The Quality Street test: Could you ever love someone who loved the Toffee Penny?

Those Christmas tins of assorted biscuits – you know the ones – fill me with retrospective misery for an Ireland of one channel, damp bedrooms and department store Father Christmases who smell of wee. There is no nostalgic charge there. You’re doing better with a box of Roses. But Quality Street remains, for me, the Boxing Day nausea-inducer of choice. (Maybe because, with those buckled Georgian hats, it appeals to the sort of lapsed northern Protestant who will insist on saying “Boxing Day”. Boxing Day. Boxing Day. How do you like that?)

Scowling furiously at the current packaging, I discover that at some point – probably around the time of the Cuban missile crisis – the Georgette Heyer theme has been dropped. You will search in vain for the smart officer and his apple-cheeked fiancée. I guess that wouldn’t appeal to the kids. I guess it’s not so-called “woke” enough. Nowadays we’re stuck with an abstract spectral explosion. Good luck getting abstract spectral explosion and his Regency partner round the Christmas tree for a seasonal commercial.

At any rate, this year Quality Street has consolidated its position as the nation’s seasonal sweet selection of choice. You can now get a personalised tin that retitles the street in the recipient’s name and skews the selection towards his or her taste. Meanwhile, Quality Street enthusiasts have been auditing the boxes for signs of bias towards one choc or another.

Stephen Hull of the Huffington Post began the movement by digging through one of the larger tins. The results were shocking. The lowest tally was for the much admired Purple One (we are sticking with Nestlé’s official designation here). Just 4 per cent of Stephen’s box boasted hazelnut within soft caramel. By contrast, topping the chart with 12.9 per cent, was the reliably horrible Toffee Penny. You’ll remember that yellow disk from the time its contents carried off €250 worth of dental work.

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Research

Aware that every journalist should prioritise primary research, I have just run across the road and bought one of the smaller Quality Street selections. Defying expectations, the distribution was, despite the smaller sample, less random across my results than it was with Hull’s experiment. There were two of each chocolate apart from Caramel Swirl and fudge, which both scored three, and Toffee Penny and the Green Triangle, both registering just one. That’s right. A complete reversal on the filling thief: from 12.9 per cent to just 4.2 per cent.

This should be grounds for celebration. It does not, after all, look as if the least admired and least luxurious of Quality Street selections is being forced on a blameless public. And yet, there has always been something character-building about the need to plough through the more revolting chocolates before another box can be opened or, in posher selections, the lower tray can be accessed. In the good old days when imperialist thugs graced the tin, Quality Street had a fair selection of confections you wouldn’t feed to the cat. There was once a Gooseberry Cream. The Montelimar nougat wasn’t much fun.

I can’t pretend to remember the Fig Fancy, but, like all long-suffering chocolate fanciers, I wake up screaming at the thought of the discontinued Peanut Cracknel. The various improvisations on “cracknel” – something nobody ever desired and that precious few could define – existed purely as a reminder of grim reality for anyone seeking escape through chocolate box. Life is not all Mint Whirl and Coffee Surprise and Fudge Supreme. It’s also dry, tasteless sugar-matter with the consistency of firewood and the fracture toughness of silicon carbide. The cracknel was the confectionery equivalent of that fellow employed to whisper “all men must die” in the emperor’s ear. It did us good.

Unnerving sweets

Anyway, that is all gone now and Quality Street – like prime time broadcast television – contains no sweets that unnerve sensibilities. The parameters are so narrow that one struggles to tell much about a fellow from the chocs he digs out and those he leaves for last. Containing a Brazil nut rather than a hazelnut in the years when its name didn’t suggest a Minnesotan pop star, the Purple One appeals to all sorts. The Green Triangle, the Toffee Finger and the dreaded Toffee Penny lodge most firmly in the brain from antediluvian incarnations.

Could you love somebody who preferred the Penny to the newer, less amalgam-threatening Chocolate Caramel Brownie? Maybe not at first. But, like one of the Heyer characters who inspired the original packaging, you could probably gain affection for them after a few decades of buttoned-up marital frustration. No such huddling round the piquet baize could win you over to the sociopath who favoured the Fig Fancy or the Peanut Cracknel. They were liable to get trampled to death on the penultimate page after failing to push the heroine down a well. We need such villains. We need slightly horrid sweets.

None of which knocks Quality Street off its seasonal perch. We are glad to have clarified some of the statistical infelicities. Wade in. Don’t put wrappers back in the box.