A Swiss roll in a jacket pocket and all the little things from our past

It seems that the Swiss roll is not going down without a fight. Last month, the cake that owned the 1970s was dropped from the basket of consumer goods and services that the Central Statistics Office uses to measure inflation. Relegated alongside digital cameras and landline telephones, the price of a humble Swiss roll is, it seems, no longer an important indicator of the health of the nation’s wealth. It is now possible to imagine a dystopian near future in which school children will no longer ask how do you make a Swiss roll purely so they can answer, ‘push him down a hill’.

But no sooner had the CSO sounded the death knell on the nation’s erstwhile favourite cake, than signs of a modest revival were detected. There was a recipe for a Swiss roll on a daytime TV show last week and in the bakery at SuperValu, I note that the raspberry roulade is no longer made of meringue, but has been re-imagined with sponge in what they might insist on calling a roulade but is obviously an upmarket Swiss roll. It’s not quite a quiet revolution, but in a changing, confusing world, it’s reassuring to know that the Swiss roll still has a faint pulse.

Like most Irish families, we were mad for a Gateaux Swiss roll back in the 1970s and into the Eighties. I’m pretty sure that our family of six got through at least three a week: we definitely bought two chocolate ones (yum), and another that was usually jam- and cream-filled. I had a massive soft spot for the pineapple flavoured Swiss roll, but because it wasn’t popular with anyone else in the family, it rarely made the shopping list. Still, looking back, that seems like a lot of cake.

It wasn’t nearly as much as my grandparents consumed. When I think back on their small kitchen table, I see a boxed Swiss roll as a permanent fixture on it. My Granny baked two apple tarts a week, but that wasn’t nearly enough cake for the three adults who lived in her home, so she supplemented the sugar rush with a constant supply of Swiss rolls. They liked the chocolate one too, but they also favoured the original model, the one that had nothing but jam between its folds. That one was too bland for my sophisticated childhood taste buds but I appreciated its modesty, which seemed somehow in keeping with my grandparents’ frugal lifestyle.

This was a couple who bought their meat directly from the factory, their fish from a woman with a pram full of the stuff and their vegetables from Moore Street. When my Grandad retired, he got to accompany my granny on her many shopping excursions.

On his first visit to the meat place, she handed him his rosary beads so that he could ‘say a quick decade’ outside while she queued with the other women inside, causing him (as he later told me) to reconsider whether retirement from his job in Winstanley’s had been such a great idea after all.

They’re a long time gone now, but for a couple who were brought up with a certain degree of poverty, they both enjoyed pretty good health. Granny was given to bouts of bronchitis, which she loudly protested were caused by ‘being smoked at’, which made my pipe-smoking Grandad and cigarettesmoking uncle laugh and laugh and not stop smoking. Still, in spite of his tobacco habit, Grandad lived into his eightieth year and never had a day of ill-health. Granny carried on without him and without further bronchial trouble till she was 91, by which time, sadly, her mind was completely clouded by dementia.

I mention their health only because it allows me recount an episode of their long lives together when Granny gashed her leg on a radiator pipe while she was making their bed and ended up in hospital. It was the first time they had spent a night apart in their 50-year marriage, and my Grandad, utterly at sea as to how to pass the time, walked from their house in Drimnagh to the Meath Hospital to visit the woman he had left there only a couple of hours earlier. Other men might have brought flowers or grapes but Larry knew Eileen and so he brought an unboxed Swiss roll in his jacket pocket.

And I can never think of Swiss rolls without seeing that lovely, big old man bringing the woman he loved the cake they both adored. The past is a foreign country: they ate Swiss rolls there and life was all the sweeter for it.