What meal made your heart sink as a child

[lemisscared]

For me i think it was mince and potatoes. The mince was from a tin ffs!! With tinned peas and carrots.

My mum used to make me eat this and i would gag and cry! Oh and fucking ready brek as i would get pneumonia if i didn't eat it - boak

You're right Calamitously, that sounds terrible!

At school we used to get liver with baked beans and an undercooked shiny pink sausage. The juice from the liver and beans used to merge together in a vile, pukey looking mess and has given me a phobia about runny food touching other things on my plate. Vile.

Re the tinned tomatoes for school dinners - I always refused them in the line, but the dinner lady would then just spoon some of the "juice" on my plate "to try" thus rendering the rest of it in edible. Cow bag!

It's weird, because other than the tinned tomatoes, I can't think of any other meal/food that I would refuse/didn't like!

No wonder I was a chubby child, I always put my hand up for seconds!

Find us crispy pancakes
Beef olives
School dinner spam fritters.

They all still make me feel a bit queasy.

Blancmange

School dinner mashed swede.

Lentil soup or braised steak. My nana would put it on to start cooking about 8am. We ate at 6pm.

Baked bananas wrapped in ham with white sauce, with cheddar cheese sprinkled on top.

It was in a recipe book, so assumed to be edible. From memory, this assumption was mistaken.

Duelling I remember TVP mince! Just unutterably disgusting. Especially when padded out with lentils.

Anything involving mashed potato. E.g. cottage pie

When I was singing the praises of my mum's food I forgot about the runner beans.

Our neighbour used to grow them and she'd give us tons. She wouldn't pick them when they were young and tender. She'd let them grow to nearly 10 inches long so they were tough and stringy.

My mum would slice them and boil them until they were grey. They'd still be tough. They'd be slimy and watery yet but some witchcraft, still dry. We'd have them with every dinner from June to October.

All vegetables for Sunday lunch would be boiled for hours.

Mushrooms would be slowly fried until they shrank to black nipples.

She'd buy the nicest cuts of steak and then fry them slowly until they were like shoe leather. Just before she served them she'd squash them down in the pan with a spatula just to make sure there was absolutely no moisture left inside whatsoever.

Apart from that her food was great.

Mutton stew and proper Irish stew, made with lamb. I really don't like lamb now, and wouldn't eat mutton if you paid me.

But I love a nice big floury boiled spud with butter and salt, mmmmm..

Cod roe
Gammon
Fried eggs
Oxtail soup
Spam or other cold meats of the pig variety
Parsnips
Home overgrown runnerbean beans that had gone purple and huge; dry, moisture-sucking beans from hell they were. Couldn't eat the actual bean case by then as they were like wood by then.

I realise none of these made a whole meal, but the presence of any one of them would make my heart sink as I had parents who came from the "not leaving the table until it's all gone" school of thought.

Lawd my mother could not cook for shit in the first place, she would let the peas boil dry and they would burn, I think we had grilled chops, lumpy mash, peas and carrots 4 or 5 nights a week, There was her spaghetti Bolognaise that consisted of boiled mince thickened with powdered gravy mix, with the occasional can of roma tomatoes added, we drowned it in tomato sauce to make it edible. Fish cakes of lumpy mash with tuna in oil added shaped into patties and lightly fried on each side, but the most gag worthy of all was the Sunday chicken dinner, A Boiled yes boiled, whole chicken, with peas, carrots & under cooked baby potatoes, the gravy was made from powdered gravy mix & the water from the vegetables, she boiled everything or threw it all in the pressure cooker, to add variety to meals she would sometimes add....Boiled chocos. She had no clue about, browning, sauteeing, braising, steaming or any other method of cooking, everything was boiled within an inch of it's life, most of what we ate was tasteless mush so I learned to cook at a very young age, mainly in self defense so I would not starve to death. I am very happy to say that I became an excellent cook, there are rarely any left overs in my house.

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

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.

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

Faggots. Rank.

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!

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

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).

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