OneGuyFromBarlick

Thinking of school dinners in the past what are your good and bad memories. Many of us flinch and sqiurm when we think of hard potatoes, tough meat, watery soup, mouldy bread and sour milk. And what horrid names we gave to various dinners.To start you off most of us will remember Sago pudding being referred to by school children as "frogspawn". Can you think of any ?

At junior school I used to hate Fridays because we were served fish with bones. Even the mashed potatoes tasted fishy and horrible on that day. The meals were good on most other days. I went to Primet School, Colne, and the kitchen was below the classrooms. They also prepared meals for other schools and these were taken away in insulated containers.

Later I attended Colne Grammar and the meals were wonderful. The cook, Mrs Whipp, was the most popular person in school, and usually managed to find "seconds" for hungry boys. When I think back, quite often the school dinner was the only real meal we received each day. I never thought about it at the time, it was normal to be hungry as a young lad growing up in the fifties. There were no fat kids in our school so it shows that everyone was in the same boat.

There was a rhyme about semolina pudding:

Sloppy semolina.
Sloppy semolina.
Green snot pie.
All mixed together with a dead dog's eye.

I can't remember the rest.

This has rung a few bells - fish on Friday of course, with parsley sauce. I'm still not keen on like parsley, and the least taste takes me back to primary school. Here's the site to tell you all about modern day school dinners from all around the world. http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

Battered spam...yummy, and there was ginger pudding with pink custard.
On the negative side there were disgusting soapy tasting sausages.

Thanks chinatyke. I believe there was chocolate semolina - I don't need to tell you what kids called that. Haha.
Tripps, yes it was always fish on Fridays for some reason. I hate fish in parsley sauce. Fish at school was never cooked properly so you could still taste it the following day.
wendy thanks, I believe SPAM was an American invention ? I remember Spam fritters. Sausagers always had skins on them. Kids had a name for the skins when they came off the sausage - condoms. Ooops can I get away with that.

I went to grammar school in Bradford during the war. We had a school kitchen and "dining room" and vile comestibles. The country also had serious food rationing.
The most memorable thing about school dinners was seeing the way the cooks used to come in the morning with empty shopping baskets and the way they went home, in the afternoon, with heavy ones.
Needless to say the local chippy did a very good trade as did the local confectioner and pie shop, even though it was a bit more expensive.

So the dinner ladies were nicking the food, while you and your school chums got the scraps in other words. That's shocking. Don't think they'd get away with that today. Pie and chips was worth waiting for though even if it cost a bit more. Its still a tasty meal today with mushy peas poured over and around. Yum yum.

I had school dinners during the war. They were delivered in aluminium insulated boxes, always arrived on time and apart from being slightly over-cooked because of the containers they were good and appreciated especially by the very poor children in the classes some of whom had to take a day off while their only pair of clogs were being repaired. Great service and of course, off ration!

I only attended Rainhall Rd School for 1 year, then we came to Australia. I don't remember the school dinners there, even tho I must have had them, but I do remember Mother taking us for meat pies from the local shop on Fridays (I can still taste them, they were yummy). I do remember the milk we were given first thing each morning at school, it was frozen and we had to put it on the radiators to thaw before we could drink it, which by then might have been recess.

chinatyke wrote:
There was a rhyme about semolina pudding:

Sloppy semolina.
Sloppy semolina.
Green snot pie.
All mixed together with a dead dog's eye.

I can't remember the rest.

China tyke we used to chant
" iddy biddy custard, green snot pie
Mix it up with a dead dog's eye,
Slap it on a sandwich, nice and thick
And wash it down with a hot cup of sick"

Gruesome things we used to say!....

School milk put me off milk for life. The dinners at Kelbrook school used to come in containers from New Road School in Earby - I did not have them, I went to my grandma's instead. The dinners at Skipton Girls' High School were cooked on the premises and were very good inspite of the rationing - which stopped whilst I was there.

I loved school milk with the added bonus of being monitor from time to time. Third of a pint orange juice for the lactose intolerant kids as well. Maggie should be ashamed for knocking the service on the head. Winter was best when the silver lids were pushed up with the frozen cream.
Never had a school dinner though, always went home for my dinner as mum was always there, got lots of exercise as well, no car in the family and the so called "school run" had not been invented then. Only kids that came on wheels were the ones who came in on the bus, everyone else walked, and guess what, no-one got kidnapped or went missing, different world and glad I had the freedom.

