Reply With QuoteLumpy rice pudding with a dollop of jam
Just a bit of Friday fun!
Talking at work the other day about pink custard & sponge pudding at school.
Who else remembers the likes of frog spawn, semolina etc......
Lumpy rice pudding with a dollop of jam
Yes, liked them all. We always had pink custard with chocolate sponge. There was also jam and coconut sponge, rice pudding with sultanas and jam roly-poly.Originally Posted by xpatx
Occasionally make myself semolina pudding now but rest of family won't touch it. Must try the frog spawn again - is it sago or tapioca?
Pineapple crumble and custard, abiding memory! Mmmmm......niiiiiiice!
F.T.F.A.
Primary school is the only place I've ever had Arctic Roll.
I remember the fight for the skin on the custard.
^ At my school that always went to the fat kid with snotty nose. I think the dinner ladies felt sorry for him.
Tapioca bought a tin from Morrison's the othe day.
What about milk in a bottle with a straw?
They always left it outside and it was a bit warm ewwww!
Chaps
I grew up in the 1950's and had a school dinner virtually every day which usually consisted of meat plus two veg and a stodgy pudding.
I recently heard a programme on Radio 4 claiming that school dinners in the 1950s were the most nutritionally balanced compared to any other time.
Kid were certainly slimmer back then.
Regards
Mick
I'll look out for tapioca but think I'd prefer made from dry ingredient - don't like tinned rice pudding.
Remember the milk - think they were third pint bottles. One of us was a 'milk monitor' with the job of handing them out.
Happy days!
Do like a good pudding with buckets of custard!!
Were I work the staff canteen seems to specialise in old school puddings!
Yesterday was sponge pudding with pink icing and desiccated coconut on top, all floating in a sea of custard .... bloody marvellous!
I don't think that's down to the meals which were laden with fat and sugar; if your childhood was like mine it was more that a) there was never really chocolate or crisps lying around to scoff when you want; and b) you spent every waking moment tearing round the street, playing with your friends, mucking about in the field over the way or playing tig / 999 / hide and seek...
I was a skinny kid as I never sat still. Made up for it since like.
Third of a pint, Silver Top with that layer of cream if they stood for a while.
We had milk monitor and straw monitor lol
Same at our school, and God help you if your playground enemy was milk monitor that week as you could guarantee you'd get the bottle with the bird crap all over it :-D
Thats because you walked 14 miles to school and back carrying bags of coal, or so Ive heard...
Actually the school dinners were not that bad. The portions were not enormous and in the main they were fairly healthy, hence they have been held up as a reference point for good nutrition.
I remember being told by a tea lady that chips were banned by Devon County Council.
Yes I did walk to school (3 miles each way) and we played outside at every opportunity, so yes that will explain why kids were slimmer then.
Mick
Chocolate concrete with pink custard. My real lasting memory was the copper jugs that they served the custard in on the table. They were all battered and never flat bottomed so you could spin them round by the handle. Skin was vile though. I don't know why but I am sure these days I'd be happy to have it.
I remember it all being vile including red jelly that had absolutely no taste!
Cheers,
Neil.
I used to love school dinners and puddings, all except the skin on the custard and the jam roly-poly made with suet - it stuck to the roof of my mouth and could only be removed with a finger
As well as being milk monitor I recall also being ink monitor, topping up the little ceramic ink wells recessed in the top of the desks.
Luxury!
I enjoyed school dinners in the main and we had chips once a week. I used to race the bus home to save the 2d bus fare. Over the fields it was 2 miles back home and the bus didn't take a direct route and took at least 15 minutes: I beat it every time.
Eddie
Whole chunks of my life come under the heading "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
Manchester Tart, I think it was... rockwell 58 hardness (at least) pastry, layer of jam, then set custard with dessicated coconut on top- a fitting pud after spam fritters and mashed swede
cruel and unusual punishment if ever there was
Prunes - it was expected of every boy, during his time at the school, to get one to stick to the ceiling of the dining hall by flicking it from the end of a spoon.
School dinners I had in the 70s were complete rubbish. I would hesitate to feed it to dogs.
I remember ; mystery meat complete with tubes , shards of bone and gristle. Half cooked pastry ; literally extra lumps of it just dumped on your plate to try and up the calorific content cheaply. Mashed potato that seemed to be 50% cornstarch and grease ( how can you mess up mash potato???)
Apple crumble consisting of revoltingly sour apples with what appeared to be raw flour and sugar on top ; this was served every other day. Unidentifiable lumps of tinned fruit ( probably once a pear or a peach) in a watery syrup that had a strong tang of urine to it.
I used to breathe a sigh of relief when they served watery soup as at least I wouldn't be choking on gristle that day.
Everything came out of a tin and was saturated in salt; pretty sure it was all made by that "Goblin" company who's main forte seems to be tinned dog food in black gravy.
To cap it all off we had martinet teachers; who obviously had a deep loathing and hatred for all children patroling up and down and demanding that we finish every scrap.
I saw one girl literally being forced to chew and swallow a golfball sized lump of gristle by a mountaneously obese teacher. I'm sure this gave me hang ups about eating in public for years afterwards. It felt like being in prison ; although the food would have been better most likely.
