Old Fashion School Dinners

I have no positive memories of school meals. I remember them all being disgusting and was extremely relieved when I went to secondary school and could take a packed lunch.

My mum used to joke that any time she asked me what I'd had for school dinner in the 50s the answer was always the same - cheese pie and cake. The cheese pie was truly awful but the cake was alright. Imagine the fat content of that meal, though.

Grans, it was the late 70s/early 80s, which explains the ?.

Spam was the only thing we could recognise at my primary school apart from the pink boiled sausages. The food was was cooked somewhere else and shipped in. I can't remember having a decent dinner except in the "British Restaurants " which were set up to feed people during rationing.
DH says his school salad often had things crawling in it.

I hated school dinners.
I've never heard of ice cream being served at school as people here remember. Neither my children or grandchildren have had it at school either.

I hated school dinners at primary school and for years I wouldn’t eat cabbage, swede, mashed potato or stew of any kind aa they were ,respectively overcooked and watery, tasteless, lumpy with black bits in and greasy & gristly. I cant remember having anything else there but I pleaded with my parents to fo home to dinner & eventually they relented.
At secondary school it was a bit better especially the puddings which I generally liked. My favourites were treacle tart ((with crushed cornflakes), manchester tart, chocolate sponge - all with custard. Wasnt so keen on the sago.
I seem to remember having some sort of questionnaire at one point and lots of us asked for chips, after which we had them about once a week. But no-one had heard of pizza then!

I mostly loved them, our parents did not provide much in the way of meals and when they did they were inedible. The school caramel tart was lovely.

I do have memories of fat on meat which I hate and not being able to leave the table until the plate was cleared. I have a horror of fatty meat to this day. Can you imagine a dinner lady doing that to a child today!, the parents would take them to court! I was bullied by the other children in the playground too. Childhood the happiest days of your life? I don’t think so.

Crikey, we never had chips and pizza hadn't been invented when I went to school. I ate it all, don't remember particularly liking or disliking any of it.

I remember we always had salad on Wednesdays - or what was called salad in those days, the only kind of sauce being salad cream. And an orange on the last school day before Christmas.

I ate anything and everything---seconds too
My favourite was meat pie, cooked on the premises and was lovely with shortcrust pastry, mashed potatoes cabbage and gravy. Mince tart and custard.
Looking back, the dinners weren't bad at all.

I rarely had school dinners but I loved the macaroni cheese, the pizza and chips and the chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard.

I too was at a convent school, but the food was awful! Cold stodge and more cold stodge.?

My school dinners were lovely,apart from spam fritters!
On Friday after swimming it was always fish and chips followed by a doughnut and washed down with hot chocolate ?

I remember the most perfect ice cream wafers. Absolutely delicious, I have never had ice cream as good as that since those days.

I was at a convent and the food was superb. The only problem being we had to eat everything put in front of us and most desserts almost made me sick so even to this day I prefer fruit or cheese.

I do not remember ever eating fruit there.

I loved school lunch, a lot of the meals mentioned bought back memories!
JessK our GC school, up to age 11 only has chips on Fridays, with oven baked fish or the vegetarian option.

Loved school dinners, all of them. Favourite was fish in batter with mash peas and white sauce. YUM.

I always went home for lunch. Eventually, in my last year of secondary school I had school dinner on a Friday. That's because they did turkey or chicken in gravy with stuffing and chips and doughnuts with custard. I remember that well.

I'd just been diagnosed with diabetes when I started at the convent school aged 11.The nuns and the school cook were very nervous about the right meals to cook and asked my mother to come in every day to coook my meals,which she did.They later found she was a good sewer and employed her to mend their clothes.This became a full time job for which she was grateful.
Nowadays school meals seem to cater well for diabetics with salads and fruit always available.
The nuns always saved a bottle of milk for the afternoon break, I was very lucky.

School custard was lovely.
I can see the dinner lady now, Mrs. M., ladling it out of a big stainless steel vat.
It seemed creamy, just the right consistency, not too thin and not too thick, and not too sweet. Mum’s Birds custard was always too sweet.
Also loved chocolate cannonballs with pink blancmange.

Mostly not very nice, but edible. Puddings were nearly always some variety of stodge, with watery custard. About once a term at my senior school there was a pud called Chocolate Cracknel, which was delish.
I did like school rice pudding. Frog Spawn, OTOH ?

At the school I went to from 9-11 it was fish and chips and ice cream every Thursday, but it was after swimming when we were all starving, and the teacher who doled it out gave far more chips to the older boys (served first!) so there were precious few for the girls. ?

The standard of cooking at home was poor, basically everything was boiled to death. Sadly school dinners were only a marginal improvement. Treacle tart was probably the best.

Chocolate slab cake was the best,other than that yuk.

I wasn't a great fan and used to either go home or take a packed lunch but can remember that chips were on the menu about once a fortnight, not like todays dinners where you can have chips every day.

We used to call that pudding ‘Tarmac’ Ginster and had pink custard with it.

I loved my school dinners.

In junior school I went home for lunch, living only 5 minutes away from the school, so the joys of school dinner didn't reach me until I was 11.

I think my favourite meal was brown stew with mashed potatoes and vegetables, followed by chocolate sponge with peppermint sauce.

The school cook also made Manchester tart which I also loved, but have never managed to replicate no matter how much I've tried.