'Salt and Shake' crisps, that stalwart survivor from the 1930s (or whenever it was that crisps were first invented, because the brand is so ancient that you often get 'Salt & Shake' crisps turning up in 'how-we-used-to-live' museum dioramas, and such like) used to be one of my favourite brands, but it's been literally years since I've seen them in the shops. Probably this has something to do with the (British) company that made them, Smith's Crisps, having been taken over by global food multimegaconglomerate Walkers Corporation, the bods behind such transatlantic treats as 'Doritos' etc.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see a multi-pack containing six bags of the crisps formerly known as 'Smiths Salt & Shake' flavour selling at Tesco's the other day. They cost around the £1.20 - £1.40 mark, so were pretty reasonable really. The packaging was quite clever - they'd retained the blue and white original 'Smith's' colouring and also added a helpful note stating that although these were now made by Walkers, Smith's crisps is what they used to be.

Despite their apparent absence from the shops recently they are exactly as I remembered. They are utterly plain crisps, thick-ishly cut so they have a fantastic textural 'crunch' and very oily (this must help hold the salt if / when you put the salt on them). They don't have even a bit of salt to flavour them until you sprinkle on the contents of the 'little blue salt bag' which is included inside each packet. The salt in the blue packet is of a special consistency also; the individual grains are fairly large and round-ish and there is a generous amount of salt provided. If you put all the contents of the salt bag on - and frankly, is there anyone out there who buys them but doesn't? - these crisps get very, deliciously salty especially towards the bottom of the bag, and are thus not at all recommended for those on a low-sodium diet.

You'd think the crisps would settle in their packets during transport, but no, as I remember from the old days, if you open a bag from the bottom end instead of the top, the minor (very easily resolvable) difficulty you'd encounter in locating the 'little blue salt bag' among all the crisps still holds true. In some way the people who make these ensure that each little blue salt bag is always to be found right near the top of the crisps (assuming you've opened them from the right way up). I've often wondered - how on earth do they do that? Especially how did they do that in the old days? I just don't know. These days it's probably something with Computers, (or transient waves of Secret Anti-Gravity Technology or something like that).

Each individual multi-pack bag contains 28g of crisps which unfortunately I find is not quite enough, because as I've mentioned, these snacks when fully seasoned are extremely salty, and very, very oily, and so eating more than a bag of them at one sitting is always a bad idea.