Did you like school dinners as a kid?
Were they the classic chocolate sponge with chocolate custard variety or something else?
I don't recall anything about food in my Primary School except for milk. We got milk at break in triangular packets. I assume it was a Government scheme to boost our bones and teeth what with all that calcium and all.
I do remember school dinners at secondary school though. We had to queue up along a corridor outside the dining hall. Each table had about 8 kids on it and heading the table was an older pupil, a fifth year Prefect. Yep, the enamel badge brigade.
The Prefect's job was to supervise the table and the fair distribution of food. It arrived in metal containers, the food that is, not the prefect! The thing I recall the most is the battered tin water jug and the custard jug. God knows how they got so battered. Maybe the dinner ladies had jug fights after their shifts?
The Prefect was in charge of the custard too. The custard king [I don't remember girl prefects but there must have been some]. The jug was his power and if you said anything he would do the opposite. I said I didn't want skin!
I can't tell you how much I detest custard skin in my mouth now!
Typical hot meals were: sausage pie and mash and cabbage and gravy; mince and onion pie and boiled spuds and cabbage and gravy; fish and chips and gravy and .... peas; lamb hotpot, mash and cabbage; gravy, chips and cabbage. There was a lot of boiled cabbage, which was really just green water held in a loose atomic structure by fear.
Puddings were equally wholesome and the stuff the Seventies stood on .... besides the platform boots we were all wearing: chocolate sponge and chocolate custard, jam roly poly and pink custard; bread and butter pudding and yellow custard and variations of all three.
I was always sleepy after dinner, far too sleepy to focus on lessons. Being called Woods I sat at the back, which was handy for a quick rest behind my opened book stood up on the desk!
Did you have school dinners?
Never had that experience, I always used to walk home for lunch and then walk back for the afternoon, even when my secondary school was across town, I'm a fast walker!
ReplyDeleteAmazing! I lived miles away from School so not an option. What did you have at home?
DeleteI remember dinner tokens, Woodsy. Remember those? At my Secondary Modern we'd take in dinner money and exchange it for five small plastic tokens during registration first thing Monday morning. At dinner time the token was handed to a desk-bound dinner lady with a grim face, who guarded by the dinner hall door. The disk entitled the unlucky participant to a hot dinner and pudding, the quality of which at my school was inconstant and variable. By the start of the forth year, I'd had my fill of school dinners and opted to take a sarnie and bag of 'crips' :)
ReplyDeleteha ha, crips! I loved that word as a kid! We used to say Chipes as well instead of chips! As for tokens, no,don't recall them soz. In fact I have no recollection of dinner ladies but there must have been some! Some one must have made the food at school unless we were like the Eloi and it just appeared in the domes!
DeleteProblems with my internet and wind at the mo. Will respond when its less gusty chaps.
ReplyDeleteTry milk of magnesia?
ReplyDeleteha ha, always to hand as a kid but it was hogged by Mum!
Delete... and lay off the sprouts :)
ReplyDeleteMmm, I'm dreaming of a windy Christmas!
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