Reply With QuoteHave you joined The Pig Idea yet?Originally Posted by Bristolian
My parents had a hotel in the 70s. We used to put the food scraps in the pig bins for a local farmer. He used to collect them at some ungodly hour of the morning : he'd been in the RAF during the war, was very badly burned and never wanted to be seen. I felt very sorry for him.
Ive an idea that pig bins stopped in the 90s some time? It seems daft that all the food we waste that's never made it off a supermarket shelf can't be put to good use as animal feed.
Have you joined The Pig Idea yet?
Banned from ~2000 due to foot and mouth disease.
Yep..."In 2002 there was a blanket ban across the EU. The authorities were taking no chances. That's the history. The reason is harder"; from this link.
Ah, state overreaction and enforced wastefulness.
At boarding school the pig bins were indeed picked up by a local pig farmer. Very fond memories of the food but always remember being hungry. Lots of stews (including meat with tubes), fish and chips on a Friday and my favourite pudding was a pinapple sponge with thick custard. Mad scramble for seconds once all the boys had been served. Great days!
I remember one lad eating loads of pink custard and then chucking it up outside the dinner hall in the playground, we were about seven or eight years old can still see him now with copious amounts of pink sic coming out of him...funny what you remember :-)
My favorite in primary school was chocolate shortcake and peppermint custard 1965. Fast forward to 1987 my next door neighbour we moved next to, his mum was our primary school cook. A couple of weeks went by when one Sunday there was a knock on the door and there was his mum standing there with a couple of servings of said pudding, it tasted just as I remembered.
Ah... Victorian schooling!
I moved schools a lot, but I do recall these grenade shaped doughnuts,heavily deep fried that were delicious!
They would never be served now though.
The jam roly poly made with suet had a name. And not a good one.
Over-cooked liver and spam.
Even now, 30 years on, I can't touch either.
Clouds and Silver Linings etc.: was one of the main inspirations for me to learn how to cook. A big passion of mine.
Hell and buckshot. That has to rank quite highly in the pantheon of inedible desserts.
I remember chocolate sponge and custard being lumpily indigestible. Don't think my school's budget stretched to pink custard. Ah well...
As a result of 60s-70s school food, I still cannot eat:
Semolina
Tapioca
Rice Pudding
Any form of suet pudding
Why ground-up bovine stomach fat has any part to play in a desert escapes me. And feeding it to children?
Whoever mentioned forced-feeding and military discipline from teachers on lunch duty earlier must have been to my school. I threw up on the table more than once. And was beaten for it, of course.
Not good memories.
Now thats two appointments you could have fun mixing up
RIAC
It seems that, despite the cruddy food at my primary school, I was extraordinarily lucky with regards to the quality of teachers I had compared to some!
Ha yes all the reminiscing on school dinners set me off on those two travesties.
The puddings were glorious in comparison!
[QUOTE=proby24;3415930]Over-cooked liver/QUOTE]
Seem to remember our liver was a 'greeny' colour. I was one of the few that actually ate it. Lol
My kids (3 and 1) are mad for tinned semolina. I tried them with Ambrosia tapioca and they both thought I was taking the piss. To be fair it is pretty rank!
I really hate to say this but I doubt I'd give any of my old teachers the time of day. Even the better ones were marked for their benign nature rather than being inspirational. The worst were sadistic tormentors. ( I had a French teacher who literally made me nauseus with fear. PE teachers : run/swim around till you puke ( rugby in -6 with shorts...I couldn't button my shirt up I was so cold).
I was a straight A student ,well self disciplined and found school a breeze fortunately as none of my teachers were remotely inspiring; my kids seem to have far nicer relationships with their teachers these days.
My own school days were like some sort of institutionalised punishment camp. Consider how little respect the pupils were shown by the staff its not surprising they also saw fit to feed us slop.
Our food was excellent, considering how bad it really could have been.
We were very fortunate to have an ex pastry chef in our kitchen and the puddings were to die for.
