School Food

[mangerton]

When reading the pudding thread, my mind went back to my school days. It occurred to me that we might like to post details of the food we had at school, both bad and good.

I suppose on the whole I was quite fortunate.

Bad points: the sausages kept hot after cooking by being placed in hot water. Friday's "piece of cod which passeth all understanding".

Good points: Proper porridge made with oatmeal by the house matron on a cold winter's night. Steak and kidney pudding. Roast beef, YP and roast potatoes for lunch on Sunday.

[Don Petter]

Cheese Slosh.

(Details withheld to protect the squeamish. Thursdays, I seem to remember.)

[umslopogaas]

Preparatory (ie parents paid) school in the late 1950s. Junket for pud. Ugh, my stomach turns at the memory. Like being forced to eat strawberry flavoured slugs. I know, it was just a way of forcing milk into unwilling little stomachs, but I HATED it and have never been a fan of milk based puddings to this day. If you want me to imbibe milk, turn it into cheese.

Semolina wasnt much better.

[Nick Armstrong]

I have absolutely no recollection of what the food at school was like. Not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign. Probably the former, I suppose.

[french frank]

At my village school 'dinner' arrived in big metal containers on board vans which were reheated in the school oven (the containers, I mean). My recollection is that it was stew every day.

[Cue Hancock: 'I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about.']

[Flosshilde]

Snot flan.





& no, that's not a joke on the lines of 'What's that? It's not flan'. It's a reference to the appearance of the jelly substance it was mostly composed of, with a slice of pinapple sitting in the middle.

[teamsaint]

I could do a very long piece on this.
Suffice to say, for the moment.....Sausage pie (pink sausage meat with pastry)...just vile.
Porridge. Off the scale of unpleasantness, (and I like porridge). Cold lumpy inedible.
Liver. Oh God.
About the only edible things were fried bread with marmalade on, and Rhubarb Crumble. (needless to say the custard was cold, and comprised almost entirely of skin.)

They would be prosecuted these days. Really.

[amateur51]

Cheese Slosh.

(Details withheld to protect the squeamish. Thursdays, I seem to remember.)

[amateur51]

At my village school 'dinner' arrived in big metal containers on board vans which were reheated in the school oven (the containers, I mean). My recollection is that it was stew every day.

[Cue Hancock: 'I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about.']

"That's the goodness in it!"

"That's the alf a pound of flour you put in it more like"

"Well .. I ate all mine"

"That is neither here nor there!"

[Lateralthinking1]

I couldn't handle semolina. Other than that, I was the kind of child who enjoyed school dinners, ate everything on his plate, and was outside half an hour before at least 50% of the rest who were still toying with their cabbage, often holding back tears.

Until 11. Then I moved from a primary school to an independent school where the food was consistently dire beyond belief.

It is possible that my enjoyment of the earlier dinners had something to do with not wanting to be at school at all. Being outdoors as soon as possible seemed like being halfway back home to me. At one point, I did manage to arrange going home for lunch on a regular basis which was better still. Unfortunately, later when it really mattered, I was six miles away so it wasn't possible.

[Anna]

I never had school dinners. I lived 10 mins away from all my schools and my mother thought school meals were not nutritionally sound so I always went home for lunch, except for one week in Junior school when she was briefly in hospital and father only served us burnt sausages and burnt chips for an evening meal every day. I recall it was roast chicken one day and cottage pie the next, one horrible meal was salad with beetroot bleeding all over it, pudding I don't recall except that it involved custard. I thought it absolutely delicious but she said I wouldn't be getting my necessary vitamins due to food being reheated and vegs boiled to death. Oh well, mothers always know best ...... when it comes to eating your greens and if you don't eat your crusts you'll ........ well, the list was endless!!

[Serial_Apologist]

Chips were a luxury at my fascist boarding school - nearest accurate depiction being Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film "If...".

The new boys (or squits as were called) had to sit at the bottom of the table, the top of which was occupied by the housemaster with house captain and deputy ditto on each side, ostensibly oblivious to all that was going on 10 yds down the food chain. The squits had to pile of the rest of the plates passed down the line - imagine what forking the accumulated pile of X-rated undescribables did to appetites and growth rates, me being 4 stone something at 13. We also had to communicate more of this, more of that etc to the "jim", the serving guy, who always complained "I only got two pairrer rands!", and on arrival it went straight to the top of the table. Our "jim" had a Tony Curtis with DA, and wore a slim jim tie with a false diamond on it windsor knotted to a rubber band, all of which kind of symbolised outer freedom. Most of what was left over, monopolised by the prefects and house seniors, was exhausted well before reaching the "squits". Naturally indebted to an obscure 19th century anthropologist's "survival of the shittest" theory, the motivation for not jumping through the upstairs dorm windows (after breaking the bars) was the thought of inevitable progress up the bench, starting in term 2 through the gleeful sadism of being able to get ones own back on the next generation of squits, daily chapel and twice on Sundays, not Karl Marx, being our ideological driver.

