana pasties of my chocolate-eating, pre-Griffin’s days which reflected the old ad perfectly are no more. The shattering news broke on the morning of  February 16: "Griffin’s have changed the recipe for the Sultana pasties ... and it’s not for the better."

Griffin’s defended the change, explaining that they could no longer get the parts for the 1960s equipment they inherited from Hudson’s and were now producing, in PR-speak, "a new recipe which is a fresh take on our previous Sultana Pasties recipe with sultanas now baked into a vanilla biscuit and covered in rich dark chocolate."

The Facebook grizzlers described the "fresh take" as producing something smaller and "an amorphous lump, an overly sweet, fudge-like biscuit mixed with sultana mince".

I guess you’ll have to buy a packet of the new pasties and make up your own mind, but at least they’re still around, unlike my all-time favourite, Cadbury’s Continental chocolates. 

They came in an attractive box crammed with a host of great flavours and top-class dark chocolate.

They were ditched four years ago and how I envied Ron Tipa who told the Facebook faithful, "I worked one school holidays at Cadbury’s in the ’60s and loved it. The machine that wrapped the Continental chocolate boxes would jam and we could eat the damaged chocolates."

No wonder there were tears when Cadbury did a bunk — shame on them!

— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.