We breakfast like kings, though with a better conscience. Nearly every such meal includes a home-made smoothie to get a flying start on our intake of fruit and veg, and because is it thoroughly enjoyable. As I took the first sip of this morning's version I was transported back to the 1970s, or even the 1960s - time travel by food - as the flavour of Vimto coursed through my system.
I'm not sure what actually flavours Vimto (natural or otherwise), but I am reasonably certain it's not a combination of blueberries, banana, peach, plum, and grapes, with lime and satsuma juice, almond milk and yakult to render it more liquid. But those ingredients combined to a moment of adult Vimto awareness.
However grown up we feel, or our roles dictate we should feel, deposits made in ones childhood taste bank are central to our experience of the world of food, at whatever age. I will confess that the flavour of bubble gum, something I have not actually eaten/chewed for decades, is very important to my appreciation of one of life's greatest pleasures, beer - it is significant in Leffe, Chimay, any wheat beer, Traquair, and many others. 'Ah, bubble gum, we love bubble gum,' says my brain (which now I notice it, sounds a tad schizoid).
Similarly with wine. Many grapes and wines hold a hint of Bazooka Joe, but the one where it is/was front and centre is/was Beaujolais Nouveau. Whatever happened to wines en primeur? Whatever happened to the pleasure of Beaj Nouveau, once raced from France to England to minimise the delay between its readiness and our drinking? Some was as rough as a Mohicanned badger's arse, of course; but every year as we took our first sip of the stuff we'd note the bubble gum (and to be accurate, the bananas too) and as jolly advanced nine-year-olds whatever our true age, we'd smile.
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