I went to a special school in Nelson in the late 1960s where we got a breakfast. This usually consisted of lumpy porridge which we called "vomit" and it nearly did make you vomit. Jam rolley polley pudding was often referred to by us kids as "dead man's arm". Peach slices in syrup we called "goldfish in saliva". Thanks everyone for the nice comments. Looks like Stanley had a pretty good time at his school. I do remember dinners arriving in the aluminiam containers to keep them warm.

Not quite school dinners but very close. My sister trained as a nurse at the Manchester Eye Hospital and they called macaroni pudding 'Cataract pudding'. Sorry about that.....

The tops of our school milk were cardboard, after washing they were handy for making wool pompoms. We used to get orange juice & cold liver oil in the afternoons - when I was monitor I made sure there was only orange juice when it came to my turn!!

I think the cardboard wide neck tops would date you school days quite well. I think I started on them, then changed to narrower neck bottles and foil caps part way through. The centre didn't always press out cleanly though, and they often spilled.
On the cataract pudding - I've never actually seen a cataract, but I'd guess it resembles sago pudding rather than macaroni? Otherwise known as frogspawn.

Moh wrote:The tops of our school milk were cardboard, after washing they were handy for making wool pompoms. We used to get orange juice & cold liver oil in the afternoons - when I was monitor I made sure there was only orange juice when it came to my turn!!

I remember those cardboard tops for school milk. The milk was always left outside the school by the milkman, and only brought indoors when it was to be consumed. In Bradford there always seemed to be plenty on rain, and, as a consequence, in the top of most bottles was a little pool of water, some of which always dropped into the milk when one pushed a finger through the central opening "flap".
If the bottle was one from the top crate the water would often be "fortified" with blue tit crap.

Macaroni pudding if I remember rightly had little coloured bits in it. Am I right about that ? The little bottles of milk we got had the silver foil tops. There was always some cream at the top - this was the best part of the milk, I think. Can anyone remember getting liver that wasn't cooked properly - it had green on the underside and, we called it "boot leather".

Funnily enough, wool pom-poms made using cardboard milk bottle tops figure in one of the articles I have just written....
As for sago, I can remember Nurse Hunt, the midwife who followed Edie Barlow in Barlick, being aghast when she found that Vera had bulked the kid's feed up with milk and sago when she was short of breast-milk. She was a bit late, Margaret and Susan had both been reared on it and it never did them any harm!

I read somewhere the other day about a school where they served offal pudding (liver, heart & kidney) it was christened transplant pudding!

Sounds horrible Moh. Thanks everyone for the comments.I can remember corned beef being called "corned dog" or "dog meat". I think it is sometimes called "bully beaf".

At Hope Memorial school in 1940 when the milk arrived frozen in the bottle the crates were put in the hearth of the biog fireplace in the schoolroom which had a large coke fire burning all day. It sat there until break time when it was not only thawed but warm! Can you imagine the number of H&S regulations against doing that these days? Let alone the fact we had that big fire in the schoolroom. There was a coke boiler warming big cast iron pipes as well but in cold weather the CH system couldn't cope. There were about 35 pupils and we sat on the floor round the fire eating our dinner.

I hated warm milk still do come to that. Our school milk was always frozen in winter and warm in the summer. No one tried to defrost it though it sat on your desk until it was drinkable. Those were the days no Health and Safety interference and we didn't seem to ail much. Eileen

Thank you Stanley and Eileen for those comments regarding milk. A bit off topic but can anyone remember putting their shoes/boots in front of a stove in the classroom to dry out in Winter time. Also a little off topic but concerning food does anyone know where this saying originates from and was there any truth in it. My mother often tells me this "Sally Army sells fish three ha'ppence a dish, don't like it, dont eat it". I didn't realise the Salvation Army "ever" sold fish - but maybe something in it !

Sunray10 wrote:. My mother often tells me this "Sally Army sells fish ........:

"Selfish" was how we always understood it.