School Dinners in the 1960's

You are not exaggerating about the school dinners. I didn't even like the chips we had occasionally. They even managed to make them horrid, let alone the ubiquitous cabbage. The only meat I remember was mutton.

Rare good points - the Manchester tart, and the 10 portion Cornish pasties

My SIL's Auntie Vi use to be the school cook in the school in St Agnes in Cornwall and she was a wonderful cook. She told me many of the mothers asked her for recipes. I was a nurse and she told me she wanted to be a nurse but she had to stay home. I reassured her that her cooking was the best medicine for those children and she did as much good for health of the community as she would have done as a nurse. Lovely lady.

I was a primary school teacher in the 60s and we got a free lunch in exchange for eating with and supervising the children. The meals were cooked on the premises and very good but the head cook took it as a personal insult if anyone left any food, including the staff! She patrolled the dining room to see that everything was eaten. I had the temerity to leave something which I didn't like and she said"you are very fine mouthed aren't you!""

I remember getting dinner money from my poor old mother and not spending it on school dinners. As my school was close to a variety of shops, it was no problem to buy chips, cakes etc. At the beginning of the week, when I was comparatively well-off, I enjoyed bags of chips, sometimes accompanied by a battered sausage or fish cake (couldn't run to fish, even in those days) followed by iced buns. By Friday, when funds were depleted, I was reduced to eating 2ozs sweets, a sherbet dab, or threepenn'orth of broken biscuits. I was joined in these illicit feasts, which were normally consumed in a nearby 'back alley' away from the prying eyes of roaming prefects, mothers out shopping etc. by a couple of my friends. Our walk back to school took us past the boys' Grammar School and, of course, we were scandalised by the catcalls and wolf whistles which happened every day!
Sorry to go off-topic, but the mention of school dinners set me off thinking. My mother never found out what I was doing.

I laughed at that Tudorrose....fine mouthed indeed! Cheeky madam. At home I was always taught that it's polite to leave a little food on your plate.

Oh yes sago and tapioca - yuk - with someone standing over you waiting for you to finish it, and dinner ladies who ladled food onto your plate saying "it's good for you so you must have some"

My school dinners were not at all bad, and we simply had to eat everything on our plates! Unlike hospital food these days, now that really does have to be seen to be believed! My elderly friend was recently in for a hip replacement and all the food, even the toast in the mornings was completely inedible. One day she chose fish and chips - the "fish" was a quarter inch thick 3" orange coloured square! She scraped the coating off, only to be confronted by a slither of grey/black slime, through which you could see the bottom layer of orange batter! If I had not seen it for myself, I would not have believed it, it was totally uncooked too! Another day she chose a " tomato omelette" and she got a lump of yellow plastic like substance with a sachet if tomato sauce! If it were not for friends and family taking food in, all the patients would have died of starvation!

Bluesmum, DH has just spent a couple of days in hospital and he thought the food was wonderful. Says a lot about my cooking!

Our dinners weren't too bad but I hated Butter Beans and I haven't eaten any since I left school. The other thing I hated was Sago pudding (Frogspawn). It almost made me wretch everytime I swallowed it. Oooh sorry I feel quite sick thinking about it again.

I remember pink blancmange that was like wallpaper paste too. Yuk.

The meat pies were nice with mash potato and gravy. I think school dinners have improved vastly since I was at school.

My daughter thinks I'm exaggerating when I say that a fridge was a luxury when I was first married. I used to keep milk in a bucket of cold water to keep it cool.

No, Linsco 56 is not exaggerating. At secondary school, one day, the disgusting stew that was dumped on my plate consisted just a 4 inch tube of cooked intestine with gravy and the usual lumpy mash. No point complaining - I just went hungry. Two senior girls were chosen to sit top of table to do the serving out, obviously they got the pick of the gruel.
What joy it would have been if we had been allowed to take sandwiches.
Needless to say most of us were on the skinny side.

We had a noxious dish which we called "babies heads "!doesn't that sound yum.? They were suet puddings with some sort of mince. The nuns would walk around (this was at the grammar school) telling us to "remember the poor starving children in India"! We used to wish they would package up the food and send it to India!

School dinners then cost a shilling....(5p to our younger grans). I hated school dinners and everyday would go to the shop and buy two packets of crisps and a Mars Bar, which cost...a shilling. That is still my benchmark for cost of living increases!

