Remembering school dinners

[keepersdaughter]

I was thinking about school dinners yesterday. When I was at school our mid-day meal included dessert. Did you a favourite school dinner? There are only three things that I recall I enjoyed. I loved cheese pie and sausage pie and custard (not together :D) made with steralised milk. And I loved the skin on the custard :eek:. I don't remember much else, other than trying to avoid the lunch monitors who insisted we cleaned our plate. The pale, watery, washed out cabbage sticks out in my mind as awful. I can't remember much else. Did you have a particular favourite or a particular loathing.

[Oola]

at upper school the most unhealthy dinners were the best - pizza, chips and beans! They also did this really nice cheese and onion pastry thing, I loved it. If I was feeling 'healthy' I'd opt for a jacket potato. Towards the end of my time in sixth form I started losing my appetite (lost a heck of a lot of weight), and then eventually just didn't manage to eat any lunch at all. Strange really as I was always so hungry up until then.

At middle school school dinners were rancid - boiled to within an inch of their life, pallid, musty and just generally sloppy mush. I used to take in a packed lunch apart from a treat on Fridays when they had...you guessed it...pizza and chips!!! The vegetables were just disgusting, grey cubed mush, stank half the school out as they were cooked all morning and half the afternoon. Yeuck. And don't even get me started on the lumpy mashed potato and the 'vegetarian' cheese flan. I hate flan because of what they served up at school.

The puddings were, however, a completely different matter. Swiss roll with pink custard, cornflake tart, chocolate pudding and chocolate custard...lovely! Probably full of rubbish but oh so tasty...

[jazzactivist]

I only ate school dinners in the UK once or twice - when I was in the infants school and decided that instead of going home for lunch (we lived nearby) I would join the excited throng in the dinner room. The food was awful - grey, sloppy hotpot and cabbage, with semolina and jam for dessert which everyone stirred around to make it pink! I carried on going home after that, although I did miss the chocolate cornflake cakes that were so brittle that they would fly about all over the place when we tried to eat them with a spoon. In South Africa children took our own packed lunch to school and there was usually a small tuck shop selling additional items. This seems to me to be the best plan. In high school I went to boarding school and the food there was atrocious too. In a country with loads of fresh fruit we never saw any of it and mainly lived on a diet of stale white bread and 'spirogiro' jam (melon and ginger). I am so glad that as an adult I could make my own choices about what to eat.

[annie fenbug]

Boiled Cabbage - or any other veg for that matter - boiled to within an inch of its life - oh yes. Oh the aroma! boy that takes me back. Beetroot pickled in paint stripper. Sausages baked to an inch-thick crust of charcoal with a teaser of flavour in the middle, assuming your jaws were strong enough to crunch through to it. Germoline blancmange (actually, I secretly rather liked it but it wasn't the done thing to say so). Mince, which I think came out of a huge tin - I've never been able to reproduce the flavour using natural ingredients.

Primary school - cook's special was apple crumble with custard: made with bramleys from the trees in the playground, inch thick skin on the (Birds) custard and absolutely scrummy. Secondary - cook's special was a peculiarly horrible mangled form of curry. As my father had served in the Far East and would make his own nuclear-strength mulligatawny soup as the answer to all known ailments (it certainly gave you an incentive to get well quickly before your tastebuds packed up altogether) I had an idea of what curry was supposed to taste like, and this certainly wasn't it. Then sixth-form college, where the headmaster's wife did most of the cooking and was a considerable improvement (apart from an unfortunate flirtation with all-vegetarian - far too many beans). Lovely quiches and fresh soups. And, poor woman, masses of salad which we all ignored!

[keepersdaughter]

Annie, glad I'm not the only one who loved the skin on the custard, everyone else turned their noses up - which meant more for me :D.

[Rustic Pumpkin]

I only had one school dinner ever. I always went home for dinner, even when I had to walk a mile to the Grammar School, so I actually did 4 miles a day!

I was just six years old when my mother had an hospital appointment and my Nana had to work. There was no one to give me lunch at home so I was sent to have a school dinner. I didn't want to go, and I was so traumatised at being served some sort of unrecognisable glop that I think included cabbage (which I hate) and 'frogs eggs' which put me off the pud anyway that I became inconsolable and had to be sent home early! I've always been a Drama Queen! Anyway, I made such a fuss that I was never put to face that trial again. Hurrah!

[Crocus]

I think after reading all of your comments above, I'm rather glad for the lunch my mum packed for me everyday, even if it only was 2 slices of bread, with a fruit and juice. To work much later I took only 2 Provitas, a carrot and a boiled egg, perhaps a small wedge of cheese for the whole of the day. Something else, I absolutely LOVE the skin of the custard. My dad as well liked it a lot so we either shared, or one day I had it in my bowl, next day he did. Not every day of the week though, only about twice a week. xx

[eleanor2]

our school dinners no exageration were great.we had a fantastic cook.every single day was a well cooked tasty dinner and pudding.manchester tart yummy. i loved semolina and sago.also like the skin on the custard.i used to quieu up for seconds and thirds.

[franbee]

I quite enjoyed the dinners at primary school, big variety, except for the overcooked watery veg, lumpy mash, and a couple of disgusting puds, trifle and blancmange, both were so synthetic and stodgy they were cut with a knife! Yuk!
The Grammar school dinners were cooked on the premises and were much better quality. On Fridays we had salad with the hugest roast potatoes I had ever seen, and for pud, they used the milk to make milky coffee instead of custard and we had a piece of cake, very grown up.

[sunflower]

More or less I enjoyed school dinners except for the grissly meat and something that looked like chicken food. I think it was raw minced meat extremely dry and tasted yuk! I loved the puddingd though, especially chocolate crunch with choc custard and flan tart.......I'm feeling hungry now....must raid the larder

[dinger]

I remember going to school dinners a couple of times only . They used to cook a dried potatoe called Pom it was awful and like said above Semolina with a dollop of jam Ugh!!! The canteen was away from the school and I remember all around the walls was "Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron" in tiles. It was back to my mums lovely dinners for me pretty damn quick .xx

[dragonfly]

I had school dinners and puddings all through my schooling and I loved them. We had a proper potato dinner, with no choice, that was healthier than they get now. The only thing I wasn't keen on was semolina but I loved tapioca (frogs eggs) and I liked the skin on custard but couldn't eat it now. I wonder if some areas had better food than others as I don't remember soggy or unpalitable food.

[franbee]

Dragonfly, I think it depended if your meals were made on the premises or in the central kitchens. Those would have been prepared early in the morning, and were delivered by van in big metal boxes. So the veg were overcooked and swimming. The mash was almost always lumpy, used to make me shudder.

[dinger]

Several schools all used to make the daily trek to this canteen . When I think about it I can still smell the Pom potatoes. I think school meals now are cooked fresh and are much better.xx .

[dragonfly]

Franbee I don't know if the food was done on the premises or not but as all three schools were new and large it probably was. I did bunk off with some friends one lunch time and we went to the chip shop but I didn't enjoy it as much as a proper dinner and pudding so didn't do it again.

The trouble with school meals today is that the children have choices and most will go for the unhealthy fast food instead of healthy meals. I am very glad we didn't have a choice, life today is so much more complicated. Children are being told to eat the healthy food but are being allowed to eat the unhealthy. I think a compromise would be to eat one healthy meal a day then they could choose the other.