Favourite school food

It depends which school I was at:
Boarding school in the early 1960s when we lived abroad was a revelation - fresh, crusty, white bread served at most meals; salads dressed with garlic, olive oil and vinegar ( at home you were lucky to get a tiny dollop of salad cream); lightly cooked vegetables (my Mother boiled every vegetable to death); and lots of exotic fruit and different cheeses with quince paste (membrillo).
School dinners in Belfast were dire! They served things in huge tin baths. The Irish stew was the worst - grisly, fatty lumps of mutton in watery gravy with tinned or frozen vegetables and lumpy mashed potato. A lot of semolina, tapioca and sago puddings ...
At my first school as a teacher in Coventry we had to do lunchtime duty and had 'family service', so all members of staff had to serve and eat with a group of about six children. The food was wonderful! The cook was allowed to buy her ingredients locally and cooked everything from scratch. I still remember her potato and cheese slice, meat and potato pie and best of all lemon meringue pie! It was a poor area, so she always made enough extra for seconds. The children had free school milk and the cook used to make biscuits to go with it - she used to stand at the kitchen door at playtime to hand them out.
When in 1993 I returned to teaching after I'd had my children things had changed and the school I worked in had awful school meals - everything made with the cheapest of ingredients and watered down - UGH! Then came the chilled meals cooked at a central kitchen and sent out in heated trolleys. I avoided them and always took a packed lunch !

Late 50's and into the 60's.
I loved spam fritters with chips and beans followed by rice pudding with jam on top!

Best school dinners chocolate sponge with chocolate custard yummy. Worst dinners soggy over cooked cabbage and grey tasteless mince.

Can't think of a decent school dinner. Spam fritters, pilchard salad with one sad pilchard. Puddings were better, especially chocolate sponge and chocolate custard and sponge with golden syrup. Nothing healthy.

I did enjoy the puddings, particularly the chocolate one with chocolate custard, dont remember nice salads or salad cream! I liked the fish and chips or cheese pie we had on a Friday.

Ohh the banana flan was amazing in primary school - this was up in rural Lancashire. Anyone else ?

The dinners at both my primary and grammar schools were inedible so I usually took a packed lunch. I had an auntie who was a dinner lady and hated eating at her house. Her home cooking was every bit as bad as the food she cooked at school, boiled to death veg, lumpy gravy and gristley meat

Yes choc sponge and custard-mmm remember it so well.

Ooh - Gypsy tart was my absolute favourite! However, try as I might I've never been able to reproduce this in all its scrumptiousness. Tried various recipes so I'm beginning to wonder if it is my taste buds that have changed! Someone mentioned butterscotch tart which I think is another name for Gypsy tart. Might give that a go.

Thick cold custard with a skin on. Mock cream also delicious.

There was a cheese pie ( sort of tray bake) that was ok. The worst had to be liver, green tinge to it, horrible stuff.

I went to an all Girls Grammar School in the early 60’s. School dinners were compulsory, even for girls who lived nearby.
We also had a teacher or prefect on each table, who served out the main course and tureens of vegetables were then passed around the table.

The Headmistress was fearsome (but fair) and took her meal sitting on a slightly raised platform. Every day, she was joined by 2 of the girls, who would serve and eat with her and if necessary she would advise on table etiquette!

I quite liked gipsy tart if that was the one with mixed fruit jam and cornflakes on top. I did try to make one but it didn’t seem right.

I hated school milk in the infant school. The infants were in one room with a movable partition wall. The teacher insisted on the milk crates being left by the coal fire to warm up. Yuk!

I remember either a teacher or prefect sat at the table and would serve us from the turines etc set at each table.

No sussexborn gypsy tart was whisked up ideal milk and brown sugar in a pastry case. The trick was to whisk for ages. It was mainly a traditional Kent pudding

H1954 Heinz still make salad cream! (Possibly someone else as also mentioned this, I haven't read entire thread. Apologies if I'm repeating!)

Miss food love, you must have gone to the same school as me!
I hated everything except sausages. I wasn’t a fussy eater, I ate everything at home, but the school food was truly disgusting.
I remember two nuns forcing my teeth apart using two forks and packing my mouth with the lumpy, grey mashed potato. Then I got a good smacking for vomiting ?
No wonder I had an eating disorder later in life ?

I loved the sago and semolina and still eat it now. I couldn't eat the fake cream though after my mum, who worked in the school kitchens explained that they made it by whisking icing sugar and lard together.....Yuk.

Loved school dinners and my mum was a school cook so she did lots of cooking at home too. But I loved the cake and custard always had a sweet tooth unfortunately!

I cannot recall anything memorable except being faced with chewy liver and bacon when I was in my first week as an overwhelmed first year at Twickenham County School for Girls. I refused to eat the bacon and was confronted by a legendary and terrifying mistress called Miss Irons ( Tinny by nickname). I still refused to eat it and she got us both out of an awkward situation by saying I had to bring a note from a parent excusing me from eating bacon. She would tolerate girls who stood up to her and withdrew with a twinkle in her eye. Not my first confrontation, but I liked her in the end.
School meals were spoiled by the possible fate of being given the job of swab, which meant fishing a loathsome cloth from a yukky bowl of water with scraps of food floating in it, having to wring it out and 'swab' the table before we left.

On the few occasions I attended school, I remember two things, the horrible acrid smell of the beef stew but the lovely salad dressing on the white cabbage, sure it was just vinegar and sugar but probably my first experience of sweet and sour, loved anything like that ever since.

I hated school dinners so much! I also hated one dinner lady called Mrs Beldon who used to slap our legs all the time, so much so my friend and I went on hunger strike. As a punishment we then had to eat lunch in our lovely headmasters office with him ! Lunches improved dramatically. All I remember about lunches was sago, jam, cold carrots, peas pudding, rubber fish, weeds (cress) , and baby poo ( can’t even remember why we nicknamed it that and what it was ? Bananas and custard?). My friend and I were so naughty I would hate to have had to deal with us.

I can remember liking something called Portuguese pie, although I can't remember what it was now, it had a mashed potato topping I think. My favourite dessert was chocolate crunch with pink custard.

I loved the rice pudding - each table got a jug of rose hip syrup to drizzle over it. I liked the sago as well.

Mondays however were cold fatty gristly beef day and was dreaded by all.

@wildswan16 ah yes the lovely rice pudding with rose hip syrup to drizzle over.. I had forgotten all about it
We were served ours with a biscuit too