The humble Nuttall’s mintoes…
I really haven’t given these little suckers a thought for many years, but I was looking for some hard sweets to take on my recent holidays for the plane.
Wandering around Wilkos I found their butter minutes, nice and hard, long-lasting and won’t hurt my sore tongue as fruit ones would.
One happy shopper.
I put them into my hand luggage and thought no more about them.
Next thought, a week later, was when we were about to depart, I opened the packet, unwrapped one and popped it in my mouth to stop the old ear popping fiasco.
WOW! Transformed straight back to the 1960s and 70s. My father always had 2 small tins of Nuttall’s mintoes, one in the glove pocket of his car and the other, next to the phone in the lounge. The latter sweet tin was carefully guarded by my mother who sat in the chair beside the phone and tin, when she wasn’t on the phone she would be knitting, no one dared to cross her needles!!
That tin was an ancient (even then) tin of Roses similar to this:
Nuttall’s mintoes were the predominant sweet as my father used to have just one in the evening with his coffee, just one, any more would be frivolous! We were often reminded of sweet rationing if we asked for a second one.
Occasionally we had a few fruit sweets (often quite sticky and stuck to the wrapper) or blackcurrant and liquorice ones in there, think they were more for my mother.
My brother and I used to amuse ourselves by seeing how long we could make them last for, can’t remember how long though…. How simple our lives must have been!
Sadly the tin must have got so revolting inside we changed to the Pear’s soap tin, never quite the same…
So, the Wilko’s version is not the same shape or the same hardness, but took me straight back, such happy memories. Plenty of companies still make mintoes, but I wonder if any of them are truly authentic?
I looked into the history of them, apparently, they were originally made by William Nuttall of Doncaster, he made a lot of money from their production, which he then helped the poor in Doncaster with.
Thank you Mr Nuttall for creating the mintoes and letting me reminisce.
Rambling With Ruthie 