Your school dinners

[FridgeJenga]

but really, this thread is about school cake!

The only thing I really liked from my school dinners was school cake, but no pink custard please.
Well, maybe their fish cakes but these were made with a batter coating, rather than the usual breadcrumbs.

Did you enjoy school dinners as a kid?

Butterscotch tart. Nothing else comes even close

The equivalent in Kent was Gipsy tart.

We had the spam fritters, the semolina, the rock hard pastry.

Apricot snow was nice, a kind of apricot mousse, but not terribly filling.

Anything like a stew with gravy, or mashed potatoes, was to be avoided, because the meat was likely to be mostly gristle and mash just went splat on the plate.

There were two options for main course and two options for pudding, but if your table was one of the last to go up, they might have run out of the popular choice.

Say what you will, school dinners make you ill....

Yes! The ice cream scoops of mash 😂

Some of these things sound quite nice actually.

School macaroni cheese and a spicy sponge pudding which had sultanas in. That was brilliant, can't really remember the custard.

The worst thing . ... probably the beef olive 🤢

I bought a pack of 'School Cake' from Aldi.
Anyone tried it?
🤞 hope it's good

Chocolate Concrete is obviously the elite school pudding, but I found out later in life that apparently it isn't a UK wide thing ?

I feel very sorry for those of you who missed out.

Cheese and egg/potato pie with baked beans followed by apple pie filling with cornflakes and cream on top!

Yes to the cake. The only thing I ate was the treacle, strawberry jam or chocolate sponge. Definitely no custard! Sometimes we got seconds. Oh the joy!

I heard a lot of my generation saying they were pretty much forced to eat the gross dinners so I feel very lucky. The only thing I liked or ate other than the cake was the Xmas dinner.

And grated carrot and grated cheese.
For some reason they had that every day. Just in dishes on its own. I couldn't eat the bread because they smeared it with margarine!

The worst was on non cake days they'd give semolina! I'd practically cry. With a tiny sprinkle of grated chocolate on it?!

Or sometimes it was half an apple that had gone brown and a yoghurt. Not acceptable cake subs.

I don't know what it was still to this day but it was like little cubes of chicken in a white sauce and it was just delicious

Dr Oetker do an old
school cake mix and it's delicious

We had something very similar called chicken fricassé

Ugh! I detested school dinners and would sometimes vomit when forced to eat something. I was put off eating so many foods for many years afterwards (and some of them I still can't bring myself to eat).

I gradually discovered food in adulthood and slowly expanded the range of foods that I ate until by my mid twenties I was eating much the same as everyone else. But I was in my forties before I ventured to try eating cabbage again!

I enjoyed mine until the day they replaced mashed potatoes with Cadbury’s Smash.

At primary school the best main courses were sausage and chips, fish and chips and haggis with neeps and tatties. I did quite enjoy spam fritters tbh….oh dear. We were occasionally served fish poached in milk and it was vile. Probably frozen fish…hated it. I love fish as an adult so thankfully no harm done.

The nicest puddings were sponge cake topped with jam and coconut, ideally with ordinary custard and toffee tart. Favourite pudding ever at school dinners was a cold pudding that had crushed pineapple on the base, covered with dream topping and topped with crushed cornflakes. It was the most popular thing served.

The worst thing that could happen at dinners was to arrive at the table to find bowls already out and a jug of soup waiting. That mean there would be no pudding and the soups were not nice.

At secondary school we had freedom to roam and control over how we spent our dinner money. Salad roll and a milk shake at the school milk bar, chips topped with grated cheese and mayonnaise from the canteen, stovies or a sausage roll from the local butcher, chips from the chippy, baked potato from a van parked at the gate. I think I only ate a proper meal in the canteen when the Christmas Dinner was being served!

Tesco gluten free vanilla tray bake (iced) is clearly a descendant of school dinner cake.
The giant jam tarts with pastry like concrete - bloody lovely
DH hankers after semolina - I do have a pack in the cupboard but I just can’t seem to open it, I mean….semolina 🤮

I loved the liver and onions.

I really loved the fact that 3rd and 4th year juniors (yrs 5&6 in new money) were given responsibility to serve the food to 7 other pupils on their table, and also given responsibility to collect up the plates for their table and stack them.

That would never happen today.

Knives. Serving. Equality. Responsibility.

The risk assessment would be too difficult.

I hated school dinners as a kid.

I now work in a school, I do not have a dinner account as I'd be very fat from all the cake. They feed us on PD days and how I never discovered school cake until I was an adult I don't know. I absolutely love it.

I went home for lunch most days so I maybe only had a hot meal at school a handful of times at most. I hated it because I went so infrequently I didn’t really know what to do a lot of the time and always ended up with food I didn’t really like much.

In high school I preferred either going to the local shops (there was a butcher that did an amazing sausage roll, or you could buy a chomp bar in the chippy for 10p and they’d batter and cook it for you, or there was a Co-op with a deli counter so we could get filled rolls there) or the cold food line at school as I liked their cheese and salad rolls. By the time I was in 6th year I just took my own lunch in every day as it was cheaper for me (I started working after school at 15 so I paid for myself from then).

I do remember once in primary school I had a sandwich and fruit plus cake and custard and I got into trouble for eating the cake and custard first. They had said to eat the hot food first so I did. 🙈🤣

My dad always recounts the tale of tapioca for school dinners when he was young. They were forced to eat it and couldn’t leave the lunch hall until their bowls were empty. He couldn’t stomach it and so secretly put it in his shorts pockets so he could get out of the lunch hall and into the toilets to flush it away. He had the best starched pockets in the school!

Ours were dreadful. Mash dolloped out with an ice cream scoop, still with powdery bits in, boiled cod and parsley sauce on Fridays. Marrowfat peas.
Sausages that were hollow when you cut them and "goulash" which was pink sauce and lumps of gristly pork, also with powdery bits still in, and boiled potatoes.
Occasionally we would have faggots and chips which was quite nice.

We did the same! There would be a teacher at each table but eating not serving. I suppose to discourage anyone from going feral with the cutlery.

I liked cheese and potato pie, cheese flan and chocolate hedgehogs. Our school dinners at junior school in the 90s were terrible. Sometimes I'd just ask for those deep fried potato balls and get just those. Our school often ran out of food as well so if your year was served last you were late back to class as you had to wait for them to cook some chips. Just had crisps and chocolate bars in secondary school!

fondly remember from primary

Sausage and bean pie
mint chocolate slice with green custard
sponge and pink custard

hated haggis neeps and tatties (although now enjoy them as an adult)

at high school we got to have chips with grated cheese on top with chocolate milkshake

I liked my school dinners. I particularly remember the cod in cheese sauce, the homemade bacon & onion pasties and the roast dinners. I wasn't a pudding fan but didn't mind the tapioca with jam.

One of my favourites too. Still is.

We also had ten to a table with the eldest three serving, the others took it in turns to clear up and clean the table before anybody could leave.