I spent about the first three years of the 1970s in Cyprus - my father was stationed out there with the RAF. We were evacuated back to England hurriedly in the middle of the night during the Turkish invasion in 1974 - I was about seven years old.
Anyway, I have a distinct memory of (while we lived out there) being given a piece of ‘survival chocolate’ to taste.
The piece I was given was an enormous thick cube about an inch on a side that had been broken off a bar that came out of a grey cardboard box with plain text labelling or printing.
The chocolate was hard and crumbly - like overcooked fudge, dark in colour and tasting like burnt, sugary, gritty chocolate.
From time to time, this memory would surface in my mind (usually when I tasted something reminiscent of the stuff), but I only recently thought to google ‘survival chocolate’ and try to identify it.
My memory bears a striking resemblance to Ration D - the presentation and packaging of the bar match my memory and looking at the ingredients list, the taste and texture sound like they ought to be a reasonable fit too.
BUT… Production of Ration D ceased at the end of WWII - some thirty years prior to my consumption of ‘survival chocolate’.
So what did I eat? A thirty-year-old surplus item? Or was there some other similar product still in production/use by the British forces?
(for the record, I also came across ‘tropical chocolate’ in my researches, but the descriptions do not seem to match the thing I’m remembering)