please empty your brain below
sausages in onion gravy, with raspberry jelly

anonyblobb | 16.03.05 - 7:25 a.m. | #

Sweet tooth me can only tink of puddings - didn't there used to be something called a gipsy tart? If not there's always butterscotch tart with custard or rainbow sponge (with multicolour sprinkles on top or as my son calls them thousands and thousands).

stroppycow | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 8:28 a.m. | #

No. Make it stop. You are bringing back too many memories (not all of them good) of public schools (to age 13 anyway) in england. I knew that moving to australia where there are no school lunches (at private schools) like this was a good thing. A vegemite roll anyone? It has to beat the dry fish finger methinks

Michael | 16.03.05 - 8:42 a.m. | #

I look forward to the TV series DG.... followed by a head to head with Jamie in School Dinner Wars hopefully.

Personally I prefer Jamie's fare and wish they'd had it in my day as I had to sit through most of the dishes you've listed above.... never ate them but had to sit there anyway.... happy days!

NiC | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 9:11 a.m. | #

Pilchards and salad with diced beetroot

Followed by Chocolate concrete
(also known as chocolate brownie)
OR
Chocolate Cracknell
(also known as cornflake cakes shaped like an igloo)

I was the only kid at school who ever ate the pilchards without being forced, so they'd dropped it from the menu by my 4th year of primary.

I still love em!

verity74 | 16.03.05 - 9:36 a.m. | #

Our local amphibians peaked too soon this year and I've now got a pond full of dead frog spawn.

If there are any school catering companies reading this, I'm open to offers.

Scaryduck | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 9:55 a.m. | #

We always used to get this thing at school called Swedish Apricot which was basically stewed apples with cornflakes and cream. Anyone else rememeber this?

Hijack - DG there's a programme on ITV at the weekend called Diamond Geezer in case you didn't know.

Football Watch | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 11:18 a.m. | #

I vividly remember a couple of items from my school lunches in 1970 - undercooked rice with some sort of rubbery meat stew, followed by stewed rhubarb with lumpy custard.
Ah, those were the days...

Lutra | 16.03.05 - 11:20 a.m. | #

Beef olives. With cold lumpy mashed potatoes and mixed veg (that tinned stuff, carrot/swede/potato mix). Followed by prunes and lumpy custard...

Making myself feel ill - better go now...

Joules | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 11:36 a.m. | #

Curry (must be a strange green colour & contain raisins, apples & minimal flesh) served with watery rice & dessicated coconut with the texture of sawdust.

To follow: chocolate concrete. When you try to cut it with a spoon, it must shatter & the pieces end up several yards away, preferably in Spotty Jenkins's eye.

Tony S | 16.03.05 - 11:39 a.m. | #

On my very first day at school I was given salad. Most 4 1/2 year olds love salad.

What do they do for vegetarians these days?

Essexgirl | 16.03.05 - 12:14 p.m. | #

I'd be tempted by saute potatoes, peas and an elderly looking lamb chop

Pudding wise, rainbow sponge and mint custard, or artic roll again (which incidentally I still buy from Tesco - love it!)

Chick | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 12:17 p.m. | #

Oh, nostalgia! -I remember these offerings well.

The default meal was mince, cabbage and potato (underboiled and underpeeled) which you might consider for the missing Thursday. The default pudding was red jam tart (very chewey, the "jam" was of unknown origin) with custard and skin (yuk!, it still makes me shudder).

John Morrow | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 12:24 p.m. | #

No lumpy custard for us: the lumps cost extra and would have put the meals over budget.

How about toad in the hole (mostly hole) with watery, yellowing peas, followed by anaeimc fruit salad swimming in thick, gritty, tooth-rotting syrup.

Ant | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 1:57 p.m. | #

Thanks to some force-feeding from Mrs Glazebrook, I still retch at the scent of baked beans thirty years on.

And what was it with sliced bananas in custard? I liked them both on their own, but put them in the same bowl, and my taste buds rebelled.

