School lunches - a pleasant memory?

I only ever had school dinners when at grammar school. They were mostly awful, but their meat and potatoe pie was lovely served up with grated beetroot. We used to dread the dessert when it was stewed apricots, or stewed ants as we called it, there were more ants than apricots in it, all floating on the top! My first grammar school did lovely rissoles, the only time I`ve ever enjoyed rissoles.

School dinners taught me social etiquette how to hold a knife and fork, how to interact with other diners, serving food fairly but ugh, the lumpy mashed potatoes put me off mad for decades.

In the 1950s it was spam fritters and cabbage. I still hate spam and cabbage. If the pudding was particularly nice my friend would relate the story (very quietly, we were not allowed to talk) of a postmortem she had seen on a horse to put the others off their pudding and we would scoff the lot.

School puddings, yep! Chocolate concrete with custard ?. I can't remember much about the meals. I just ate them because I was hungry. I don't recall anything really awful.

For the 1 week that I had to stay fir school meals due to family moving house, my memory is of gristly meat and floppy veg but glorious chocolate pudding, warm bakewell tart and syrup sponge pudding all with huge jugs of custard.
Yummy.

I'm one of the " school dinner lovers ". The puddings were especially delicious. In particular, Cold Manchester Tart, (pastry with confectioners' custard topped with coconut) and I have to say, the rice pudding, semolina and tapioca were favourites.

My school-days were late fifties, early sixties and the food was excellent. Some people were reminiscing in the local paper a few years ago and they printed the recipe for chocolate concrete! I do remember once, we had a teacher sitting at our table and yes, as I tried to break the pudding up a piece shot across the room, I didn't get told off though. These meals were well made and if any child was unable to get a decent meal at home, it certainly made a difference for them.

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.

Oh Sussex Pond pudding— double yum!

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

Sponge puddings - yum

I can remember salad and mince but nothing else

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.

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 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!

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 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.

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.

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 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 .

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.