School Dinners

Bad memories of school dinners still affect the eating habits of many adults, a survey suggests.

Many still refuse to eat certain foods or even look at them after being force-fed at school, according to the poll of over 2,000 BBC Good Food magazine readers and users of the website Friends Reunited.

Half of those questioned who cited school meat as a problem had become vegetarian as a result of their canteen nightmares.

BBC: School dinners haunt adults

I can’t say I’ve ever had nightmares about school dinners, but it’s certainly true that I don’t remember them with any great fondness. While most of the lunch time trauma I experienced tended to be at the hands of vindictive older children and sadistic teachers, it has to be said, the food didn’t help. Me and gristle have never got on and even today, a careless forkful of meat can bring on a quite spectacular gag reflex (oh sorry, were you eating?). Our daily servings of alleged meat tended to be riddled with the stuff, and as in those days we were expected to eat what we were given, gag reflex or not, the lunch hour often seemed a lot longer than 60 minutes. It’s possible that this mystery food product may have once been belonged to an animal, but I’d want to see some proof before going out on a limb.

No, the first course was just something through which we suffered before getting to the real reason for attending school in the first place...pudding. It’s worth clarifying for Murkan readers that just as “dinner” in this context means lunch rather than the evening meal; “pudding” refers to whatever you were served after the first course. Not dessert, not sweet...pudding.

Other than an addiction to Cadbury’s chocolate (the kind made in Britain, not the stuff churned out here under license by Hershey’s – ick, yuck, ptooey), I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth. When I shovel junk into my pie-hole it tends to be salty or spicy and on the rare occasions we eat out, I usually skip dessert in favor of another beer. However, like many people, my fondness for sweet things was greater as a child, and as my school didn’t serve alcohol, pudding was the highlight of the day.

And oh, what puddings we got. Not every day of course. Most of the time pudding was nothing more than some kind of sponge cake smothered in a lumpy yellow goo euphemistically known as “custard”. But sometimes, every now and then, when the planets were in alignment or if the school inspectors were paying a visit, the Dinner Ladies served up a crowd pleaser.

Jam roly poly was my personal favorite. What is jam roly poly? Well, it’s is a flat suet pudding, which is then spread with jam (preferably raspberry) rolled up and baked. Lumpy custard only enhanced this nectar of the doGs. A serving generally weighed about the same as a cinder block and it kept your tum warm and happy on the coldest winter day. Spotted Dick was a similar repast. (By all means, go ahead and insert the joke of your choice at this point – generations of school children have done so before you.) Another suet special, this one had raisins or currants rather than jam. It too, required custard.

In fact, custard was pretty much a standard coating for all our puddings, although it wasn’t always yellow. Chocolate pudding came with brown custard for example, and sometimes we got pink custard (pink?). No matter the color however, the custard always tasted the same and it was always lumpy.

Not everything was smothered in custard though. Lemon meringue pie for example, tended to be topped with a layer of shaving foam which took your mind off the filling, which was so yellow the school had to install Geiger counters by the serving hatch. Prunes showed up fairly often, to keep us regular I suppose, but the best part of getting those was counting off the stones at the end in order to determine your future. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief”...ah, who needed career counselors back then, eh?

Tapioca was another favorite, although of course, nobody called it that. Frogspawn it looked like and frogspawn it was, with a wee dod of rosehip syrup in the middle. Why, I have no idea. Rosehip syrup was also slathered into semolina, or smelly llama as it was known back then. This was a benefit because you could stir it up and make the whole thing pink, which didn’t make it taste any better but gave you something to do while postponing the inevitable. I could never figure out why grown-ups spent good money on expensive wallpaper paste when they could just have used leftover smelly llama. I suppose they wanted to be sure they could get the wallpaper back off again some day.

But in the world of school dinner puddings, the big one, the holy grail, the best pudding ever, rumor of which would send frissons of excitement through the whole school, had to be...chocolate floorboards. Chocolate floorboards? Yep, cornflakes in baking chocolate; cooked in big trays and cut into slabs. Food only a kid could love. The dinner ladies always made about 18 times as much as necessary because they knew what greedy little piglets we were. Chocolate floorboards weren’t served in the slop line like normal food; that would have been too inefficient. Instead the dinner ladies carried around plate after plate of them.

“Take the one closest to you, not the biggest!” they would admonish and of course, we ignored them. It was all about the quantity. “I had nine chocolate floorboards!” we would brag later “That’s nowt, I had eleven” came the retort. Ah, memories. But the best part of chocolate floorboard day was guessing which kid would be the one to bring them all back up an hour or two later.

Trust me, if you haven’t seen a 9-year old barfing half-digested mystery meat, boiled cabbage, cooking chocolate and cornflakes onto a classroom floor, then you really didn’t get much of an education.