I switched to packed lunches after begging my mother ; by the time I'd finished primary school I reckon more than 50% of the kids were in the packed lunch section.
I've never had worse food in my life , not in hospital or staff canteens of the most grottiest. If my kids were put through the same experience I'd have them out the school in 5 minutes.
Sad to say my abiding memory of school is monsterous sadistic teachers right from day one. I reckon most of them would have gotten the chop pretty rapidly today.
What the heck was that green 'custard' stuff I seem to remember?
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
- Bender Bending Rodríguez
My junior school had pink n green (was it not mint) custard, worked a treat with chocolate sponge. And coffee in a plastic glass that you could water down too. Funny things you remember
Pretty much my experience with primary school dinners in the 1970s (left primary school in 1981/82), apart from the teachers. In my case, the teachers were almost all kind and friendly. It was just the school food that was dire.
I too changed to packed lunches asap.
Interestingly, my primary school was very small and very old. It had no room on the premises for serving food or doing PE. Both lunches and PE were held in some kind of quite sizeable church hall about a quarter of a mile away. And so, every day, the entire school walked back and forth (more than once on a PE day) along a busy road with narrow pavements to the church hall. Amazingly it is only in the last couple of years that the old school premises have been closed and a new, much larger, replacement school built near to the old one.
As I mentioned, and despite the difficulties with the small and ancient premises, the teachers were mostly kind, helpful and friendly. It was a good school for all its limitations.
^^^
not I'm my experience. My mum was a dinner lady where they cooked all the meals fresh that day and a couple of times a week brought home puddings for my dad who was a pudding expert!
If anyone is feeling nostalgic you might want to give the Pudding Club in the Cotswolds a try. (Perfect venue for a WIS GTG...) We stayed there last year and the puds are Historic as Michael Winner would say.
Ditto the comment about school meals on the 70s although I do remember the chocolate sponge and chocolate custard was very nice, and there was always a lovely thick crusty skin on their rice pudding and semolina which I used to ask for, that tasted of nutmeg. Haven't tasted nutmeg for years, I'm going to buy some today.
This must be a major point. If I remember correctly and as far as I knew/know, the church hall where we used to eat lunch had no food preparation facilities. Therefore all the food had to be cooked elsewhere and shipped in. I recall seeing some of it arriving in large metal cylindrical vats and other containers.
This long-winded process could hardly have helped make it palatable.
Remember the 'pig bins'?
Good grief, yes! I always wondered if it really did go to pigs. I always doubted it.
Our school cook retired after donkeys years. As a leaving present, she was bought....................
a cookery book!
Mike
Pink custard!!
Yes, good shout I used to love the pink custard as well, with the sponge pudding... I want some now
Army kitchens used to have pig bins as well and I can remember one of the ACC chappies at Pirbright getting very upset when some herbert put something inedible (packaging or something similar) in one of the pig bins so, in that example, I have a feeling that it actually happened.
Mmm school dinners, 5 bob a weekanyway I got Liz this recipe book for Xmas as I loved them so much...LoL
I had rum and raison ice cream last week, very old skool and something I don't remember having since I was a kid. Knocks spots off anything Ben & Jerry can come up with.
Chocolate sponge and chocolate custard or a sort of lemon or orange clear 'syrup'
And shaving foam cream
Chicklets. Drumstick shaped roadkill. I loved them.
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
- Bender Bending Rodríguez
Steak and kidney pud, mashed spuds, cauliflower and gravy with apple crumble and custard to follow,
And yes it was cooked on the premises, if what they have now as school dinners is progress, I'll show my arse on the town hall steps.
Rum & Raisen or Wine Gums and you thought you'd get drunk!
Yes, I remember those dinners. School semolina was rubbish, as described above. But my mum's was much better (more sugar, perhaps...which came off ration a month before I was born) and occasionally I still make some at home.
Of the same period; does anyone else remember the baby clinic concentrated orange juice? That was a favourite of mine, especially when diluted with hot water.
Last edited by PickleB; 7th February 2015 at 19:59.
Frogspawn/ semolina I remember that to this day. 30 years on and my stomach still turns.......!
Sago. I still enjoy it.
Semolina was like satans man fat though.
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
- Bender Bending Rodríguez
That's interesting. So it probably did.
One of the reasons I doubted that it went to pigs was the issue of choosing which pigs it went to. Did some farmer somewhere buy the food or was there some sort of lucky state-sector farm that got the state sector's pig food, I wondered.
Last edited by markrlondon; 8th February 2015 at 01:51.
I was at infants school in the early 60s and remember the school dinners with horror. I hated each and every moment of every one.
Sounds just like the school I went to! You've bought back terrible memories of the meat????!!!! 😶 with tubes in, anything with apple in ALWAYS had the "toenails" in, blancmange that could be used for bolting on wallpaper, spotted Dick or jam roll that was rock 'ard at one end and soggy at the other...... We used to get sweet and sour which was almost pure MSG with some unidentifiable lumps that were supposed to be chicken, GREEN liver, faggots that I was sure were made with bogies....... The list goes on........
Just like your school an awful eating experience was made ten times worse was the psychotic sadistic bastard staff that wouldn't let you leave the table until you had eaten everything on your plate.
I've almost zero happy memories of school........ 😟
Posting Permissions
