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The Eat Generation. Alternative caramel confectionery in the form of Caramac (1959).

CARAMAC

Named after Halifax-based toffee tycoon John Mackintosh rather than the American beat poet author of On the Road, Kerouac – no, hang on – Caramac nonetheless seems to have had most in common with the iconoclast, hippie, jazz musings of the latter. First, for an entire decade or more, it defied all marketing logic by continuing to sell without a single commercial spot to its name. (Then 1991 saw a TV relaunch of the ‘I was here all along’ ilk, backed by a pointed, almost sardonic, version of the Tremeloes’ ‘Silence Is Golden’.)

Second, there was something so gritty in the texture, a viscous fudginess in that original recipe which was so very redolent of melting, syrupy brown nuggets of street heroin. Caramac felt like the detritus, sweepings from the post-war factory floor of Rowntree’s production line, scooped up, tipped into a vat and boiled down into something altogether more… well, moreish. But, of course, it wasn’t. Far from a happy accident, it was a careful concoction of sweetened condensed milk, butter, treacle and so on, intended to replicate as closely as possible the experience of chomping through its cocoa-based cousins.

In fact, like the best British home cooking, its appeal was driven by economics, austerity and nostalgia. Caramac was a stodgy Sunday sticky toffee pudding turned into a thin, anaemic bar. A bar that, for all the love and attention lavished on its preparation, could never call itself chocolate. Neither fish nor fowl, Caramac sought mainstream acceptance by arranged marriages to other, more established brands. Hence Carawheat, a Jacob’s biscuit covered in a golden Caramac layer, and a later Breakaway version. Though what really took the biscuit was the cheeky twenty-first-century hook-up with a certain four-fingered wafer snack (presumably because of the pleasing, nursery rhyme result). All together now: Kit Kat Caramac, give the dog a bone…

Hey, have you heard the one about your statutory rights? Rowntree Mackintosh aims for the funny bone in a 1982 comic ad.