Goodbye, Mr. Chips

(Originally published 5/21/16)

I recently purchased a few Banquet brand frozen turkey dinners at a local supermarket. “TV dinners” are not typically on my shopping list nowadays for a variety of reasons—the foremost being that they aren’t very good. Once upon a time my youthful palate appreciated their ultra-sodium contents—but no more. Still, they were on sale and the packaging underscored the fact that there was now “fifty percent more” turkey in them.

If nothing else, consuming these frozen dinners amounted to a stroll down Memory Lane. And, I will concede, they were curiously edible. However, if there was indeed double the turkey in the dinners, their predecessors must have been sorely lacking—unsatisfying for sparrows let alone for the human masses. Fifty percent more turkey notwithstanding, I could have effortlessly eaten the three I bought in one sitting. If there was a downside to TV dinners during my wide-eyed and insatiably hungry boyhood, it was, without question, the portions. Even Swanson’s “Hungry Man” versions were somehow never enough.

This frozen dinner experience nevertheless got me thinking about other grocery store products from my youth, some that still exist and others that are in the compost heap of history. I ate a lot of pizza in my younger days—and in a variety of forms, too, including an instant toaster version manufactured by Buitoni. Regrettably, they are no more, but I fondly recall their gooey, reddish-orange puree of cheese and tomato sauce interiors, which were invariably blistering hot and prone to burn the mouth. My “Whatever Became Of” Internet search on these peculiar pizzas from yesteryear led me far afield to past comfort foods like Borden’s “Ready to Drink” Frosted Shakes in their heavy aluminum cans. We added milk to them at our house. They were that thick. Sadly, the Frosted Shake has gone the way of the Buitoni toaster pizza.

And the death knell didn’t end there. Sometime around 1970, Kellogg’s introduced toaster pastries called Danish Go-Rounds. I distinctly remember the TV commercials for them. They featured a catchy jingle that went something like this: “A new kind of pastry, frosting, and tasty. New Kellogg’s…Danish Go-Rounds.” They were tasty all right, but disappeared while I was still eating them. I had no choice. It was back to Pop-Tarts.

This former fare retrospective of mine found me in the end in Fudgetown. These were my all-time favorite cookies from a company called Burry, which also made Girl Scout cookies back then, when they were actually good. I hadn’t thought of Fudgetown in a long time, but I see that they, too, are only a memory now, along with Burry’s other boxed cookies: Gaucho and Mr. Chips, with the mysterious silhouette of Mr. Chips on the box. They were quality cookies. And since I never got the chance when Burry discontinued the products, I’d like to finally say it—better late than never—“Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”