7 homemade snacks from the 1970s you enjoyed as a kid that have mostly vanished

While you might still catch the occasional pineapple and cheese hedgehog as a kitschy centrepiece, this staple of homemade snacking was a dominant part of the 1970s. The base could be a melon wrapped in foil and then designed to resemble a hedgehog, with bites of pineapple, cheese or other items poked on with toothpicks.

Sadly, this staple of dining is rarely found, with other centrepieces taking over the kitchen table, while snacking has developed past finger food like this.

If the kids weren’t having it as a dessert in school, they were certainly enjoying a helping of blancmange back at home as a treat. This tasty treat comprised milk or cream thickened with flour and gelatin.

Nowadays, quick snacks are more towards things like ‘Angel Delight’ and the humble blancmange has disappeared.

One snack that has endured for decades is toast, and while now we might top ours with jam or melted cheese, back in the 1970s, Heinz had an entire brand of toast toppers for our snacking needs. Flavours included the likes of bacon and mushroom or cheese and onion, nearly turning the snack into a meal itself.

Sadly, Heinz discontinued the product back in 2015, meaning that it’s firmly a thing of the past.

A quick and easy way to make children eat healthily was ants on a log, essentially raisins (the ants) on a stick of celery (the log), with a sweet spread holding them in place. While you might find the occasional child enjoying this, ants on a log are now more retro than modern.

One of the quickest snacks that parents would make at home back in the 1970s was coconut ice, which contained large amounts of icing sugar, desiccated coconut and condensed milk, leading to an almighty sugar crash.

While a parent might still bring something like this along to a bake sale, they’re unlikely to be making these for their own children anymore due to the high sugar content.

Mock cream really took off during America’s Great Depression and during World War II with rationing making cream and butter hard to come by. It stayed edible for a while, making it the perfect topping for cakes, eclairs and other quick snacks our parents would bake.

Nowadays, if people aren’t going to use real cream in their products, then they’re much more likely to use buttercream in its place.

First made in 1904, perfection salad was a savoury gelatin dish made with shredded cabbage, celery, peppers, and sometimes pimentos or olives suspended in lemon or vinegar-flavored aspic. And with how popular gelatin was in the 1970s, this was one of the go-to snacks of the time, even if modern-day people now look at it with a raised eyebrow.