Wayne | 16.03.05 - 1:59 p.m. | #

Sausage, chips and gravy (or tinned spaghetti), followed by chocolate sponge and pink custard with skin (think it was meant to be strawberry).

Mmmmm looks so good. Although that could just be because I'm currently eating a 'GI diet induced' brown pitta bread! About the 8th I've eaten this week already!

QueenieB | 16.03.05 - 2:00 p.m. | #

Did we go to the same school? That is absolutely spot on my school menu up to age 12, then they started getting all "self-service" and the fried food crept in.

It's weird that everyone seems to totally agree, was there no regional variation to school dinners? Or are we all from the south-east of England?

To be honest there wasn't much served up I didn't like (I was the only person I knew who ate frog spawn). My mum served the same stuff in the evening too so I had no choice!

DOLnet | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 2:02 p.m. | #

Too easy!

Clearly Thursday 2 should have:

Meat & Potato Pie (Soggy Crust)
Sauteed Potatoes (Very soggy)
Carrots (In a technical sense only)

Followed by:

Two wafers (Soft, almost soggy in fact, noticing a theme?)
Vanilla ice cream (In the scaled shape of the 2001 monolith, but wrapped i9n wax paper).

C | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 2:06 p.m. | #

I grew up in Indiana, USA so my entry (ca. 1976) would be quite different (but somehow the same)...

Meat Loaf w/ Gravy
Sweet corn
Fruit cocktail (containing pear, peach, a cherry if you're lucky, in sugary syrup).

The Dunce | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 2:09 p.m. | #

Was my J&I school the only one that served SQUARE eggs? This was created by about 3x8 of them being 'cooked' in a tray. (Sort of poached, but with no water, and not exactly fried either.) In fact, it wasn't a tray, it was the LID of a metal cooking tray. They were then divided up with a fish slice, in straight lines.

Chig | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 4:40 p.m. | #

Na - speaking as northerner I can confirm that this all sounds terribly familiar to me. Although being a bit of a youngster (relatively speaking) I can say that by the time I got to secondary school it was mostly chips and less ice cream scoops of mash. Now I come to think about it, I have almost no memory of school dinners throughout my teenage years - I think we were nipping up the road for chip butties more often than not. Was not obese though cos simultaneously did some exercise, which seems to be the missing link nowadays.

Katherine | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 4:46 p.m. | #

That menu reads like a Half Man Half Biscuit song. Someone should record it.

Pete Ashton | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 7:06 p.m. | #

Does anybody do blancmange these days? Does anyone even know what it is? That was one thing my old school used to do very well - in fact all their puddings were tops - sponge cake in particular. It was just the main courses they couldn't do, and their soup was filthy. We had to have Lent meals for the six weeks prior to Easter in which the main course was soup - and I can't touch it today, 25 years on.

Matt | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 7:47 p.m. | #

The concept of school dinners is completely foreign to most Australians. We had the tuck shop where you could get a variety of ham and salad rolls and plain meat pies(25 years ago). Of course you could get some crap but mostly we ate pretty well for kids that had free choice, I guess we are more used to healthy food. As much as I love to poke fun at EVERYTHING the English do I am now terrified of my 2 year old daughter going to a typical London school. Jamie's School Dinners has not helped.

I would feed the little f*ckers Kebabs and lager...its what they eat and drink anyway. And a slap for pudding. Two for ones that say "innit".

Uncle Hunty | 16.03.05 - 7:50 p.m. | #

Did you ever have jam doughnuts, covered with sugar and if you were the first to lick your lips, you were the loser?

Alba | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 9:28 p.m. | #

I followed your link to the Scolarest web site. If their food is as good as their web site the local chippy has nothing to worry about.

I'm always worried when firms want to have "partnerships" with schools. Sounds very matey but usually ends in tears when the school finds out how much they have been ripped off.

Invicta | 16.03.05 - 10:54 p.m. | #

We had a thing called Chocolate Goo. Shortbread pastry with the eponymous chocolate goo on the top. You still had the stuff on the roof of your mouth on the way home. Why my heart hasn't packed up by now I don't know...

jamodu | Homepage | 16.03.05 - 11:33 p.m. | #

Mince and fried bread triangles. mashed potato, mashed swede+carrot, cabbage. Atom bombs + white sauce. Atom bombs were choco cornflake cakes, v hard. Dig your spoon in and send it flying. White sauce was like custard, only white. Skin. Maybe had a lot of vanillin.

