The Golden Years

Box of Golden Grahams

Long ago, back in the 1970s and 80s at the fag end of the cold war, Britain was covered in US Air Force bases. Full of F14s and B52s and Tomahawk missiles holding the second line against the coming Soviet invasion, able to strike back once the tanks started rolling into Germany. It was a strange era. Every time we heard the F111s flying out of Upper Heyford we thought the nuclear Armageddon had started.

As well as containing the tools of the imminent demise of mankind, these places also contained shops. Shops stocked with all the obscure US products that you couldn’t find in the UK; and not only that, they were highly subsidised.  It was rare to find an opportunity to get inside a base, except when there were airshows, and then access was restricted. But every so often we managed. To  us, as a family, where we had spent some time in the US in my extreme youth (and my parents had spent longer before I was born), it was a treasure trove of incredible excitements such as grape soda and Budweiser. It’s bewildering to think that I was actually delighted to find these things. The world was much less global back then.

Amongst the things we tended to buy, on those rare but happy visits to the USAF’s shops, were Golden Grahams. I have no recollection whether my parents discovered these in California in the 60s, or much later on future trips to the US, but I do recall them occasionally making it into our cereal cupboard and being a rare and much loved treat.

So how would they fare when I came back to them so much later? A lot of things I loved as a kid are the kind of thing that you might love as a kid but which are actually pretty nasty to an adult palate. The Golden Graham’s pass the adult palate test pretty well.

Nostalgia for Upper Heyford

I’m sure they’re entirely familiar to my US readers, but UK readers are probably not so familiar. Graham crackers are, well, a cracker made out of wheat. Not too strong in flavour, but quite earthy and a little sweet. They’re the basis for the legendary smores that we often hear of in the UK, and in that regard perhaps the closest analogy would be a digestive biscuit. Certainly in terms of ubiquity.

As a cereal they’ve used Graham cracker material and made it into a Shreddies like lattice. The “golden” part of the name is a honey addition.  It’s not the usual lightweight honey you often get in cereal but a darker, almost burnt sort of flavour, bordering on being caramelised. The cereal is like an unmalted Shreddies, I guess the caramelised honey replacing the malt.  And it’s great. It’s really, really good.

It’s a dense cereal, one that sinks, that’s filling, that tastes good. It tastes like it’s made from real stuff, not from the magical chemicals in a lot of US cereal. It actually sets you up nicely for the new day.

There’s something earthy here in the graham cracker which works fantastically with the burnt honey, giving a great full flavour and just a hugely satisfying feeling when eating it. I can see entirely why we used to be so excited when we found them.

Frankly delicious, and something I’ll be revisiting once I’ve emptied the rest of the cereal aisle.