When I was small, about seven years old, my mum got us a packet of Vesta Chow Mein for the first time.

“This is from the ‘70s… it’s fantastic!” she said, before placing the colourful mock-Chinese box on the kitchen table. It sat there unassumingly among the Hovis and the satsumas.

Shopping days were always my favourite. They marked the end of butter sandwiches and beans on toast with the last of the cheddar. Not that there's anything wrong with either dish, it’s just the rapturous feeling of unloading Sainsbury’s bags full of eggs, cheese, beef mince and a six-pack of Petit Filous was then matched only by scoring a goal during a lunchtime kick-about.

In fact, if there were Penguin bars hiding somewhere below the Maris Pipers, groceries might have had the edge.

Dinnertime back then swapped comfortably between home cooking and abject convenience. For every two bowls of pasta, peas and pesto was some sort of breaded meat centrepiece.

I was always ready for such offerings. Bernard Matthews, whoever he was, was a kind man who provided me with a generous vehicle for mayonnaise. I used to sprinkle cayenne pepper on top for added oomph. My broccoli was only welcome if it arrived in butter and garlic.

This peculiar Vesta Chow Mein, then, marked a serious departure from the standard discourse of my early culinary days. I thought only foods like fish fingers were deployed in such packaging, and Chinese food was found in plastic tubs from shops on street corners with faux wooden floors.

My mum’s purchase was pegged to her own nostalgia—she'd had it when she was young and wanted to pass on the tradition.

“I loved Vesta Chow Mein as a child in the '70s so very much,” she recalled when I quizzed her. “We sometimes had it on a Saturday, as a treat. It made a change from meat and two veg, which got very boring. We occasionally had ratatouille or bolognese, but the chow mein was the only ‘packet food’ we had, so it was novel and thrilling.”

““In the bubbling fat, slivers of dried nothingness rose from hot oil like golden phoenix-strands of noodly fire.””

And so we also cooked the chow mein. In went various sachets of “beef” and egg noodles; soon the smell of fat, soy sauce, and sugar-filled the air. I marvelled at just how small pieces of carrot could be, but for a time I was unconvinced.

It was only when the crispy noodles were added to another frying pan that my interest truly piqued. In the bubbling fat, slivers of dried nothingness rose from hot oil like golden phoenix-strands of noodly fire, the rice and wheat flours egged on majestically by tapioca.

Of course back then I thought it simply mysticism. They were so crispy and enchanting, resting there on the paper towel, soaking up the grease.

Calamity soon struck. You see, it so often did.

As my mum began chopsticking noodles into her mouth, she realised the recipe had been changed, updated. She said: “I love strong flavours so you could only imagine my excitement at discovering Vesta Chow Mein again. Except it was different to how I remembered it. And it used to be chunks of beef but it was mince. I was dismayed, so I wrote to Vesta to complain.”

I don’t remember my mum being one to write to food companies to moan about flavour profiles, but for whatever reason, Vesta had wronged her to the point of doing so.

She clearly struck a chord, because the company asked her to be a recipe tester, and so began a wondrous few months of fortnightly reviewing, where international dishes came packaged up and quirkily presented along with scorecards, tasting sheets, t-shirts and all.

It was, I suppose, my first experience of food writing. Every Wednesday afternoon, after The Simpsons on Channel 4, we would sit down on our small pink sofa to examine whatever Vesta had sent to us, and then head to the dining table to indulge. There was a beef curry, a beef risotto, some sort of paella situation, I think. None were what they said they were—this was horrendous food but fun, granting us cause to explore the bizarrest of ingredients lists. Only the chow mein made any real sense.

Still, early on we trawled through multiple choice questions meticulously, talking of saltiness and spice levels, a lack of veg or too much sugar. Vesta probably looked at our analysis and laughed. It was actually the most serious hour of our week.

“We used to have a mouthful and then answer a few questions,” my mum told me. “It was great!”

Given our new-found love of food-based nonsense, we always continued into pudding, which, on Wednesdays, pretty much always happened to be two satsumas. “I’ve got a tanger,” I would declare, sampling too sour a segment. I still sometimes consider my segments to this day.

Three or four months into seemingly endless boxes of what were essentially large Pot Noodles, we finished our deal with Vesta. Or my mum simply stopped replying and the company cut contact. “It wasn’t just the Vesta, it was the awful t-shirts they kept sending,” she explained.

I’m afraid there is very little point to all this.

Perhaps it serves only to highlight the sheer happiness food brings in the most farcical of circumstances. For all the fine food so easily dished up by swathes of Britain today—the carefully primed chicken legs, skin crisp and seasoned; the sheets of pasta strewn with capers and courgettes—often what is most important is sitting at the table, maybe a little intensely and with a person most dear, and tucking into a bowl of instant noodles.