f Wotsits still exist 30 years from now, I may eat one and be transported back to 2020. The moment that faux cheese umami hits my tongue, and I can feel my pupils dilate on reaching the gastronomic Shangri-La referred to by Guy Fieri as “flavour town”, I’ll fall down a rabbit hole of Zoom quizzes, hand sanitiser and unintelligible government briefings. It was never my plan to make Wotsits my own version of Proust’s madeleine. If I had any real choice over which food would send me hurtling down a winding path of involuntary memory, it would probably be something fancy and literary, like fresh New England clams, or the first bite of a ripe Comice pear. But Wotsits it is. And probably spaghetti hoops, Dairylea triangles, and Penguin bars, too. Because global crises, it transpires, put me into a culinary regression, the likes of which I’ve never known. Lockdown social media – as we all well know – is where you go to either check up on who’s winning the war on Covid-19, or to gaze upon people’s perfect, freshly baked sourdough loaves. Or homemade dumplings. Or, generally, photogenic meals containing at least four types of vegetable. Which is all very inspiring and motivational (if not overwhelming) for someone like me, who is always looking to improve and diversify her cooking skills. Especially when I’m increasingly opting for meals such as tinned spaghetti on toast. Because real comfort foods are the ones you remember. Tinned spaghetti on toast is something my grandma (who was a great cook, before old age and dementia) used to make me for lunch, when I’d go and stay with her as a kid. And it’s a carb-on-carb delight I can’t remember tasting since my 90s childhood. Triple carb, actually, if you count all the sugar in the tomato sauce. I remember the roughness of the piece of kitchen roll she’d tuck into my collar when serving me this; a kitschy affectation, like something out of a 70s Italian restaurant. I remember the butter on the lightly charred white toast (it absolutely has to be white, for minimal nutritional value) melting into the neon orange sauce and creating something so much greater than the sum of its parts. This is an experience I’ve felt compelled to recreate in lockdown. And I can confirm that spaghetti on toast is still food of the gods. The scared, comfort-craving gods. School lunchbox foods have also been making a comeback. In particular, the criminally underrated Penguin, which is a classic of the “chocolate bar/biscuit mashup” genre that 90s mums would buy seemingly by the pallet. Lifting that little flap on the wrapper of a Penguin bar to reveal a joke that looks like it was generated by AI is still enough to induce a Pavlovian salivation response. I’m not sure anyone would struggle to figure out why, in “difficult, strange, unprecedented” times, you’d reach for the stuff of your childhood. Especially – seeing as taste is such a potent memory stimulus – food. I can’t remember the last time, pre-Covid-19, I bought a pack of Penguins or a wheel of Dairylea triangles (another one of my grandma’s go-tos). It’s as if these (let’s face it) slightly shit British foods were designed to form a cloud of nostalgia around our brains that warmly pulsates every time we eat one of them. “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our Club,” I sing to myself in a low mutter as I wander around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors again and again, hoping for new snacks to materialise out of thin air. I’m not sure if 90s advertising was more powerful than that of any other era, but there is a distinct section of my brain dedicated to remembering its many jingles and taglines. All of which are channelled into the surrounding fog of nostalgia, creating – as I write this – a craving for Skips so intense that I may have to leave the house, thereby risking my life, just to get a packet, bring it home with me like spoils from a hunt, and let every one of those tangy, prawny little discs melt into oblivion on my tongue. After all, staying healthy while the world descends into chaos beyond anything most of us have ever seen seems needlessly punitive. Snack on, I say. And with every snack, may memories of simpler and nicer times wash over you like a warm, syrupy wave. And if anyone knows where I might be able to get my hands on a crate of Irn-Bru bars, please do not hesitate to get in touch. • Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva