This is all about the delicious stuff (that most of us like) but which we could not buy during the war years.

I was really surprised on reading a recent article which detailed where and when chocolate goodies first came into our lives. It is a fascinating story which I think might interest you as it goes back to the 1930’s.

From 1930 to 1937 virtually all the great, classic chocolate bars were invented, and many are still around today.

Amazing the Crunchie bar was one of the first invented by Fry in 1930. The delicious Milky Way bar was invented by a man called Mr Mars in a small factory in Minneapolis. He passed the recipe on to his son Forrest Mars who came over to the UK and set up a factory in Slough where he started to look at creating a ‘chew bar’ which would consist of a soft caramel coated with chocolate.

It was rather tricky to get the chocolate to stick to the caramel, but Mars discovered the secret and the Mars Bar was born, appearing in Chicago in 1932. Very soon 600 million were been eaten every year. That is 10 per year per person.

In 1933 Black Magic, a British brand created by Rowntrees’ appeared in boxes and it is said that it is still one of the best sellers.

1935 saw the introduction of Aero from Rowntree’s and were followed in 1936 by Mars with a pea sized pellet of dough flavoured with malted milk, resulting in another classic originally called Energy Balls and aimed at slimming women! A strange name that made many people laugh they were eventually renamed Maltesers.

Moving on to 1937- in this year we saw the arrival of KitKats, Rolo’s and Smarties. Some 10,000 million Smarties are gobbled up every year!

There you have it.

In music, that would be the golden age of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. In painting it would be the equivalent of the Italian Impressionism at the end of the 19th century

and in literature think of Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens.

I for one did not think of such a history for chocolate, but I live and learn something new every day, do you?

Credit here goes to Roald Dahl from his Cookbook in Penguin 1996.