skool dinnerz

[Cudzoziemiec]

At juniors (of primary) we went to the local rugby club. I think there just wasn't anywhere on site for us to eat. It was a minute or two walk and no, we weren't served by burly rugby players, we had proper skool dinner ladies in white coats (or once white) serving us slop from big aluminium trays shipped in from somewhere.

[ian]

Picking and choosing food. We got A/B, mash/chips and dessert/no dessert. There may have been experiments in pasta, but like the great chicken kiev debacle, rarely repeated. The East Midlands in the mid-80s wasn't quite ready for pasta and pizza. Or herbs and spices. And being whiter than whiter, there was none of that kosher or halal nonsense. Is this pie halal, miss? No, it's meat. Best not to ask what kind of meat, DNA profiling wasn't yet readily available, and even now, it's rarely made available to dinner ladies (I suppose it's all outsourced catering companies, or Pizza Hut or Ginsters, and fearsome, meaty armed dinner ladies are a quaint symptom of the past).

As a junior, I used to go home for lunch (to my grandparents) but that was mostly to watch Pipkins.

[MikeFromLFE]

My abiding memory is the blackboard describing the delights on offer. Of course it was at boy height. If you were towards the end of the session you never really knew what you were getting (and couldn't tell from what it looked or tasted like) Dicks & Bastard anyone?

[rafletcher]

Thankfully I have few memories of school dinners.  There are some though; lumpy mashed potato, sago and tapioca desserts, usually with a lurid red "jam" as an addition. Baked beans - the one thing I never ate, to the point (in primary school) of being the only one left sitting up when everyone else had their head on their arms "resting" at the end of lunch. OTOH the "meat" pies - large tray bakes with a chewy shortcrust on top - were pretty tasty.

[T42]

We, of course, had Irish stew. We also had curry, which was Irish stew with curry-powder and raisins.

[ian]

I don't think we ever had anything as exciting as even the vaguest facsimile of curry. It's possible lasagne existed. There was a stuff-in-a-tray continuum spanning the pie spectrum (meat with pastry crust on top, potato on top, more potato on top, cheese on top). One scoop, pray for actual filling rather than topping in its own incontinent puddle of lukewarm gravy.

To continue the orange theme, there were lots of potato croquettes. A good day featured potato waffles and baked beans and sausage (in the singular, it was a brave pupil who asked for two, a possible skinning offence).

[T42]

The only orange things we ever saw were carrots. On a bad day you could see them twice.

[hellymedic]

Weren't you served LURID 'syrup' with your puddings?

[T42]

Custard, custard über alles including your hand.

[caerau]

Wow, so many posts on school dinners and no-one has mentioned the delights of chocolate toothpaste.


When we left school, our dinner ladies even gave their seekrit recipe for it to us... haven't actually ever made it naturally, despite a deep desire for it still abides within me.  The stuff was awesome.  Basically a sweet chocolate goo inside a pastry casing.  Mmmm. 


And no-one has mentioned murdered cabbage either.  I had to find out as a fairly senior adult that cabbage could be nice in fact.


One little amusing memory I have was that I don't like (think REALLY don't like) that 'tongoo' stuff....  I was six, I had yet to parse that what you spoke with equated to 'tongue' and that's how you pronounced it. 


I also recall that when Thatcher got into power and free school milk was once again off the menu - that I was thoroughly delighted with this.   Now I understand that it contains lots of calcium, is good for a growing child and that there were many people that it made a big difference too back in the day.....  but ...... really - room temperature milk of iffy quality is what the reality was.  My memory of free school milk was that it was a form of torture inflicted on us to be force-fed it - and it was force fed.  They would stand over you and make sure you drank it all.  Pretty sure I was sick on more than once occasion as a result.

[ian]

I think we've covered free milk before, but if there's a subject that requires a revisit, it's such a source of trauma. That's ultimately why so many of my generation voted for her, not the dread suck of the 70s on the country's soul or the Up The Argies bongoism.

An entire cohort of children who regarded her as the one who freed them from the afternoon terror of sucking congealed lukewarm milk through a straw.

[caerau]

I nearly put in that perhaps 'chocolate toothpaste' was a regional thing.  But looking at google, it was very specifically a Bedfordshire thing.


http://www.friendsofbedfordshire.org.uk/chocolate-toothpaste-tart/


Aww, the rest of you sooo, missed out.


You can rest easy that you were most likely much further away from Milton Keynes and Luton in your childhood than I.

[hellymedic]

I LOVED my school milk. We had ours just before the mid-morning break in each of the four primary schools I attended. It was never expected to last till the afternoon.

My sister HATED her milk. Same parents, same schools, just different individuals.

[T42]

We had milk morning and afternoon, in those ⅓ pint bottles with a foil cap.  This was back before anyone had invented a reliable method of getting the tops off, so every day there was at least one geyser & mop incident.  I used to use my teeth.

[Cudzoziemiec]

School milk came in two forms: rancid and frozen.

[ian]

It was the afternoon milk, it would sit there in the corner of the classroom. Patiently waiting. Getting claggier and claggier until it was less a case of drinking it, more like fracking cheese. Morning milk was indeed typically frigid to account for the day sans refrigeration and each sip would painfully thrust an ice cube into your sinuses.

