School dinners

[darren]

Re: School dinners

yes when i was at school primary school we where asked what we wanted just pointed at it and got.
We never really had certain days where we got certain things from memory.

i loved getting beans and chips.

Never really mnded getting portatoes with black bits i them.

Cant ever remember seeing black pudding being offered.
I suppose it depended where you live.

[vanhelsing]

Re: School dinners

If anyone remembers mr Taylor from ashby junior school 1972, Please tell me where he lives so I can go round his house make him eat custard till he is sick while constantly telling him to 'just try it, its really nice' in a patronising voice and then i want to punch his face in for making me 'just try it' for three years (not continuously obviously!) I hated custard then and i still hate it now!
There, rant over, (been dying to get that off me chest for 37 years. I'm psyhcologically scarred!)

I've got books on torture and executions methods (The first was for curiosity and the rest're for research purposes and writing ideas).

[Trickyvee]

Re: School dinners

Yes by high school we got a good choice, although chips and beans were generally the order of the day. Jamie Oliver would reel!

[stuckinthe80's]

Re: School dinners

We got a choice in comprehensive school between 2 main meals and 2 deserts. Infants and Junior school was a case of eat what you were given or go hungry! I think thats the way it should be too!

[Trickyvee]

Re: School dinners

Our dinner ladies use to tell you what it was. do you want? 'pie or sausage', mash or roast potatoes, choice of veg etc, and you'd just point and say that one please

Wow, you got a choice! We never got a choice. There was only ever one main meal and one desert take it or leave it, and never a choice of veg or potato types. I feel hard done by!

I'm sure our dinner ladies would have told us what things were but I don't think we ever bothered to ask, or at least I didn't. Mind you I've never been a fussy eater so I think I was just happy to shovel anything in and hope for the best.

[Heather74]

Re: School dinners

I use to 'run errands' for the school secretaries at play time Darren, which included taking the dinner ladies the numbers for that day to the kitchen, most day's I got given a freshly baked biscuit or cake as at that time they were nicely cooling ready for lunch time.

[darren]

Re: School dinners

Our dinner ladies use to tell you what it was. do you want? 'pie or sausage', mash or roast potatoes, choice of veg etc, and you'd just point and say that one please

did all school dinner ladies not do that H.
they did that in my school as well.
one of the dinner ladies in my school was my aunt she always gave me a bit extra.
i bet u had seconds H.

[Heather74]

Re: School dinners

Our dinner ladies use to tell you what it was. do you want? 'pie or sausage', mash or roast potatoes, choice of veg etc, and you'd just point and say that one please

[Trickyvee]

Re: School dinners

In the juniors they had a board telling you what the meal was that day but in the infants they didn't, presumably because we couldn't read! I find it amusing now to think that we had no idea what we were eating. I had this lovely sweet stringy red stuff one day and went to great lengths to try to describe what I'd had when I got home. It took us a good while to establish that it was stewed rhubarb.

Re: School dinners

Our primary school dinners had good and bad days. I remember Monday's being Black pudding day, so that was avoided. Thursday was always chip day, and they were the best chips I've ever tasted. Can still smell and taste them now. My fave pudding was the Jam sponge, with a thick sticky layer of raspberry jam on top. Can remember also getting beef olives and roast beef & gravy. Our school wasn't huge, but the younger ones went first, then about 15 mins later we got to go. My daughter goes to my old primary school and they still use the same foldable dinner tables with attatched seats that I sat on, can't believe they've lasted so long!

[Krazy]

Re: School dinners

I enjoyed the school dinners. Except the cold mash potato with black bits in it (presume they were the eyes) Loved the cheese flan that we had, and absolutely adored Manchester Tart for pudding. I often went back for seconds. But you had to be careful, we were not allowed any drinks, except water that was in a jug on the table, and if you werent careful, and left the table to go up for seconds. Some people would pour salt into your glass of water. Not very nice atall. There was a particular dinnerlady, who looked like Miss Trunchbull out of Matilda, very scary and she had a moustache. You were on your best behaviour whilst she was on duty.

[darren]

Re: School dinners

One of the primary schools I went to had 2 sittings, another had 4 because there were seperate ones for those having sandwitches.

Interestingly it was later in the break so I normally had dinners so I didn't need to wait, & it was more filling having a hot meal.

i agree with the hot meal bit mate.
only problem was some of the food was from good to pretty bad.

i remember near the end of my school days they started doing healthier dinners.

you could even get fruit.

[Marillion]

Re: School dinners

A few kids used to take sandwiches to school, and the school set aside a special table for them in the dining room.

[Richard1978]

Re: School dinners

One of the primary schools I went to had 2 sittings, another had 4 because there were seperate ones for those having sandwitches.

Interestingly it was later in the break so I normally had dinners so I didn't need to wait, & it was more filling having a hot meal.

[Marillion]

Re: School dinners

As a former Londoner, I find the idea of a small school difficult to imagine. My primary school was huge - about 300 kids in the Infants and 400 in the Juniors - taking into account that we were the last of the baby boomers so schools in those days were crammed with more kids than they were designed for.

The canteen (or 'dining room', as the staff insisted on calling it) wasn't big enough for all of us so dinner was arranged in two shifts. One half of the school would go out to play while the other half ate, and then we swapped round. There were two dining rooms, one for the Infants and one for the Juniors.

What about the food? We all thought it was disgusting - if you liked it you kept quiet about it - it might ruin your reputation. I remember reading once that rule applies to prison food as well. A researcher asking a group of prisoners what they thought of the food was told it was revolting, but when he interviewed them individually, most of them said it wasn't too bad. My own private judgement was that it was tolerable, but I rarely cleared my plate. A typical meal would be sausages, meat pie or watery minced beef with mash and two veg, followed by tart or sponge with custard. The one desert I disliked was the suet pudding.