In the late 70s at Grammar School we had no choice - option and no packed lunches. Three sittings with allocated seating, mixed ages and teachers together, rotas for clearing up. Chips once every 3 weeks and if you had to change your sitting that day you missed them. Still remember having lettuce with mashed potato!

At my school dinner tickets were bought weekly and a little hole was punched every day on entering the refectory. The first child 4s/11d, the second child 3s/6d and I can't remember the downward trajectory thereafter. All purchased on a Monday morning from my registration teacher. When I reached the age of 14 yrs I would keep the money and buy something from the local shops. That was until my mother somehow became aware of what I was doing and asked to see my dinner ticket...parents could sometime be an absolute pain in the proverbial!

My favouwas rite pudding at a small village school (the food was delivered each day) was cold pink rice pudding!

Some of your answers resonate with me. At primary school we had fatty, gristly meat nearly every day and lumpy mashed potatoes. I well remember the huge metal trays full of tubey liver swimming in thin gravy. And all the puddings seemed to be accompanied by watery custard. We weren't really given a choice of whether to eat it or leave it. We had dinner ladies who used to patrol the dining hall and the chief one was a fire breathing dragon who would make you stay behind, staring miserably at the plate of by now cold, congealing dinner and try to eat it while all your braver friends who had managed to eat theirs went out to play. I often sat there til the bell rang at the end of break time when she had no choice but to release me so I could go to lessons. Some of the other dinner ladies weren't so strict and would divide what was on your plate into two and tell you just to eat half of it. Once they'd moved away the half that you were allowed to leave had grown considerably. It was an experience that I hated and would beg mother to let me take sandwiches but she wouldn't give in on that one. School dinners today have much improved.

I was vegetarian too, unheard of in the 50s when I started school so my mother had problems getting that across to the teachers. However I was allowed to have just the vegetables. I was in heaven when we had cheese pie. There was something called rusks served with the stews, what we would call croutons today.
They were as hard as rocks but soaked up the gravy very well.
Loved the puddings except sago, lumpy and glutinous. And I adored the skin on the custard, as nobody else liked it I was given all of it.

I do remember on my first day at school the lunch was salad with tinned salmon. Fine by me, I do eat fish. Problem was a small green caterpillar on the lettuce. I put my hand up to show it to the teacher who said there was nothing there and just eat my lunch. When she wasn't looking I picked it off, wriggling, and squashed it!
Generally I quite enjoyed the school lunches. At least we didn't have to suffer the horrors of turkey twizzlers which came years later.

Oh yes, that lovely skin atop the custard. While other children made squirmy noises I was always happy to have it. I don't make custard now but would still take the skin first, if i did.

Much of what I've read here has made me eternally grateful for being able to go home for lunch - Mum's thick, nutritious soups with good Scottish floury rolls. The smells from the school dining hall were revolting and the pigs in the neighbouring piggery got fat on the leftovers. Little wonder that most of my classmates were much slimmer that I was.

semolina and tapioca pudding

I remember many an afternoon sitting in the canteen with a cold plate of this and not allowed to leave until I had finished it. I have never touched it since leaving primary school.

Our school meals were mostly good, sausage pie and Manchester tart being the best of the lot!
There were the usual hated things, liver, sago, tapioca etc, but my personal hate was meatballs, they were always horribly overcooked and to bulk them out had grains of rice mixed in. The rice used to stick out of the meatball at odd angles, hence my name for them, 'sea mine meatballs'!
We have a local bakery who make Manchester tart, individual or family sized, my DH is an addict.......to be honest, I'm fairly hooked on them too!

A hospital near me could make a fortune offering weight loss programmes. When I had my knee replaced, I was in for a week, the food was disgusting so I lost 8kg. Another 3 weeks would have sorted it!

You could buy meatballs in a tin when I was younger. My Dad always said they were tonsils.

Our school dinners were lovely. I remember stew, mince beef pie, sausages wrapped in bacon, lovely mashed potatoes, salad with a thick slice of ham. The desserts were great too, chocolate sponge with pink custard was my favourite. Of course sometimes I'd spend my shilling dinner money on a packet of tuc biscuits instead! I didn't know about healthy food in the sixties.

sausage loaf - yummy