Melbourne has bestowed many gifts upon the world.
From Aussie Rules footy and the black box flight recorder to the Hills Hoist and the eight-hour work day, the world’s most liveable city has pulled above its weight in its additions to civilisation.
I’ve had a surprising resistance to Type-2 diabetes, given my chocolate consumption.
But Melbourne has another export that, in my mind, at least, rivals these contributions, even the salty black gold we spread on our toast. I speak of the Cherry Ripe, which this year celebrates its centenary as a national icon.
Invented in 1924 by Sir Macpherson Robertson (whose MacRobertson’s Chocolates started off in a Fitzroy bathroom in 1880, and became the biggest confectionary empire in the Southern Hemisphere before being sold to Cadbury in 1967), the Cherry Ripe is unique in that it treads the fine line between mass popularity (declared our number one chocolate bar in 2013) and delicious sophistication.
Yes, I appreciate that “delicious” is subjective and that the Cherry Ripe remains divisive – generally, it seems, you either adore it or despise it with the searing hate of a thousand suns.
I stand firmly with its admirers. Having worked 12 sleep-deprived years of graveyard shifts in servos across Melbourne’s west, with a nuclear-powered metabolism, no boss looking over my shoulder and a surprising resistance to Type-2 diabetes, I can say I’ve illicitly sampled our vast range of chocolate bars many times over.
My first ever bite of that strange flat log remains a core childhood memory: sat in the back seat of our old Magna, pulling away from a freeway servo. To my seven-year-old palette it tasted distinctly adult-like, as if I was sampling some exotic and vaguely alcoholic forbidden fruit.
It has competitors, of course. While Cherry Ripes are undoubtedly my first love, I spent many a servo night sampling the substantial but silky Mars Bar, the chunky and satisfying Picnic, the neat and no-nonsense Kit Kat, the nuclear payload of chocolate Boost and the beloved hipster Polly Waffle.
Thus it will remain a mystery to my tastebuds that in our $5 billion-plus annual chocolate market – with over five kilograms eaten per Aussie per year – Cherry Ripe and its delicious mates have somehow all fallen behind the top-selling but plain-Jane Cadbury Dairy Milk bar.
But there’s that divisiveness for you. For its acolytes, there’s almost something mystical in a Cherry Ripe’s richness. It’s finespun, elegant and svelte – yet somehow still chunky. Its magic stands out against the caramel-nougat-wafer sameness of its peers – the culinary equivalent of an enchanting string section in the bridge of a popular rock song.
You can’t just scoff one down. The Old Gold chocolate exterior and glace cherry-coconut guts demand small savouring nibbles, inwards from the corners. You do this ideally after dinner, on the couch while watching a film, your sock-clad feet up.
Like all our favourites, it’s had several failed spinoffs: the lamington-like Cherry Roll, the chunky, somewhat ridiculous Double-Dipped, the passable Dark Cherry and the divisive, overwrought Dark Ganache.
Apocryphally rumoured to set off a breathalyser, there have been rumblings from the masses in years past about the diminishing amount of glace cherries being crowded out by the much cheaper coconut. Even so, its place in the Australian confectionary canon is assured not only by being a part of our Aussie vernacular, or its inclusion in the hallowed Cadbury Favourites pack, but also by the fact that, after Tim Tams and Vegemite, it is the most requested item by homesick expats in their Aussie care packages.
I will always be thankful for this thin slab of perfection. Happy birthday mate. Here’s to another century of deliciousness, adorning servo shelves like the glistening jewel you so very much are.
David Goodwin is a freelance writer. His debut memoir, Servo, is out in February 2024.
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