School lunches - a pleasant memory?

No fond memories
Disgusting!!
Lumpy mash, over boiled cabbage,
floppy carrots, boot leather meat or gristly mince.
On lump or two? Gravy
Ditto the custard
Chocolate shortbread?? that required a hammer and chisel.
What's to like??
Luckily had the option of a packed lunch,
Still had to out up with cabbage stench!

School milk made me gag!
Why did they have to keep it by the b****y radiators.

Put up with.......

I'm amazed to read that so many of you enjoyed school dinners! At Big School ours were mainly awful and, on a good day, were slightly less awful! I've never been a fussy eater, but struggled with school dinners. Too many 'tubes' still attached to the leathery meat for one thing! Cabbage, which had morphed into slop, lumpy puddings, various foods which completely defied their descriptions! . . .

I remember having a tour of the school before we attended and there were enormous tins of corned beef high up on a shelf in the kitchen, awaiting destruction because of a health scare.

Nothing but bad memories, I am afraid. In the late 1940s, mashed potato powder carelessly mixed so that it was full of tiny lumps that made me gag. I cannot eat mashed potato to this day. I am tensing waiting for the lumps.

Minced meat with so much gristle that when a loose tooth came out as I was eating it, I swallowed it because I thought it was just another piece of gristle.

Lumpy pink blancmange with a thick skin. Eggs boiled in a bain marie so that one end was cooked hard and the other the white was liquid and barely cloudy. I cannot eat eggs now unless the yoke is hard and it has some other flavouring added - cheese, mushrooms or herbs.

I have never drunk milk, even as a toddler, I have a real aversion to it, so, hours sitting with a third of a pint of slightly warm milk refusing point blank to drink it.

Lettuce served as a veg with stew. DH still will not eat beetroot. It was served as a hot vegetable and he just would not eat it.

I loved school dinners, especially the "all purpose" sponge with pink custard. I remember being sent to the staff room to collect the catering tins containing the staff leftovers. We then helped ourselves to cold mushy veg and gravy...yum!
I'd probably be OK with hospital food too.
Weird because we never eat like that at home.

I hated school dinners! We were forced to eat food that we didn't like. Today I still can't eat any type of milk pudding, even the smell puts me off.
Also mashed potatoes was always lumpy with black lumps in it. Still can't eat that either!

We had a currant pudding which we called 'brother where art thou' because there were so few currants. We also were allocated a place at a table and as we got older we found ourselves taking turns to serve the food at the head of the table. My very real dislike was the white parsley sauce! I still can't face it even now. This was served with boiled ham and mash. Tapioca pudding was known as 'frog's spawn' and was disliked by almost everyone. Luckily, we weren't forced to eat anything we disliked, not like many of you have said you were made to do.

I hated mt school dinners. Like varian and others describe we had grisly meat, grey lumpy mash, overcooked cabbage etc. Puddings were better - yes, the pink custard too ! W hy? Wasnt manchester tart a bit like bakewell tart -patry covered with jam then sponge with almonds on top? I remember the coconut one too. Sago was frogspawn, often served with 'dog biscuits'. Garibaldis were fly cemeteries.
At grammar school we filed in and always sat at the same table where we were served by the prefect who sat at the head. We stood for grace first and had to eat with good manners. Then we all scraped our plates as we piled them up and took them back to the serving hatch to collect the pud and custard which again was served from the head of the table and passed along. There was absolutely no choice. I think the food was awful but its a shame they dont teach good table manners like that any more.

Overwhelmingly mashed potato! I know at least 20 different ways of serving potato but school dinners were always mash! I haven't been able to eat it with pleasure since!

Our school meals were cooked on site at the main part of the school and delivered to us, in the annexe some 6 miles away in the head's car. They seem to be congealed at either end of the journey.

I didn't eat meat even as a child and no such thing as vegetarian options so I'd have the same as everyone else but minus the meat. Remember the rock hard cubes of oven baked stale bread that was served with the stew to fill us up, the idea was that it would soften in the gravy. Called croutons nowadays!
Always seemed to get a tiny caterpillar on the lettuce. Loved the cheese and potato pie and the puddings, except sago and tapioca.
This was late 40s early 50s so food was basic but generally good and nourishing.
No canteen style menu with loads of choice, all rubbish.
We ate what was on offer or went hungry.

Pros: pink custard, treacle tart, jam rolypoly
Cons: frogspawn pudding, butter beans
Haven't had butter beans since. Yuk

I remember having fish once, didn't like it and was ill that evening, We never had fish at home.
Mum wrote a note and next time I was served with a very large lump of hard cheese and nothing else.

I prefer not to think about school dinners ever again!

