Rolling in Nostalgia

Rolling in Nostalgia
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 12, 2014

Last Sunday I had my first encounter with a Chiko Roll since 1988. We met by chance, that Chiko Roll and I in Cockburn Sound, on a jetty I hadn’t set foot on since I was in pigtails.

Two hours earlier at home, the man of the house had yelled through the back door: “Hey! Let’s go fishing in Safety Bay!” Of course, I knew the fishing was a subterfuge – what he really wanted was to marry two of his favourite things: his Holden ute and a long drive.

Regardless, the kids know to pounce when an adventure’s in the offing. Inside ten minutes, they’d found their shoes and loaded the hand lines and buckets into the ute. They were sitting expectantly in the back seat by the time their father had jemmied loose some squid bait from the back wall of the freezer.

We took the scenic route – past Kwinana’s industrial estate and the fertiliser plant, belching columns of grey steam. It was not yet 4pm, and the Palm Beach jetty was packed. Bronzed kids with glistening skins sprinted past us, daring each other to climb over the railing and dive-bomb into the deep water.

Fishermen were staking out their territory. I took my youngster to the end of the jetty and baited his reel with a blob of squid while his father and sister horsed around on the beach.

For the next 45 minutes, mother and son caught nothing but a baby blowfish. It flopped and squeaked, trying to puff up into something more menacing. Being a novice fishwife, I had to shut my eyes to extricate the hook from behind two buck teeth. I made a ceremony of releasing the captive back to its watery playground but my six-year-old, bored, had already wandered away to find dad.

I packed up and leant against a concrete bench watching the anglers back-lit by an orange sun. Two matrons with matching perms were enjoying the same view. One of them had a half-eaten Chiko Roll in her lap, still in its stripey paper sleeve.

“Wow!” I said. “A Chiko Roll! Haven’t seen one of those in years!”

They turned in unison and laughed. “We still love them, even though they’re bad for us!” the lady in the cream tracksuit replied. She motioned towards her friend. “Tottie and her husband had the fish and chip shop up the road.”

Tottie was inspecting the paper bag in her lap which was turning grey from the spreading bloom of grease. “Chiko Rolls and dim sims went like hotcakes on Sund’y evenings,” she said, “We rolled them in chicken salt and the kids went mad for them!”

I left them re-living the 1970s and tried to remember the last time I had a Chiko Roll. I could still picture the straw-coloured filling flecked with carrot, but could only recall the taste of cabbage. The rest was a mysterious slurry cleverly named to suggest chicken, without promising actual bird. In fact, the Chiko Roll was more or less an Ocker spring roll, a fat tube of carbohydrate designed to be managed with one hand. The ends were cleverly plugged with batter so the insides wouldn’t seep down your front.

I remembered the Chiko Roll being extraordinarily resilient. It could remain edible after days of sweltering under the glare of a roadhouse bain-marie. The outer shell, a deep-fried chamber of dough, could be sat on without it collapsing. I know this because in my twenties, I once rear-ended one, getting back into my car after a pit-stop at the Myalup roadhouse. I didn’t even dent that Chiko Roll, such was the gentle pressure applied by my then-dainty left buttock.

The Chiko Roll has a larrikin’s pedigree. It premiered at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show in 1951. Its inventor, Frank McEncroe, a boiler-maker, had welded together his prototype with a flux of egg and flour. He was inspired to experiment after sampling a ‘chop suey’ roll from a stall at a footy match.

His new snack sold out. With a sausage-machine, he began mass-producing the rolls from the back of a fish shop. Surf dudes and top chicks lived on them. I remember the ads featured a sultry leather-clad blonde astride a Harley Davidson, her Chiko Roll gripped at a suggestive 60-degree angle. Mum complained that the lady’s jacket, unzipped to the waist, was ‘sending the wrong message.’ I thought the Chiko Roll was meant to keep its filling intact but here was hers spilling out. I ignored what I didn’t understand.

That Sunday night, under a pink-streaked sky, the five of us demolished a parcel of fish and chips. At the shop, just the one Chiko Roll lay basking under the warmer, next to a shrivelled pair of dim sims. I eyed-off the trio but wasn’t game to buy. Who knows what’s in them? I’m guessing deep-fried nostalgia.