[Jaded]

We'd keep back bottles and put them in a safe place to see see how high the tumescent growth would go.

[SteveC]

I hated school milk. When it was generally stopped, when I was about 10, you could go to the kitchen and be given a drink of milk, at morning playtime. My mother said we were to go, I think I went once. I didn't drink milk again until my first year at university and it was very rare even then. I like milk now, but it does have to be cold.

As for school dinners, I loved them. There was a period in the late '60s when merely having enough children in the family entitled you to free school meals (so at a Catholic school there was no stigma attached to that!) and I went for a couple of years.
At secondary school I thought they were pretty good (did include spam fritters which were, as Ian says, wonderful). My brother, who was in the first year when I was in the upper sixth, tried them for his first half term (the minimum allowed), hated them, and took sandwiches for the remainder of his time there.

[ian]

I have described the post-Thatcher snatch (go on, think it, you can't unthink it) situation where the school stumbled on the wheeze of extorting cash out of parents for orange (see, it's that colour again) sugar water in tetrahedroid cartons that not only squirted enthusiastically as you tried to insert your straw (preparation for adulthood, boys, don't worry she'll understand, though the Thatcher thing maybe not) indelibly staining many a school uniform, but contained vast, vast quantities of the orange food colouring later found to send children wild (previously used to defoliate entire countries). We'd shoot down the corridor like a pin-ball and the bounce through all the classrooms racking up ever higher scores. Sometimes you popped out of the window, like the time Darren W did when he demonstrated his breakdancing skillz.

I figure all my schools were all part of some MK-Ultra offshoot.

[hellymedic]

I remember reading of 'yellow peril' tartrazine in 'Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin' as a PSO...

[caerau]

Ah yes, the orange squash that was a genius of a drink.  It's the only drink I've ever encountered that could physically make you thirstier than before you drank it 

[T42]

Beer always did that to me. Didn't stop me drinking it, though.

[ian]

Ah yes, the orange squash that was a genius of a drink.  It's the only drink I've ever encountered that could physically make you thirstier than before you drank it 

It was weird stuff certainly, more so in the fact that it didn't taste of orange and was in the weirdly shaped carton (still in use I see, but for frozen 'drinks') that made it difficult to hold and insert the straw without inspiring sartorial calamity. I'm unclear the decision chain that led to someone thinking it was necessary for the entire school to be fed large quantities of synthetic food colouring other than it being some sort of drug testing. Well, Professor Collins, I'll say it really does cause some kind of hyperactivity disorder, look – that one went straight through the window!

To clarify, this was junior school, the Darren W's incident was at comprehensive so we can't blame orange. For reasons, he decided he was a breakdancer, the East Midlands being a crucible of black culture akin to the Bronx of course, and to demonstrate his newly minted skillz he was going to spin on his head on a classroom desk while we assembled to watch the show. A desk by the window. A single-glazed window. On the first floor.  He only broke the one leg. The rest of us were unfairly banished to the corridor for the rest of the term. Again. The first time was when Mad Bill decided to charge the wall with his head (he wasn't the sort of child to need a reason). His cranium managed to burst through the plasterboard but was less successful with the underlying breezeblock. He was rejected from the army for being too mental but then he probably signed his application form with 'Mad Bill.' He's also managed to shoot himself twice with his own crossbow. Yes, he used to wander around with a crossbow.

[caerau]

Beer always did that to me. Didn't stop me drinking it, though.

Well yes, but I was talking of a more immediate effect than the next morning

[caerau]

Ah yes, the orange squash that was a genius of a drink.  It's the only drink I've ever encountered that could physically make you thirstier than before you drank it 

It was weird stuff certainly, more so in the fact that it didn't taste of orange and was in the weirdly shaped carton (still in use I see, but for frozen 'drinks') that made it difficult to hold and insert the straw without inspiring sartorial calamity. I'm unclear the decision chain that led to someone thinking it was necessary for the entire school to be fed large quantities of synthetic food colouring other than it being some sort of drug testing. Well, Professor Collins, I'll say it really does cause some kind of hyperactivity disorder, look – that one went straight through the window!

To clarify, this was junior school, the Darren W's incident was at comprehensive so we can't blame orange. For reasons, he decided he was a breakdancer, the East Midlands being a crucible of black culture akin to the Bronx of course, and to demonstrate his newly minted skillz he was going to spin on his head on a classroom desk while we assembled to watch the show. A desk by the window. A single-glazed window. On the first floor.  He only broke the one leg. The rest of us were unfairly banished to the corridor for the rest of the term. Again. The first time was when Mad Bill decided to charge the wall with his head (he wasn't the sort of child to need a reason). His cranium managed to burst through the plasterboard but was less successful with the underlying breezeblock. He was rejected from the army for being too mental but then he probably signed his application form with 'Mad Bill.' He's also managed to shoot himself twice with his own crossbow. Yes, he used to wander around with a crossbow.

You weren't a my school were you?  This all sounds remarkably familiar