Gypsy Creams

Martin Fenton on 5 August 2011 @ 9pm

Still going, albeit (it seems) only in catering-sized 2Kg tubs. They slather it on hot toast at our works canteen like it’s tiling grout.

Kif on 6 August 2011 @ 3pm

The thing about Summer County (I can sing you the jingle if you want) was that it was always advertised as being “10% butter”. This always struck me, even at the time, as a percentage so small as to be hardly worth bothering with. But there is no getting away from the fact that using butter had a social cachet that using mere margarine did not. It was never a health issue because butter was regarded as rather good for you and margarine as a rather inferior fatty substitute. No ‘spreads culture’ like today. It was either butter (good) or margarine (cheap & nasty) in the fifties – and cheap margarine tasted like lard with yellow dye in. Only when Flora arrived, in the sixties, did margarine begin to overtake Butter on health grounds, and lose the “poor people’s spread” image that it had had in the fifties and before. Summer County was a marketing attempt to”have it both ways”. The cheapness of margarine with an uplift to the taste element by adding a bit of butter. It was a huge success, oddly, but faded when the arrival of Flora (really) did revolutionise the margarine world and smashed market leaders Stork & Blue Band into the subsidiary, “baking only” category…