I loved my school dinners. We had the most marvellous cook. She was called Mrs Sampson, and ran the kitchen with a rod of iron. She could make even brown stew tasty. My favourite thing was chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, I'm salivating just thinking about it. The teaching staff had their lunches on the stage in the main hall. I became a member of the serving girls. We took the teacher's orders, went to the kitchen and took them on a tray. The stairs up to the stage were a hazard but we managed.

Awful memories of school dinners, lumpy mash lumpy custard, gristly meat watery gravy,and a smell that will stay with me forever of being 6 years old and walking into the canteen.

I adored school dinners at primary school. The food arrived in big silver metal trays for the prefects to serve and I can remember the anticipation waiting for everyone to get their plate so we could all start eating together. I dont think there was anything I didnt like and my particular favourite was the thick skin from the top of the custard. Toad in the hole was amazing, with lovely crisp batter and all pies - sweet or savoury. Ginger pud with lashings of custard was my favourite dessert. I loved school milk too and was very happy to drink mine and anyone elses who didnt like it. In winter the milk used to freeze right out of the top of the little bottles so you could eat it like a ice lolly.

At my junior school I once found half a caterpillar in my cabbage, so i left the cabbage, but ate the rest of the dinner. The horrible ogre of a headmistress came past and made me eat the cabbage. I was sick all down the front of her skirt.
At Grammar school, the meals were really nice, but occasionally we got what we called 'jam slab it was a large round of pastry with jam on top, and was always rock hard, but tasted good, so we always had loads of custard with it. One day a, girl couldn't break through hers, so she lifted her spoon high up and brought it down on the plate as hard as she could. The plate shattered and everyone sitting near her was covered in custard and jam. There was silence in the dining room for a moment and then everyone bust out laughing, including even the very stern teachers. Oh happy days.

I hated school dinners my DM used to give me packed lunch. However the odd times i did try but there just seemed to be naked beans with everything I hate beans yuck! Yuck! Yuck!

When I was at junior school the canteen where we had our school dinners was at the end of the street, so we had to walk there in a crocodile each day. There were two sittings, and the first crocodile would be walking back as the second one was walking down. If the meal that day was meat pie (everybody's favourite), when the leaders of the first sitting met the leaders of the second sitting, they'd say 'pass it on, it's pie'. The message would go all the way up the line of children. I don't remember it happening about any other sort of meal.

The other thing I remember is a girl on our table who always mashed her beetroot into the mashed potato, making it pink. It used to put me off.

I loved my primary school dinners. We had stews and many dishes made of mince, one of which had savoury scones on the top which they called 'American Biscuit'. We all hated the days we had salad with tinned Macedoine diced vegetables but fish and chips were a treat and we loved the roasts.

Puddings were mostly really nice with a cake topped with hundreds and thousands a favourite, as were treacle tart and custard and rice pudding and jam. The thin jam tart on short pastry was to die for and we all quite liked Angel Delight and jelly.

We had small portions and then another cooked dinner at home in the evening but ran all the calories off. We were all as thin as whippets. The children who were considered plump then would be underweight now.

Spam fritters, manchester tart and pink custard were my favourites. There was always a 'proper' dinner with meat from a joint at least twice a week and loads of fresh veg. I'd not seen a banana before I was given one at school Happy days

Unforgettable experience for me was 'the day' I was having beef stew and encountered a huge lump of fat and gristle. My teacher said it was to be eaten. Well.... I sneaked the offending mass into my blazer pocket - yep, gravy and all - and took it home. Was my Mother mad at me! However, she duly examined the offending portion and, lo and behold, agreed with me and visited the headmaster with it next day. The outcome was the school paid for the cleaning of my blazer. Rubbish and unhappy experience for me nonetheless because I really liked that teacher and she never forgave me.

From 9 to 11 I was at a school where the menus were the same from week to week - e.g. stew and 'stodge' (suet or sponge pudding) on Wednesday.
Thursday was by far the favourite - fish and chips and ice cream. Only the teacher who dished it all out invariably gave far more to the bigger boys, so the rest of us never had nearly enough chips - and it was always after we'd just been swimming and were consequently ravenous.

One pud I remember was 'geranium' jam tart, as we called it - thick doughy pastry smeared with the thinnest possible amount of bright red jam.
I quite liked the rice pudding - Mondays IIRC - though.

However one of my most stand-out memories of school dinners was another girl whispering to me, 'Witzend, do you know about periods?'
At maybe 10 I didn't, so she continued to explain until the end of dinner!

The only thing I objected to was liver ????. I remember the dinner lady Mrs Dora not allowing me to leave the table until I'd finished it!!! I was physically sick in the end!!
I was very lucky that my mum worked in the school kitchen and often times I'd get the same thing for dinner that I'd eaten at lunch! Spam fritters were my favourite and butterscotch tart with custard. Yum yum ?