Giant Ants in Belgium Chocolate

A hard day at the coal face and a Friday evening with no food in the house finds me lazily buying a Sainsbury's Cantonese Chinese meal for 2 (I am big boned).
Roasted duck in plum sauce (marinated sliced duck breast in a tasty plum sauce with carrot, pineapple and water chestnuts.)
Chicken and cashew nuts (marinated chicken breast pieces with water chestnuts, onion, baby sweet corn, red peppers in a rich spicy chilli soy sauce garnished with cashew nuts.)
Spicy noodles (egg noodles and bean sprouts in a spicy sauce.)
Egg fried rice (quite bearable)
Prawn spring rolls (again, quite bearable but, threateningly, "hand-rolled")

This feast will live in my memory – along with a fillet steak in Monte Carlo, a pint of Guinness in a Longford bar and a wasp taken, at speed, when crash helmets eschewed the visor – as one of those culinary landmarks that define apogee and nadir of the esurient arts.

“Unpleasant” falls as short of the mark as a child’s rocket straining for the Sun. This subtle blending of the rankly sour, strangely alien and blandly offensive took several mouthfuls to become believable. The chef’s master stroke coming in the disturbing textures that darkly hinted at the contents of each mouthful. Duck breast pieces like Pomfret cakes, cashew nuts like Witchetty grubs and all else reminiscent of Soylent Quorn.

I once ate (all of it, in disbelief) an Ice Lolly so revolting that it seemed impossible that news of it had not spread. The suspicion remained that, like root beer, it might have been made in response to a local peculiarity of taste. That was Clapham Common 1975 – perhaps a historian could enlighten me.