Just saw a weird and delightful item of news!
The Australian National Library in Canberra has recently been working on a crowd-funded project to read and catalogue a stash they have of the papers, letters, published and unpublished works, notes and general stuff from the desk of the great Australian poet Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson. Among the papers from his time working as a war correspondent for an Australian newspaper during the Boer War in Africa about a hundred and twenty years ago they had a totally unexpected find: a tin of chocolates that they described as ‘still smelling almost good enough to eat’!
Apparently these tins of ‘finest quality British chocolate’ were sent out to the troops in 1900, as a New Year gift to the soldiers on the front from Queen Victoria, paid for out of her personal fortune rather than by the British taxpayers. She had quite a debate with the chocolate company: the Cadbury family, being Quakers and thereby pacifists, did not want their name associated with the war effort, whereas the Queen wanted her soldiers reassured that they were getting the best British product. The Cadburys did eventually consent to putting their name on the product.
Why I thought it worth raising here was that it does enhance the possibility that foragers in the Silent World (especially in FennoScandia, where it stays a lot colder than in Australia), might actually stumble across still-edible chocolate!
