Remember Fizzies? Those alka-seltzer type of tablets that one dropped in a glass of water to get instant grape soda or root beer? And those other wacky flavors?
They were the delight of my childhood, way back when. (Okay, we lived waaaay in the sticks, it didn’t take much to amuse me as a result.)
Sadly, they died off when cyclamates (the source of their peculiar sweetness) were banned. Gone for good.
Or so I thought.
Well, I finally encountered them again the other week, and bought some in a retro candy store. http://www.fizzies.com/101.html
Now they’re made with sucralose!
The anticipation was quite great, when I plunked one down into the water, forcing the littlest Mercotan to watch and relive my childhood with me (she’s 19, part of the plugged-in generation, and NOT amused by fizzing tablets.)
Then came the taste test…
<<guh>>
<<dwguhh>>
:eek:
Man, that stuff was vile!
Anybody else craving Fizzies?
Don’t do it! You can’t go back to the 1960’s again. At least I can’t. Not with these adult taste buds.
I loved Fizzies. They were an almost unheard-of treat, since they were a novelty item and mom wasn’t big on wasting money on such frivolous stuff.
Even better, IM childish O, were “Flavor Straws”, which were paper straws coated inside with chocolatey stuff so that the milk you drank through them was flavored. At least the first several sips were.
I’m twenty-two. I remember my mom getting really excited about seeing those in a Kroger (chain grocery store) when I was eleven. We got some orange ones and some root beer flavor ones. Both flavors were pretty meh…even to my eleven year old palate.
I do remember using one as a visual for a current events report one a kid bringing Aka-Selzer to school We got extra-credit if we had a visual.
I was a kid when Fizzies first came out. I bugged my mom. She finally relented and bought a pack – I think it might have been cola or root beer. I plopped it in a glass of cold water, watched it fizz and drank it down.
My recollection is that the original Fizzies, back in the 1950s, used suger, not cyclamates. (This is Pepper Mill’s recollection, too). Fizzies died out in the early 1960s, then, I think, came back later. But its demise had nothing to do with cyclamates.
I think back to Fizzies and I remember them being disappointed in them even then, and I originally had them in the fifties. I don’t remember them being artificially sweetened, which may have been part of the problem. I remember them being similar in weight and size as Alka-Seltzer tablets.
If that is correct, they’d only weigh around 3500 mg each. Two of them, 7,000 mg total in 8 ounces of water won’t be very sweet. That’s about a teaspoon and a half of sugar. Compare that to Kool-Aid, which, if made to package directions, has 26,000 mg of sugar per 8 ounce glass. There’s a blast of sugar that’ll keep the kids coming back.
Cyclamates, saccharine and sucralose all have a lot more sweetening power than sugar, so could be made a lot sweeter in a small dose.
Fizzies were the grossest food I ever tasted as a kid. I wanted them so I could watch them fizz, but I couldn’t swallow the vile stuff. They tasted a lot like those red dye pills the dentist gave you to chew on every year. The horehound candy the old people gave you were better than Fizzies. The bar soap I tried as a kid was better tasting.
Every summer, my parents, in Southern California, would put three or four of us boys on a Greyhound Bus to San Francisco*, where my Grandma would pick us up, and the first thing we did was pull open the drawer on the kitchen table to get the Fizzies.
Good times.
*And then, most Mays, we’d have a new brother or sister in the family. Go figure.
Nope, it was cyclamates. If they used actual sugar, it would have to be 5-10 times as big, since artificial sweeteners are much sweeter (and dissolve better in water) than sugar.
Fizzies were more fun to watch fizzing then they were to drink. It was impossible to get the ratio of flavor to water right. So it was either colored water or pure artificial flavoring. I got them a few times as a kid, but one taste told me not to bother again.
I didn’t care much for Pez, either – it was the dispenser that made them useful. But they weren’t horrible – just insipid.
Now, that’s a blast from the past I could have lived without: I’m sitting here reflexively salivating with the sensory memory of sucking on Fizzies tablets 45 years ago. Putting them in water was for babies; real eight-year-olds licked them.
There is a Mexican candy that’s marshmallow and coconut between graham cracker like cookies. I don’t know if it’s got a generic name, but Merengue is the best known brand. We’d only get them when my grandparents went to south Texas, and I remembered them as tasting great. So what happened when I found them being sold in a Mexican grocery? They all tasted dry and not sweet. I even tried another brand, and it still didn’t taste good.
