To say that some things about old fashioned school dinners tasted nice?

[malificent7]

Ok..so admittedly they are mostly puddings but i will start with australian crunch and that cornflake, jam treacle flan thingy. I want the recipie!

The semolina and jam dilema. Did you mix it up to make it all a pretty shade of pink or have a spoonful with a little bit of jam and a little bit of semolina. Whichever I did I always wished I'd done the alternative.

School roast dinners are what stand out to me. That cheap weird "beef" in super watery gravy and rock hard potatoes with steamed veg. I'm pregnant and craving it despite hating watery gravy and soggy veg usually 😂

I used to run the tuck shop 🤣 we had a cupboard full of boxes and boxes of crisps, chomps, curly wurlys and fizzy sweets.

Lumpy mash served with an ice cream scoop - didn't bother me at the time but I wouldn't want it now.

Artic Roll for dessert though - can't beat it.

Chocolate sponge cake with chocolate custard

Oh god yes! I'll be back later to share!

Our school kitchen made 3 things really well, and each of them appeared only one day a term (or maybe it was one day a year?)

1. A sticky chocolatey crunchy thing that may have been Australian crunch. With never enough for seconds.
2. Battered fish
3. Chips

But because our headmistress had pretensions and really wanted to be running a public school, she would never allow fish and chips at the same meal (it was "common"). So it was fish and mashed potatoes; and sausages and chips.

Manchester tart
Tapioca
Milk Jelly
Friday fish&chips

Nearly all of it was yum, especially the desserts.....ahhhh.....

Pink blamange with strawberry jelly
Semolina and chocolate sauce
Roast dinner
An amazing salad, which today's clean eaters would thoroughly approve of: grated carrot and beetroot, slices of boiled egg, peanuts, raisins, cucumber, watercress.

I loved school dinners in the 60s. They were quite exotic compared to my mother's plain cooking.
I loved meatballs in a sort of tomato soup, winter coleslaw wirh dates and all the puddings

home made bread pudding sprinkled with white sugar we used to be served at elevenses with a cup of tea.

I am the only person I've ever met who liked spam fritters.

I made a cornflake tart the other day. There are loads of recipes online.

Ah pink custard. I just had to look up the recipe - it has raspberry blancmange powder in!

The first half of my primary school days were mostly slop, loads of chewy meat with a scoop of potatoes and soggy veg. I developed a life long fear of cabbage.

We got chips on Fridays but if your class was the last in the rota to go into the dining room you were out of luck.

I loved it when they changed to baked potatoes with filling and unlimited salad bar and filled rolls as well as some hot options.

Well I go back to the 40s and 50s and they were pretty dire. Lumpy mash, cabbage stewed to death, custard where they stirred the skin in so you had bits of slimy skin to avoid, and of course the ghastly semolina. In fact , as a 5 year old, I can remember a teacher sitting by me when everyone had finished trying to feed me cold mashed potato.
I was so upset by it that eventually my mother let me come home for dinner. I had to cross a main road and get the bus by myself; my mother would be lynched by present-day mumsnetters! Not to mention the threat of bombs, doodlebugs and rockets.

As a child of the 6Os I remember meat that you could chew forever and it wouldn't break down.We had to eat everything so that meat sat in your cheek through the whole meal until you could get rid of it later.
Concrete shortbread that would have shot across the plate if not tethered by the custard .
No choice,eat everything Also had to eat in silence and the teachers ate at their own table.
The only meal we weren't forced to eat was pea soup,it was truly aweful and we were excused because the teachers couldn't eat it either

Butterscotch tart.

I pretty much only have one good school dinner memory... BUTTERSCOTCH TART!

Was delicious... almost made up for lumpy semolina and soggy cabbage 🤢

Haha Bob we had the same thought at the same moment

Meatballs and dates in puddings!I would have liked your school Ours ran the 'meat',potatoes and overcooked veg.Puddings were a variety of milk pudding(we had these at home but with jam),sponge and custard,the aforementioned mentioned concrete shortbread.No tuck shop.

Wow Eddiemairswife ! I can affirm semolina was equally grim in the eighties though.

Apple crumble was always my favourite (and I still find it hard to resist!

I lived in horror of being made to eat lumps and skin, so I wouldn't touch school custard or gravy. The meat was identifiable only from the accompaniments, but I don't remember thinking it was especially tough. The best thing was the school chips on Fridays, always super crispy and delicious. They went downhill when my secondary school moved to a canteen system with more choice, and they must have bought different catering products.
Oops. I don't appear to be saying that school dinners tasted nice at all.

I used to love having a slice of chopped pork with chips and spaghetti hoops. The dinners in high school were a lot better and healthier.

My first secondary school has an amazing bunch of cooks in the kitchen. They used to do lasagne, vanilla custard with the proper pods stood in them in the that big vat thing they used to ladle from. Our senior cook even used to make her own tomato ketchup! Desserts used to have the kids continuously joining the end of the queues for more. Chocolate pudding with chocolate custard and jam sponge. Oh my word!

There is one lamb mince dish they used to make which used to have the kids queuing for 2nds and 3rds. To me, aged about 12, it had a 'foreign' name which I couldn't pronounce (but lasagne was foreign to me with the dishes my mum used to make!) I can still sort of taste it if I really try to remember. But can I remember the blooming name -not a chance! I know it wasn't moussaka as it didn't have aubergine with it - just a normal mince dish. The quest continues....