Water in coloured metallic jugs, duralex (ho ho) glasses.

Then, in the 70s, our school switched head cook and suddenly we had brilliant meals and everyone wanted to stay to lunch instead of going home. Curries and gateaux - this was the 70s, remember, and such things were exotic, ergo desirable.

Oh, and the beef olives were delicious. To say nothing of the braised lambs' hearts....

And the pigswill bins outside Room 10... they don't have pigswill bins these days, do they.

anne | 17.03.05 - 12:12 a.m. | #

mmmmmm....mint custard on jam roly poly. Out of a battered tin jug, obviously.

I was in Staffordshire for primary and junior school and this list of dinners looks spot on. Although where are the sprouts? I had a veg monitor force me to eat a sprout once. I promptly threw up. That taught her.

And, yes, by secondary school it was chips with everything.

Mags | Homepage | 17.03.05 - 12:30 p.m. | #

For dessert I remember something called Manchester Tart, which effectively was a layer of pastry spread with a thin layer of jam, topped with a thick layer of hard custard. On top of that was spricked desicated coconut. It actually tasted ok.

I can't remember much about the main courses apart from it nearly always consisted of Mash, some sort of green veg and a lump of something vaguely resebling meat. With that in mind I'll go for: lumpy mash with broad beans and steam-rollered chicken.

coffdrop | Homepage | 17.03.05 - 4:18 p.m. | #

(un)fortunately i never had school dinners/lunches/(candlelight)suppers, i was born in country that could barely afford to provide milk until was 7 and then only if burnt by the morning sun until it tasted more past it than pasturised. Btw the land of stodge still reigns supreme despite any number of faux french/italian/english chains and they wonder why they cannot win at (insert sport here) world level, never mind hosting a sporting event, i think the ducks are safe in the wetlands of stratford.

geoff | 18.03.05 - 2:43 a.m. | #

Surely it must include beef (grotty mince) cobbler? And spam fritters would have been a luxury at my school - we got the spam, but not the fritter.

Had a variation on this ubiquitous 'chocolate concrete', too - although for some bizarre reason it was called 'Australian crunch'.

Vicky | Homepage | 18.03.05 - 7:27 a.m. | #

those cornflake hedgehogs served with pink custard that yep, shot across the table as soon as you attacked them with cutlery. So now we know school dinners were never good and they got worse and could definitely do better! Have you checked out Jamie's petition?It's going stonkingly well - 25 signatures a minute we reckon. There's a custard revolution coming.

Deb | 18.03.05 - 1:53 p.m. | #

didn't you ever have jelly on your menu? I used to hide what I really didn't want to eat under the smash instant mash. I also once managed to rush my plate so fast under the icecream scoop that the smash fell onto the counter, much to the annoyance of the dinner lady, much to my delight. Hateful stuff.

When I was at Lewisham College they had a scolarest there - they would sell you a slice of pizza and want to serve you chips with it.

harriet | Homepage | 18.03.05 - 2:21 p.m. | #

The meat always used to have 'pipes' in it - rubbery arteries that survived, no matter how slender the slice.

Quink | Homepage | 18.03.05 - 10:50 p.m. | #

ewww quink thats awful i feel sick!

verity74 | 19.03.05 - 7:35 p.m. | #

quink - and now you all know why I became a vegetarian.

Mags | Homepage | 20.03.05 - 5:10 p.m. | #

To be fair, it's not true that the catering companies "are spending a mere 37p a head serving up cheap fried horrors to the nation's children, and we allow them to get away with it."

It's us (council tax payers) who are spending 37p a head. We simply get what we pay for from the catering companies. Don't blame them. They'd be even happier if we were willing to buy (and pay for) better food.

Andrew Denny | Homepage | 21.03.05 - 1:51 p.m. | #











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