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Nostalgia is one heck of a drug.
There are things from our past we think about fondly. Maybe they recall simpler or happier times from our formative years: watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday mornings as a kid in the ‘80s while scarfing down a bowl of Honeycomb cereal, for example, or basking in the sun at the man-made Kinsmen Lake in Stonewall Quarry Park while scarfing down the best darn Pizza Pop I’ve ever had in my life.
Oh, and premium, fancy desserts be damned — give me one of those small, single-serve plastic cups with the vanilla ice cream and the wooden stick/spoon thing. Good times.
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Well, about a month ago, out of nowhere, I had a random craving for another throwback snack — Cheez Whiz.
You can read all about the history of Kraft’s “cheese spread” on the Cheez Whiz Wikipedia page (My favourite fact: one of the guys who created the stuff in the 1950s tasted it in 2001 and declared it tasted “like axle grease” — I mean, how do you know what that tastes like?)
About a month ago, a jar of the orange spread ended up in my grocery basket. The sticker shock alone should have deterred me; the regular price of a 450-gram jar of the stuff now costs upwards of $9. Yikes.
It had been about 30 years since Cheez Whiz had graced my palate. And, well, having tried it in a few configurations, allow me to save you $9 worth of your own “culinary” experiments…
Hors d’oeuvres, anyone? (Ben Sigurdson / Free Press)
First off, the stuff tastes less cheesy and far saltier than I remember. Two tablespoons of Cheez Whiz brings 410 mg of sodium (or 18 per cent of your recommended daily intake). That made the choice to smear it on an already-salty Triscuit cracker a poor one.
My next move was to try it on a few different veggies, which offered mixed results — only on celery (the classic Cheez Whiz delivery mechanism) did the stuff taste remotely decent.
Ritz crackers probably proved the best combo — not surprising, I guess, given that you can buy packs of Ritz “snackwiches” pre-loaded with some sort of cheese/cheese-adjacent spread.
My final Cheez Whiz experiment: I remembered eating (and enjoying) hot dogs with Cheez Whiz slathered on the bun as a kid, so earlier this week, after barbecuing some regular and veggie dogs, I applied a very modest amount to my hot dog bun in an attempt to recapture that nostalgic flavour.
The verdict: this throwback combo didn’t do much flavour-wise, and actually proved pretty texturally troubling.
So, Dish readers, what are some of your own nostalgic cravings and, when revisited, did they hold up?
(I’m also taking suggestions on what to do with a 90 per cent full jar of Cheez Whiz, other than the obvious binning it.)
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