Even now, all these many years after I first tried it, I still like a real Coke with salted peanuts in it.
That burst of sweet and salty flavors is incomparable but not quite as enjoyable as it was in my teenage days when Coca Cola came in green, six-ounce glass bottles.
Those contoured bottles that became collectors’ items were slim at the top and then flared out some before tapering again toward the bottom.
That is a pitifully inadequate description of the old Coca Cola containers which are more appropriately referred to these days as “Coke bottle shaped.”
Cokes were five cents at most places then, and another nickel would get you a small package of Planters peanuts.
Nobody has ever documented where or how that tradition took hold, but all the guys I knew growing up put peanuts in their Coke at one time or another. I don’t remember seeing any girls do it.
It is a little embarrassing and hard to admit that even at my advanced age, I still get a real Coca Cola every so often instead of my usual caffeine free diet Coke and pour peanuts in it.
The drinks come now in humdrum plastic bottles that seem to stifle the fizz of the salty peanuts a little, but the taste is still reminiscent of the old days and the classic glass bottles.
Producers of Coca Cola nearly lost all of us fans and consumers back in the fifties when somebody in that empire decided to raise the price of the sodas from a nickel to six cents.
Not that the extra one cent would bankrupt anybody, but it was difficult to come up with a penny a lot of times. Those old Coke machines took only a nickel and penny and didn’t make change.
Coca Colas quickly went up to 10 cents, and people applauded that steep price increase instead of complaining about it. It was easier to find a dime or two nickels than a nickel and a penny.
And there was more to getting a Coke back then than just enjoying a soft drink or a sweet, salty Coke and peanut combination.
Those iconic green bottles usually had the name of a town embossed on the bottom. I have never been sure if that signified where the bottles were made or the name of the town where the soft drink was bottled.
But it was always interesting for us to compare the name of the town on our Coke bottles when we finished them. We were excited by bottles from faraway places like Atlanta or Albuquerque and surprised to see Minden, Shreveport and other nearby towns.
I have no recollection of drinking Cokes from aluminum cans or plastic bottles in my younger years. Cokes, RC Colas, Orange Crush, Delaware Punch, Dr Pepper, 7 Up and other soft drinks came in glass bottles.
None of them were as distinctive as the six-ounce Coca Cola container, but they were bottles made of glass and not plastic.
My mother started buying Shasta and other sodas like that in big plastic bottles because they were less expensive. Kids my age avoided them and pushed them off on younger brothers and sisters.
We did drink fountain Cokes from fancy glasses with the Coca Cola emblem on them at Tennyson’s Drug Store.
That venue and those beverages were too sophisticated for us to pour peanuts in the drinks, but we did get them sometimes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream to make a Coke float.
My mother drastically curtailed my consumption of Cokes by telling me that they caused pimples. There was nothing worse for a teenager who had trouble getting dates even without facial flaws.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES