General Chat

The one I hated most was boiled ham, tough carrots and badly cooked potatoes always followed by rice pudding. Luckily the dreaded tapioca hadn't followed me to senior school.

Corned beef invariably found it's way to the floor, but I quite liked it.

Didn't much like Kitty Kat pie, probably made with the left over ham - it was very pink. Nor did I like Bone Stew - this was a sort of watery broth with no meat, just a couple of fatty bones and mushroom stalks - for eight of us.

Hated custard, but loved the lemon sauce with the lemon sponge, loved the shaving cream foam with fruit flan. By the end of the 60's kitchen had gone self service and menus changed.

I did a school dinner for the village lunch.

Pasties, mash, carrots and tinned peas followed by chocolate cracknell and pink blancmange.

Had been looking for the chocolate cracknell recipe for a long time and finally found it on the site 'Schoolrecipes'.

I liked school meals which were all cooked on the premises.

Meat, veg and mashed potatoes. Fish, Braised steak, ham. Sometimes boiled potatoes. We never got chips. We had eight girls to each table and two of them served up the dinners which were in metal tins. The puddings were also good. My favourite was Bilberry flan with sweet white sauce. The things I did not like were tapioca and the jugs of water and plastic beakers were always warm .

Mid 60’s would have been at Primary school (just). Like Jax most of the components for our meals were shipped in from elsewhere in large metal trays and kept warm. We queued up at a hatch to be individually served. Our classrooms doubled up as lunch rooms – the Hall was a separate, new addition across the playground from the kitchens.

Only a few meals stick in my mind - salad was one because there was a live caterpillar crawling over the lettuce! Tapioca (frog spawn) was a pet hate along with the custard. I wasn’t forced to eat it at home unless it was sweet and runny. The School version was thick and lumpy where they’d stirred in the ‘skin’. Rarely were we made to sit at the table/desk until we’d cleared our plates. If a child was being targeted for trying to leave too much, we’d often share it out amongst ourselves when the teacher wasn’t looking.

No one brought in packed lunches. You either ate what was offered (no choice) or went home to eat. No one seemed to have food allergies, special dietary requirements or was vegetarian.

Just remembered a favourite pudding - Gypsy Pie, now sold as Kentish Gypsy Pie
:-D It was accompanied by a spoonful of mock, sweet, cream

Oh - and the food was served on proper china plates, the water was in real glass glasses!!!
Somehow we could be trusted to work out which were the vegetables without them being in a separate section of the plastic plate, and we could manage to drink without smashing the glass!! :-D

Likewise, the milk every morning break, was in a glass bottle.

school dinners back then was way better than the dinner the kids get now
i can still remember some of the dinners we had at school as i was a fan of school dinners

we had


beef or chicken roast potato's with veg
meat pie with boled potato's and veg
mince rolly poly with mash and veg
liver with mash and veg yuck the one and only dinner i could not eat
stew with dollop mash
fish and chips with peas best dinner of the week
cheese flan saled with mash


puddings
custard with sponge cake jam and coconut on top
custard and cake with pink icing
samerleana with dollop jam
rice pudding with dollop jame
some times ice cream with jelly
some times apple with crackers
lemon ceard pie with dollop of cream
ice lolly but not very often
jam rolly poly with custard


I LOVE MY SCHOOL DINNERS THEY WAS THE BEST




:-) :-) :-)

PRIMARY SCHOOL IN THE 50's
DINNER TIME HORENDOUS
ALL OF US IN THE MAIN HALL
AND WE HAD TO EAT EVERYTHING
AND I MEAN EVERYTHING,I HATED MOST OF IT
BUT WE WERE NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE
TABLE TILL IT WAS ALL GONE,,COLD AND STEWED SOGGY VEGTABLES NIGHTMARE
SECONDARY SCHOOL WAS LIKE JOY SAID LARGE TIN AND
ONE GIRL ON TABLE DISHED IT UP,
DIDNT LIKE SEMOLINA OR TABIOCA

I don't remember much of what we had but I know we didn't get a choice, never liked cabbage,cauliflower ect but was forced to eat it at home, so being made to eat it at school was no different.... If we did leave anything we had to show the headmaster, who would say yes or no to it being thrown in the bin.
The food was delivered in big metal containers as we didn't have a kitchen, but one was built during my last year or so, not that the food changed.
Puddings were lovely infact I cannot think of any i didn't like.... Chocolate pudding and chocolate custard was one of my favourites

Shudder to remember most of them, not being a fan of meat I did suffer as back then there was really no option.

Cheese and tomato pie was one I did like with really nice 'dry roast' potatoes, there was a scoop of mash with most things, carrots, cabbage, 'scouse' stew with stringy meat in watery gravy ( eeuch!).

I liked the puddings though, jam rolypoly with custard, rice pudding, semolina with a scoop of raspberry jam in the middle, apple and cookies, apple crumble ; prunes and rice pudding or semolina, I was lucky enough to swap the prunes surreptitiously with friends and would eat their rice or semolina for them in exchange ;-)

As well as the food being served from big metal trays, key feature was always the jugs of water on the tables, handy for washing down the worst of the food!

I went to 3 primary schools in the mid 60's, two in Cornwall, and one in Devon. The food in all schools was similar.
I remember having shepherds pie, carrots and cabbage.
Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and veg
Once a week we'd have fish of some sort.
Corned beef salad/baked potato and salad

We had a variety of puddings.
Semolina or Tapioca
Jelly or blancmange
Spotted dick or some other steamed pudding
chocolate cornflake/rice crispy cakes

All food, in each school, no matter how small, was cooked in the kitchen attached to the school. In each, there was a huge potato peeling machine, worked by hand, and a chipper. :-D

all our food was in silver metal tubs and were served by one of the older children
I fondly remember some of the food
we had nearly always with mashed potatoes with meat stew fish or sometime salads
for sweet we had cornflake pies chocolate cake spotted dick treacle sponge
all with custard or sometimes we had ice-cream and toffee sauce


the worst experience I ever had was sometimes we had to have prunes
that always made me sick
ive since tried them recently and yep they made me sick still :-D :-D

Hi Everyone
I am working on a project with some pupils about the kind of "school dinners" that people had in the mid 60's. Could you help by sharing your memories if you wre at primary school during this time
Many Thanks
Wendy