My personal favourite: Rhubarb crumble with thick custard.... yum. The crumble was thick and chewy at the same time, delicious.
who remembers Swedish Apple Charlotte? No not some Scandinavian Masseuse who eased the pain but "honk" on a plate that you were forced to eat.
ahhh the fond memories!!
Jim
i used to love angel delight,havent had it for years ,have to check in sainsburys to see if they still do it,they probably do
Self defence cookery, I know that feeling.
I was prepping my own packed lunches as soon as I was tall enough to reach over the worktop & able to dish up a decent family dinner not long after. Not that food at home was bad, I just wanted it done the way I liked it.
School dinners gave me such an aversion to insipid ready made crap that I still do virtually all of the cookery at home and never ever buy any ready made or processed meals.
And this is despite the fact that my wife is a qualified chef who trained at one of the best cookery schools in the country.
I wouldn't mind trying my hand at cooking school dinners one day, post retirement. I have worked in professional kitchens before and wouldn't mind doing so again one day. Alas it just doesn't pay that well.
It makes me very sad to hear how bad it was for some. I was very lucky in that the majority of my teachers at primary school, prep school (yes, I really went to a prep school) and secondary school were thoughtful, friendly, and helpful. When I learned that the headmistress of my primary school had died I was genuinely upset that I hadn't been able to see her before her death.
One teacher who stood out as an exception to the pleasant teachers I knew was a supply teacher at my primary school. We were saddled with him all too often (although in reality it was probably only 2 or 3 times the whole time I was there). He was universally disliked by children, parents and staff. I recall that the staff made no secret of this. He must have felt like an outcast, which probably didn't exactly help his naturally unpleasant demeanour. The usual way to call the children in from the playground was to blow a whistle but his preferred method was simply to stand in the playground, throw his hands up in the air, and scream "STOP!". It doesn't sound a big deal now but it was actually weirdly unpleasant and seemed to have no advantage over just blowing a whistle (other than that I think it made him feel powerful in some way). As I recall he had a generally unpleasant personality and seemed to be on the lookout for ways to be nasty. From the sounds of it, many other people in other schools had to put up with teachers like him all the time! :-(
The "pig bins" at HMS Pembroke - Royal Navy Cookery School - went to local farms. They stopped using them in the mid 90's as some one at the DoE decided they could be a source of swine fever - pigs eating pork leads to SF. There is a movement to bring them back as most waste now goes to land fill.
I was at secondary school in the early 70s, and a fussy eater until I encountered school dinners.
Basically, the food was shit, and you got 2 choices.....eat it or go hungry. Grisly meat, egg and bacon pie, soggy pastry......most of it was awful. However, the puddings were usually better provided you didn`t mind cold lumpy custard.
The one I detested was gooseberry crumble (aka 'shit & bogie pie'), closely followed by rhubarb crumble, but I remember shovelling it down as an alternative to starving.
Maybe it was character-building..........I have fond memories of my schooldays despite the relative harshness of the regime, but the food is the exception. Overall the teachers were excellent; tough but fair is the way I remember most of them.
Paul
Rice pudding with the thickest skin ever sticks in my memory. I'm sure school rice pudding was 50% skin.
Mashed potato has memories. Some of the boys were flicking potato at each other. The Teacher spotted this and sent me to his classroom.
He wrongly accused me as the guilty party, I replied " it wasn't me Sir " his reply, "innocence is a sign of guilt" and caned me anyway.
T T
I used to swap my peas for a pudding. Rice pudding with jam or Rhubarb and custard.
My prep school in Devon provided pretty good meals. We'd regularly have ham, mashed potato and coleslaw - the ham came from the local deli, Crebers, owned by the parents of one of the boys; I think the rice pudding might have been from Ambrosia, whose factory was just up the road - another family business, whose sons were at the same school.
I also remember Granny's Leg = Jam roly-poly and custard; semolina, tapioca, some sort of milk pudding made with penne, custard sponge and chocolate custard. I can't remember ever having chips.
Secondary school in Plymouth was much worse - the smell of the greasy chips put me off eating them for years.
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