Each house assembled in its house room before every meal, a bell signalling the order of human passage to the stinking dining room. Another bell would mark everyone in, and the large Gothic-styled Victorian entry doors would slam shut on anyone excluded by the last-second scrummage. They then had to make their way up the centre gangway to the headmaster's table where names were taken, grinning heads craning to see who had been caught out this time. Monday lunch was always stew. I hesitate to write "beef"; the stench of the cooking of which, enough to make one hold breath parading through to morning chapel, made one think of maybe bodies of African freedom fighters imported to save money. The fat comprising at least half of what was one the plate had elastic qualities that made it spring back after being chewed, breath again held, so if one was to eat it, because it was the part that did us the most good, one had to swallow it whole. Lumps in porridge were, we were told, where the "jim" had spat in it. I think they obtained their fried eggs from Ellisdon's, the joke toyshop, then heated them up in axel grease. Our sausages were probably beef, disguised but made worse by herbal admixture, and only eatable by addition of copious amounts of marmalade supplied from home: the two comprising the main course on a naked white plate resembled something unmentionable bursting through something else unmentionable. Bread was called "toke", as it had been when my father was there in the 1920s. It was always white - remember this was pre-multicultiral Surrey - and being mysteriously curled up and of stiff consistency, never required toasting

All this was of course still considered "character-building" in the late 50s/early 60s, and one experienced character-building flashbacks for a good couple of decades more. The mores were those perpetrated on easily mouldable adolescents judged suitable for running the Empire by accident of birth or serendipitous family connections. Standards had definitely slipped by the time Lat1 was allowed to leave the table before others had finished, because apparently there are some who claim they benefitted from the experience of my time, and who still make speeches to this effect at the reunions I am privileged to receive glossy news of every 6 months as a result of being signed up for life as an "old boy".

[Lateralthinking1]

My leaving the table, s_a, occurred at the local council junior school. As a very sociable, elected, prefect there in the final year, I do remember my shock on going to the Independents to be examined for their idea of intelligence. It wasn't just the dire food but in every conversation I attempted during those lunches I was blanked. I had never experienced anything like it in my life before.

Once admitted into one of the institutions, as it happens on a free council pass, it probably took a full two years before I spoke more than a couple of sentences in any week. I remained virtually silent from 8.30am to 4pm for the next five years. In the real world, I was always very talkative. Just like a light switching on and off. It was probably a whole decade later when I concluded that it had simply been bad luck. There had then been many years of a normal sort of engagement, although I still felt I could have managed things differently. During the next eighteen years, each day brought in aspects of life which represented both periods. There was rarely a time in work when I didn't feel adversely affected by that era and rarely a time in social life when I did.

And then two years ago, there was an election and the sudden realisation that it had been nothing about me whatsoever, it had been one kind of British norm that I had convinced myself just couldn't be, and that it had taken over the country. Things could never be the same again. I couldn't work with it for a second time, nor could I utilise in any meaningful way unimpeded strengths.

[Mary Chambers]

Small private infant school - we were taken in a hired bus to a local cafe where we had an upstairs room to ourselves. The only food I remember is jelly with blobs of fake cream.

Prep school (day) - mince! One girl wrote a brilliant poem about its vileness, which made all the teachers roar with laughter, but they wouldn't publish it in the school magazine.

Senior school - awful main courses (salad with warm lumpy mashed potato, that mysterious thing called cheese pie, dried-up fish on Fridays, no chips ever), but wonderful stodgy puddings.

[Serial_Apologist]

it probably took a full two years before I spoke more than a couple of sentences in any week. I remained virtually silent from 8.30am to 4pm for the next five years. In the real world, I was always very talkative. Just like a light switching on and off. It was probably a whole decade later when I concluded that it had simply been bad luck. There had then been many years of a normal sort of engagement, although I still felt I could have managed things differently. During the next eighteen years, each day brought in aspects of life which represented both periods. There was rarely a time in work when I didn't feel adversely affected by that era and rarely a time in social life when I did.

That description almost exactly parallelled my own experience(s), Lat.