School Dinners

Oh go away!

The only things our dinner ladies could cook well were meat and potato pie with shredded beetroot, and roast potatoes. Salads always contained live caterpillars and greenfly. And we hated stewed ants, actually stewed apricots, but you had to push the covering of ants aside in order to get at the apricots. I didn`t enjoy school dinners much.

Our school dinner ladies made the most marvellous steamed puddings, Swiss rolls and rice puddings. They weren't so good at meat courses, the sausage and mash was fine, but the mince was awful, and the fried fish was always dry.

gypsy tart .oooh can i come to tea.?i tasted the gypsy tart in the bakers .omg it was awful.yes i loved the lumpy mash poatoes at school .infact i loved everything about school dinners ...

Sodapop thinking about it it was actually 60s and early 70s I left 6th form in 1975. I'm in my 60s now.
Also remember how much I loved the roast potatoes.
Just sitting here thinking about school dinners now!

That made me feel old EthelJ my children were at school in the 70s

I loved the egg and cheese flan, the salads which included a bright green cabbage\lettuce dish which seemed to be sweetened but was probably pickled I gave never worked out how it was done but I loved it. And my favourite of all butterscotch tart. I can still remember the taste and have never been able to recreate it.
I was at school in the 70s

Grandma70

Yay! Fly cemeteries - aka Eccles Cakes but we never had them for school dinners.

You cannot buy them here, at least not in any bakery I've ever drifted into but I have a cookbook with a great recipe, which I've used just once. The trick is to use real butter for he pastry. Makes all the difference.

Oh Day6, Manchester Tart! I'd forgotten that. It was delicious and I loved the pink jugs of custard that accompanied the yummy puddings.

Never had chips so envious of another local school that did. My favourite at primary was semolina and tinned peaches. Secondary was a jam tart, basically a shortbread type base with jam served with custard so thin it was like yellow milk.

My primary in the 60s also forced you to finish your plate. I found most of the food served revolting, so refused. Got sent to the headmistress aged five with my plate! Later learned to be crafty and took in a bag to scoop the ugly goo into. Chocolate pudding was nice though. ?

Heart?! I could never have forced that down. It was bad enough when my mother would boil one up on the hob for the dogs - it smelt and looked disgusting.

We used to be served heart.
Yuck, it smelt and tasted awful. No-one was allowed pudding until we had all eaten our dinner - no serving yourself either, the dinner ladies served it out.

I liked the stews, sausages, even the liver and bacon, loved anything with gravy. Never had chips or roast potatoes.

Puddings I liked the jam tart, cornflake tart, (we never had gypsy tart, would like to try it!). The suet puddings were lovely, plain with syrup poured over it, jam roly poly, spotted dick, though have never liked custard.

But I had real problems with the milk puddings, the smell of hot milk makes me retch. As a five year old stuck in an isolation hospital for a month, we were given milk puddings every day, and walloped when we didn't eat it. So when these awful puddings arrived, I would be sat in the Bursar's office over a congealing mess, unable to eat it and bringing it straight up again when forced to.

You could have been at my primary school, Nissan hits and all except I don’t recall the beakers.

I still come out in cold sweats thinking about primary school dinners. Liver (yuk!), tapioca, lumpy grey mashed potatoes. Worst of all for me were pilchards - we were expected to eat the bones! I do like mashed potatoes now but I mash mine with plenty of butter and cream. ?

Ooo, spam fritters and baked beans followed by rhubarb stodge ...yummy. On the other hand, unidentifiable pieces of grey meat/gristle with watery 'greens' and gravy (which managed to combine both grey AND watery) followed by prunes and lumpy custard ... yuck.

our salad consisted of beetroot slices cress orange and grated carrot served with luncheon meat which the bright pink had beetroot juice leaked onto it!
fish fingers mash not real potato and peas
milk puddings tapioca semolina with shortbread biscuits
weetabix with butter and jam on

I loved the stodgy puds and various milk puddings. We also had pink slop and chocolate slop - I guess it was coloured custard. I have a Kenyan friend who went to a posh Nairobi school where they had exactly the same puds, a great British export! Can’t really remember the main courses.

I HATED school meals. We had loads of salad as the school grew its own. It used to make me throw up till I worked out that I could put it in my pocket instead. Got very hungry with no food all day, though. Havn't eaten salad since
(52 years!)
p.s. There was often slugs in it too!!!

Has anyone mentioned Fly Cemetery? One of those things, like cheese pie, that only existed at school.

I loved all the puddings, including tapioca.

My school had wonderful food, cooked on the premises every day. Fresh greens, all the vegetables lightly steamed and the apricot pie was so delicious that girls would almost have a fight in the queue if it looked as if it were running out and they might not get some. In later years I worked in a school and the food almost made me weep; with better ovens, warming cupboards, kitchen gadgets and washing up machines unheard of in my childhood, those poor children got stone cold undercooked jacket potatoes with black patches, broccoli boiled so that only the stalks were left, nothing was ever hot, and frequently they were given a doughnut for dessert still frozen in the centre. It took a lot of campaigning to get the supplier changed; for some children on free meals this was their only 'hot' meal - what a travesty.

'Cement and tadpoles' is the one I particularly remember. A combination of semolina with a few raisins thrown in.

I liked school dinners but unfortunately contracted hepatitis from one, I was very ill for weeks and another girl ended up in hospital.

Loved Gypsy Tart, never remember having chips at all, think we had roast potatoes once a week otherwise lumpy mash I still don't eat mash!