I’ve been staring at the block of chartreuse-coloured card hanging on my kitchen wall for weeks.

The concertinaed columns of pale lemon plastic hanging neatly from it have looked so peaceful I haven't had it in me to disturb them. But it is time. I take a deep breath, reach for the packet two across and three down and carefully pluck it from its home.

There is a framed illustration on its front, an image I’ve never really paid attention to before. A table is situated by a window, providing me with a picturesque view of a fishing harbour—two creels sit ready and waiting, boats float patiently, and a seagull is mid-flight.

But it is the contents on the table that caught my eye. Three drinks sit very close to one another—a full pint glass, a flute of sparkling wine and some sort of soft drink situation—and beside them lies one singular packet; an artist's impression of what I am currently holding in my hand. The implication seems to be that what I am about to eat will go with any manner of drink, but I can’t help but worry that someone sitting at the table has made a terrible error and only ordered one packet to be shared amongst three.

I tear my packet open—feeling gratitude for being alone—and I inhale. It smells like squeezing pristinely cut lemon wedges over fried breadcrumbs, their juice catching paper cuts on my fingers as the scent of citrus joins the steam slowly rising from the basket.

I balance one goldfish orange pillow between my thumb and my forefinger, the exact colour of the Paxo golden breadcrumbs my Gran used to make potato croquettes with at Christmas. Sunlight catches the sheen of oil that hugs the surface, an individual breadcrumb winks at me.

““I tear my packet open—feeling gratitude at being alone—and I inhale.””

I place it carefully on my tongue, I close my eyes and I let the pub slowly build itself around me. I find myself sitting on a stool and—much to my chagrin—dressed in waterproof clothing, wool crowning my head. A diet coke glinting with ice and lemon sits before me, a beermat separates the cold glass from the heavily varnished table, a varnish thick enough to dig my fingernails into. A fruit machine towers over my younger sister and sitting across from the two of us our parents discuss plans for the weekend.

I am warm, and I am safe, and I am loved.

I take another pillow out of the packet, open my eyes and thank God for the existence of Smith’s Scampi Flavour Fries.

***

Now is probably the best time to admit that I have been mindlessly eating scampi since I qualified for a kid’s menu without a clue as to what scampi actually is. Gun to my head I could not tell you what fish maketh a scampi meal.

Aware that that childlike ignorance isn’t going to pass here, you’ll be as thrilled as I was to learn that—in the UK—scampi refers to breaded or battered langoustine. Langoustine! A cousin of the lobster! How fancy!

For something so quintessentially British the word itself is Italian in origin (although what could be more British than commandeering something from another country as our own) and in Italy scampi refers to a peeled prawn tail.

British versions of scampi have been made since the 1700s—early recipes involving shrimp have been credited to Hannah Glasse, author of 1747s Art of Cookery—but it wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that the scampi I know and love came into its own.

From Berni Inn to Beefeater, the 1950s onwards saw the exponential growth of the pub meal, aided by the arrivals of domestic inventions such as the freezer and the microwave. Gastropub culture was here to stay, and scampi in a basket—now deemed a retro classic oozing with nostalgia—was feeding families up and down the country.

A very glamorous woman sits two tables away from me in the sparsely decorated lounge room. She opens her packet of Scampi Fries at the top before gently tearing down one side. She removes a wedge of lemon from her gin and tonic and squeezes it over her Scampi Fries with a flourish before sliding the packet slowly towards her husband.

The whole act has a quiet romance that makes my heart ache. I wonder if there will ever be an opportunity for me to do the same for someone else one day.

There is a seductive chaos to the anatomy of the Smith’s Scampi and Lemon Flavour Cereal Snack that I have yet to find elsewhere.

It doesn’t shock me, then, to learn that the minds behind Scampi Fries were true innovators—introducing new methods, ideas and products that have influenced and encouraged the entire snacking industry.

Smith’s Snackfood Company—originally Smiths Potato Crisps Ltd—was founded by Frank Smith and Jim Viney in Cricklewood, North London, in 1920. Their original product—Salt ’n’ Shake—saw their unseasoned crisps being portioned and packaged in greaseproof paper bags; a small sachet of salt was included to be sprinkled over as you desired. By 1934 Smiths were responsible for 95% of the two million bags of crisps being sold within the UK. Jump to the 1950s and Smiths was producing ten million packets a week.

Cheese and onion is up there with my least favourite flavours of crisp, however, credit must go to it for being the first artificially seasoned flavour added to our beloved potato snacks—an invention created by Joe ‘Spuds’ Murphy of Irish brand Tayto, quickly adopted by Edinburgh-based rivals Golden Wonder. Smith’s response to this? The introduction of Salt and Vinegar—a far superior flavour, if you ask me.

As crisp-making technology progressed these flavour wars waged on with Smith’s producing some of the most iconic crisps known today: the monstrosity that is Monster Munch, the corrugated delight of Frazzles, the delicate crunch of Chipsticks. But it was their range of Moments—pillow-shaped cereal snacks that debuted in the 1980s—that were to become an instant pub sensation.

