What meal made your heart sink as a child

School shepherd's pie. Even the smell made me gag and I had to wait outside until it was done. Even now the smell takes me back. Strangely I like mince and I like potato but the two cooked together....:-(

oi, I'm eating crumpets!
no boiled grinning pig head talk at the table!

smiffy54, sorry a bit off topic but I remember a neighbor boiling up a pig's head to feed their dog. The smell was horrible and the pig had a smile on its face.

Me too child of the 60s. It was quite scary as I was only about 6.

......oh I missed the part that said what "meal" made your heart sink haha!!

I think I enjoyed nearly everything really, was quite a greedy guts

Secondary school

A child of the 60's, brought up in a village that time forgot. Brains on toast. " they're just like beans", pigs heads boiling to make brawn and numerous other offally frights. Been vegetarian since 1979 when I left home. My DH is a real carnivore, and loves offal, but thankfully he does the cooking. .Oh and the school spam meal. I won't get the taste of it away all day now. And i vomited numerous times at school by being forced to eat milk puddings of any description.

steak and kidney pie - bleurgh!
Tripe - the smell lingered forever!
Liver - yuk!
Boiled butternut and pumpkin - all watery and revolting.

And I don't remember this but my DM tried to feed me brains (before CJD) and apparently I just spat them out in her face.

Oh god that tapioca makes me heave just looking at it. Sago pudding too. Did anyone else have that at school?

Citron Oh! Oh! How awful to ruin good old sausage and chips like that!

Vegetable stirfry ... It started my hatred for peppers

i used to dread the nights when we'd have sausage, soup and chips.

Cheap sausages, home made chips cooked in the chip pan (admittedly these were nice) and a tin of vegetable soup poured over the lot as a kind of vomitty gravy. Everyone else in the family loved it

More school dinner horrors:

< Tapioca pudding with a dollop of jam (we called it frog spawn)

Irish stew (boak)
Ox liver and bacon - the liver had holes and tubes (extra vom)

And the butterscotch pie they served at school. That was back in the day when they made you eat everything on your plate. I remember having to eat it and shortly afterwards throwing up in the classroom! They didn't make me eat it after that!

Liver and onions, in a big frying pan, with its own thick gravy. How did I choke it down?

School meal, semolina pudding. Foul stuff. Once the school kitchen cooked too much and we had mandatory seconds. I was only 6 but the horror burns bright in my memory.

My mum is an excellent cook but we used to have bacon, mash and swede once a week. I HATE swede! I used to have to put loads of brown sauce on it (which I didn't like either but lesser of two evils!) and try to swallow it without tasting!

My mother had a Schwartz spice rack, which was bought with about 20 jars of herbs and spices to display. She was obsessed with taking labels off...I think so only she had control over the kitchen. 30 years on she still has the same spice rack with spices. All the same shade of brown. And hardened. Even a sniff doesn't give much of a clue to what they could possibly be.

I can remember every single dinner lady. Particularly the one who wore a headscarf and curlers and slipped on a carrot and broke her hip She'd have sued for a billion pounds today but back in the 70s got a home-made card from the pupils.

Ooo get you with your savoy dinner lady our dinner lady lived in the village she sadly died last year but she remembered all the children and would say hello to you she was lovely

My school dinners were fantastic. Little village school and the cook had previously worked at the Savoy. We were very spoilt (and luckily not hungry for the hideous dinners served at home in the evening).

Just remembered when my mum discovered the 80s. That was grim. Spaghetti done in the pressure cooker with a tin of mince on top. But at least there was the tin of mince (or was it dog food?) on it. At my friend's I was once faced with a large plate of rather cool spaghetti - plain. I'm the world's least fussy and most polite eater, but even I could not make even a quarter of that go down. And another time this friend's mum served up baked onions. Well, baked onion actually. One big plain onion sitting on a plate. No wonder that family was all thin (and lived in a great big house).

Our school dinners were nice except the beefburgers they were rank probably had the backside boiled out of them I loved school curry

Yes Terrified! Brains Faggots-disgusting slop straight from a foil packet-bleurgggggghhhhh! And not made any better when they had sat on my plate for hours as I still refused to eat them!

Faggots. Rank.

Oh, and any school puddings. Particularly rice pudding or semolina with a dollop of jam in the middle and banana custard.

And summer pudding which was a bizarre concoction of bread and tinned fruits

Steamed pudding with treacle which invariably clung to the roof of your mouth and refused to bow to any amount of chewing.

Paradoxically enough and ditching the revolting treacle it was quite nice cold. More like cake.

And don't get me started on the Sago pudding for dessert (tapioka)