School lunches - a pleasant memory?

If I have to venture into a school even now, and get a whiff of 'dinners', it makes me feel really queasy.

I didn’t like my primary school lunches in the 1970’s?
I used to watch with great envy the children who went home for lunch. This was not an option for me as both my parents worked and that was in the next town along, a 40 minute drive!
I too remember hideous over cooked food and luke warm meals! It was all very different from the food we ate at home!
Both parents had lived abroad, and in my mother’s case had grown up abroad. so our food was always very seasoned or highly spiced, and not at all British food of the time! My grandparents ate the same way (for the same reason) so I found stodgy UK school lunches highly unpalatable? things improved when I went off to boarding school, and at least the food there was prepared fresh on the premises and not shipped in by outside caterers?

Same as inishowen I loved them
Main memories : beetroot juice on mashed potatoes, prunes and custard, leek rolypoly.
I've got a photo somewhere of me as server on our table, published in the local paper.

I didn't have school dinners in Primary school. I went home. My dinners in Grammar school were great. We had allocated tables ruled over by a prefect. I had my first taste of watercress. We were in a watercress growing area. I loved all the puddings especially one we called concrete. It was shortbread served with pink custard.
I well remember my son , when he was in Primary school being excited at the prospect of Cowboy Hot Pot for lunch. He was really miffed when it turned out to be liver !!!

The school dinners at primary school were dreadful but the ones at High School were an improvement - the hearty dinners of the 1950s and early 1960s were generally meat, potatoes, veg and gravy followed by pudding.

Puddings were good unless they were sago or tapioca (frogspawn).
I remember when we had sliced bread with our gravy dinners for quite some time when there must have been a failure of the potato crop.

I still love beetroot and mashed potato - making 'pink' mashed potato.

No-one had packed lunches in those days, there were one or two girls who went home for lunch, but very few.

I mostly loved my school dinners. My favourite was the salad served with 2 thin slices of spam. Sometimes we had the most delicious dessert. It was pastry based with soft sticky raisins on the top. Served with custard, it was absolutely Gorgeous. If any Gransnetters have a recipe for this, I would love it.

I had the misfortune of being at boarding school where the food was prepared by an untrained cook....none of today's strict food regulations. Boiled cod, lumpy mash and butter beans meant it was Friday; fishy tasting spam, lumpy mash and pickled beetroot appeared on Saturday. Breakfast was invariably a gloopy, grey porridge...more lumps and evening teas were a triumph of nastiness. Sliced boiled egg, with green yolks, in a cheese(?) sauce or boiled liver were the worst. We were allowed to have our own butter which was kept in a cupboard, so that the last wee lump was completely rancid.
As a consequence of nine years of eating revolting food, I can now eat anything!

At primary school we used to have dates with salad. Yuck. Still can't stand the sight of them.
At secondary a favourite pudding was 'chocolate splodge' which was a pastry case filled with a rich chocolate ganache-type filling. Lovely.

I was at school in the 50s and as both my primary school and grsmmar school were only a 10 minute walk away I had more home dinners than school dinners. I remember at school we had salad all year round and in the winter it was mainly chopped raw cabbage. There was a salad cream which tasted like nothing on earth and must have been made by mixing a powder with water. Packed lunches were unheard of except that the Jewish girls took packed lunches which they had to eat in one of the classrooms and not in the school canteen. My mother told the story of when they went to the parents evening before we started at grammar school one of the mothers piped up and said that as they ate dinner in the evening could her daughter bring a packed lunch. The headmistress said surely her daughter was like any other 11 year old and could 2 dinners a day. Food was slightly better there and I can remember a lovely meat pie but we never had fish and chips just boiled cod in a 'parsley ' sauce which has put me off forever. Puddings were okay though and I still love semolina.

Chocolate concrete which would shoot across the table when you tried to get a spoon into it. Still loved it and never found out the correct name.

Watery brown Prunes and semolina - couldn't find an emoji for yuck -
Even in later years with Delia saying prunes and chocolate were a marriage made in heaven, I couldn't bring myself to try a prune. But I've since bit the bullet and sweet toffee like prunes are now part of my breakfast museli. But the smell of any milk pudding still makes me heave.

I too loved chocolate concrete although eating it was quite a challenge without a handy power drill

teetime that’s gross.
I think my primary school dinners might have been a bit earlier than others’ . I remember being forced to eat swede and being sick. Watery cabbage and lumpy scoops of potato were horrible. I know food was rationed so the cooks were limited. Puddings were prunes, or suet pudding, tapioca and semolina with a dollop of jam. At my next school thankfully we were allowed to bring sandwiches and mine were carried in a lovely red Oxo tin.

teetime I hadn’t read the later posts at that point.

We used to have something called Brown Stew. No idea what it was made of but we all loved it. Puddings used to be amazing. Light, fluffy sponges or suet puddings with custard. My favourite was a pastry base covered in cornflakes which had been mixed with golden syrup served, of course, with custard. I dreaded tapioca (frog spawn) or semolina. I could cope with the rice pudding because our dinner ladies were very generous with the jam .

My favourite was a pastry base covered in cornflakes which had been mixed with golden syrup served, of course, with custard.

Mmmmm; cornflake tart. Delicious.(But hold the custard...) They certainly kept our calorie count up

Our school dinners must have been OK on the whole as I, a very fussy child, ate them without complaint.

But the horror of well boiled and chopped up or did they mince it? cabbage (how did they manage to make it gritty as well?) put me off this actually quite delicious vegetable for many years and the utter abomination that is banana custard had me vomiting in the bowlful I was being forced to eat...

We love banana custard, my DC used to be fed it regularly at home!
But not cooked like the school dinner version, just hot custard on bananas. Haven't eaten that for years.

DH went to boarding school where the food was totally inadequate; they felt hungry much of the time.

I liked semolina vq but not tapioca or sago (someone on my table liked it so always got mine - a quick sneaky exchange of her empty bowl for my full one or else the teacher would have made me eat a double portion if she'd caught us.

DH went to boarding school where the food was totally inadequate; they felt hungry much of the time.

ExDH and DP both went to boarding school. I've never known anyone else eat so fast! They said they had to eat fast else they had the food nicked off their plates by even faster eaters!

I suppose it was just after the war and food was rationed but it sounded very inadequate compared to what we had. Yes, I think everyone was eyeing up the food of the slower eaters!

Our school dinners were awful and consisted of slices of meat with lots of slithery fat or liver with tubes sticking out of it plus the usual disgusting potatoes and cabbage. Stodgy puddings and sliceable custard. Yuk yuk yuk.
However, just at a St Patrick's day breakfast I was faced with a revolting plateful of the most disgusting, cholesterol packed, overcooked, fried stuff. I had too much respect for my arteries to attempt it. The hotel chef who produced it should have been thoroughly ashamed of this waste of produce. The elderly man next to me, brightened up at the sight of it and ate the lot. He said it took him back to his school days!

I really don't remember if I enjoyed school lunches- my only two memories are that everything on the plate had to be eaten and beetroot coloured everything else on the plate pink, yuk! I can't eat beetroot to this day.

I think it absolutely depended on the cook. Custard - yum

Sponge puddings - yum

I can remember salad and mince but nothing else

Oh Sussex Pond pudding— double yum!

I just remember the gristle on the meat - grim. It was OK if you were on the first sitting because you could sneak it under the custard skin on the jugs awaiting the second sitting. Naughty

I remember being intrigued at the age of about 5 by a German girl in the school who brought yoghurt in her packed lunch - we had never seen it before.