Lurkers' week: memories of school dinners

Gypsy Tart - Yum
Custard with skin on - Yuk

Tapioca pudding, otherwise known as frogspawn. Urgh, how I hated that!
Mashed potatoes that had hard lumps in it.
Some kind of stew that had grey grisly bits of meat in it.
And that custard that was so thick it was served in slices.

<^shudder^>

Oh yes, mashed potato with lumps in, and it was always cold. In fact most meals were as they were cooked elsewhere and brought in to our school canteen.

My favourite was the chocolate shortbread with mint custard

As a child I didn't like fish, vegetables or beans, (I now understand it was the cooking of them that was the problem) but anything else I wolfed down like the starving child I was. I especially liked the milk puddings that few others seemed to like and one day I ate all six bowls of sago that were on my table - just to be helpful to my fellow pupils of course.

We were never served chips at school and I wasn't too keen on the plain boiled potatoes, but I loved the mash (still do). As for custard with skin on - yum, I used to ask for the skin.

Lumpy mashed potato and that horrible tapioca pudding. Rice with jam. Ugh for me!

Welcome to all new posters / former lurkers.

When we moved to NE Scotland, school dinners included the local "delicacy" of skirlie - fried oatmeal, onions and fat which was certainly a new experience.

I loved the Manchester Tart I asked my mum to try and make it but she could never get the custard right ,it always came out runny nothing like the dinner ladies made.

Then you'd have loved the custard at my school glammanana; it could stand upright on the plate!

I loved the semolina with a dollop of jam swirled in.

Chocolate slab cake and cornflake tart a bit like treacle tart.
None of the dinners though.
But the frog spawn omg now I know what hell tastes like.

Manchester Tart is still a favourite of mine, but it must have a deep layer of jam.
Mince and mashed potatoes figured largely.
At Christmas we had Christmas pud with 100 sixpences distributed through the many puddings.
If you were lucky enough to find one, you had to go to the front of the hall and mark it on a blackboard, it was very exciting.

A slab of something with currants in it that we called Fly's Graveyard.
We'd have liver once a month and everyone sang Yellow Liver, Yellow Liver - don't know why as it wasn't yellow.
Thick skin on the custard every time, probably been sitting there for ages.

Yes, Glammanana, Manchester Tart was my favourite, too.

The dinners were awful and very often left on the plate but I liked the puddings. Thick custard and semolina. Yummy!

I loved Semolina with jam , ate my friends share too.

They didn’t allow girls and boys to eat at the same table, if they had some of you would have been welcomed, frog spawn, jungle juice, stodge, bring it on .

I ate everything as a child ( just as well!) so I hoovered up any school dinner going.I remember cheese pie or fish pie on a Friday...yum. Nothing else made an impression on me, but I also remember a pudding, coconut jammy sponge with pink custard....also yum.

coming from a home where hygiene and food safety was next to godliness, for which i am now very grateful, i was appalled and disturbed, not to say traumatised by the regime that held sway at infants school.
leaving food was not allowed, nor was declining to be served it. much of the food was unknown and rather disgusting to me. we inmates would try to spread the pudding around the bowl to look as if we had eaten it. we had to march up and show the plate/ bowl and then stack it to be washed and throw the spoon in a great container.
i remember being ordered to take a spoon from the used ones, i hesitated trying to identify the one i had thrown. take any one ! was barked. now take your bowl and finish your food.
it was not only disgusting but deeply disturbing, as i was now in a world where the people in charge where so far removed from the moral universe of my background.
far from giving a good example, upholding standards and norms of civilised living, the inverse held sway. like the world turned upside down. like hell.

Revolting Tapioca, Semolina and rice pudding.
Pink custard and jam tart - yum
Horrible cold floppy cabbage

loved cornflake tart

Yuk! Just that.

Prunes and custard....we used to put the stones from the prunes around the edge of the dish then recite.

Tinker... tailor..soldier...spy.