School dinners

Gypsy tart was my FiL’s favourite and as if it wasn’t sweet enough already he used to pour condensed milk on it. It would always make him break out in a sweat.

I used to love chocolate sponge and ‘pink’ hot custard.
Proper gourmand me.
?

I loved my school dinners too! When I worked in schools in London, when meals were still subsidised, we had our own cook & kitchen staff and food was made from scratch. So good that the teachers chose to be on lunch duty & eat with the children to get a 'free' lunch! Sadly things went down hill but there is a growing movement now to have tasty and fresh school meals with several schools growing their own veg.

I loved the caramel cake at school dinners.
Basically a pastry base and a tin of carmelised condensed milk poured on top and sprinkled with chocolate vermicelli.
I used to boil a tin of condensed milk for hours to make the caramel, now you can get it ready made.

In fact I had the same cake from the bakers today. Probably had a thousand calories in it, but it was so delicious!

My dear mam was a dinner lady and we ate well! She used to bring us some puddings home as extras and we loved them! She also brought home coleslaw and chicken curry sometime and it was lush! It was great time every night for us!,!,

Almost all my food loathings come from school dinners.

I went to a lot of schools (father in armed forces) I can remember one, it was about 1950 and schol mash was made from from potato powder and when mixed it was full of tiny little lumps, that made me gag - and I cannot eat mash potatoes to this day. At the same school, the minced beef (?) was so gristly that when a tooth came out during lunch, I ended up swallowing it, mistaking it for a bit of gristle. My parents assured me the tooth fairy knew and understood and would still visit.

At boarding school, if we had boiled eggs for breakfast, theystood them on end side to side in a shallow bain-marie. These are quite shallow and the water did not quite cover he eggs so that we often had boiled eggs that were rock hard one end while at the other end the white was still liquid. Just the thought of it makes me want to heave.

Then there was pink blancmange with a thick skin on it and macaroni cheese that hadn't been within 10 miles of a piece of cheese

Cannot think of anything I really liked or remember with pleasure.

My DD1’s favourite. Will save the recipe for the next family gathering.

Like this?

recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/recipes/desserts/gypsy-tart