Jamie Baxter is now known for being a world-renowned distilling consultant behind Craft Distilling Services but thirty-five years ago he had an equally impressive occupation—Shift Quality Controller in a factory in Swansea responsible for making Scampi Fries.

“I was responsible for quality control of everything that was going on in my shift,” Jamie tells me. “We used to measure all sorts of things. The amount of flavour that was put on the product was quite important and we measured that by simple titration for salts as that's quite easy and cheap to do. Fat content as well.”

“It was good fun. Mainly I just used to wander around the factory and pick something off the production line and taste it and if it tasted roughly alright I could concentrate on some of the other lines that might not be working quite as well,” Jamie continues.

“In the same factory, we made Monster Munch, Cheese Sticks, these weird extruded pillows that were called Savoury Moments, although I think they might have also been called Cheese Moments.”

Now, I’ve never experienced Cheese Flavoured Moments, so I don’t feel the level of bereavement I know so many do at their current lack of production, but I ask Jamie if he knows what happened to them all the same. Alas, he does not, but what he can tell me is, at their time of being Savoury Moments, they had a lesser-known sibling.

““I take another pillow out of the packet, I open my eyes and I thank God for the existence of Smiths’ Scampi Flavour Fries.””

“I think we called them Savoury Moments when I was there because we launched a sweet version filled with orange and sprayed with chocolate. It was only ever launched and advertised in South Wales, but it presumably didn't perform as well as they never made it national,” Jamie says. “And then they changed Savoury Moments to Cheese Moments, which is a very cheesy name in its own way.”

So there we have it, while you may remain none the wiser as to what fate befell Cheese Moments, you can take a moment to give thanks that, unlike their less fortunate chocolate orange sibling, you managed to briefly exist at the same time as them—may the memory of Cheese Moments be a blessing to us all.

But how were these pillows, which have captured the hearts of so many, made?

“It was an extruded product,” Jamie explains. “An extruded hollow cereal tube that the factory imprinted into pillow shapes and then they just naturally fell apart into individual pieces. I can't remember if they were dried a little bit but then they’d be coated in rusk and the breadcrumbs. Then they were fried and then they went through the flavour drum.”

The flavour drum is where the magic happens. Having just been fried, the scampi and lemon flavouring would be added, clinging to the fresh oil coating the shapes. There’s only one problem, when Jamie worked at the factory there wasn’t a single scampi flavouring in sight.

“There was a Dover Sole flavour on the labels rather than scampi,” Jamie says.

Dover Sole! After all that, the research, the nostalgia, the recollection of all the scampi I have met and liked and it turns out they didn’t even use a scampi-flavoured seasoning in the first place. I may never trust again.

Scampi—the meal—became a staple of British pub cuisine for its ease of creation, its simplicity of service, and its amiability of taste. So what better flavour to assign to a snack destined for bars up and down the country, when the nostalgia is already there?

Liam Findlay is a friend of a friend and he works as a specialist in Theme Park and Museum Scenting. As someone who works closely with how scents and flavours can be assigned to a place, I ask him how the science of nostalgia works in linking foods with places—specifically, Scampi Fries and the pub.

“Our scent receptors are directly connected to the limbic system, which is the part of the brain in charge of memories and emotions,” Liam says. “Therefore, if you smell something delicious when you step into a food shop or restaurant, your memories of encountering that smell in the past can come back to you. They'd likely be happy memories, and this may cause you to view the products in a positive way.”

These happy memories are echoed in a conversation I have with John Porter, pub food and drink writer and former Food Editor of The Publican, about the iconic status of Scampi Fries.

“They’re snacks for grown-ups, sold off a card behind the bar and very much associated with pub culture,” John says. “For many people, their first ‘proper’ pint in a pub was accompanied by a bag of Scampi Fries on the side. It’s a rite of passage.”

And it’s this constant, accompanying presence that has become so vital to the pub lore associated with Scampi Fries, to their meaning becoming so intrinsically attached to the memories, traditions and communities that draws people to the pubs they drink in.

“Because of the strong connection between scent, flavour and memory, a scent can become a kind of signature for a brand,” Liam continues. “Scent is a very simple application, but it can have profound results on appeal and profitability!”

Scampi Fries may mean the pub, but what do they mean to me? When I yearn for a packet of Scampi Fries what is it I am yearning for?

My etymology of Scampi Fries does not lie in the deception of Dover Sole seasoning or in basket meals or in innovative pillow technology. But in crisp packets neatly folded up, tied in a bow and placed between the slats of a picnic bench, as I have seen my Dad do countless times. In watching my friends return from the bar, three pints cradled between two hands. In dreaming of a knee tentatively grazing against my own. In coming in from the cold and in someone knowing my order and in feeling the capability of my heart expand, one packet at a time.

There is always so much more to say about the things that mean the most to you.