Dreams of childhood (Part 5)

Dreams of childhood (Part 5)

School dinners.  Two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of pretty much any adult.  Long before Jamie Oliver came along with his campaign to banish turkey twizzlers and chips with everything, indeed long before turkey twizzlers were even invented schools across the UK were churning out good, wholesome meals to children, right?  Weren’t they?  Of course not.  Show me a man who enjoyed his school dinners and I’ll show you a man who either has no taste buds or thinks dog food is haute cuisine.  My primary school was no exception and this is something I’ll never quite understand.  My school was a small independent (i.e. fee paying) preparatory school so if anything I’d have hoped for decent meals, with a higher budget than you might expect in the infant school down the road.  But no.  They clearly put all their funds into buying that turquoise carpet in the main house because come lunch time all they had the money left for was some cheap catering sized barrels of baked beans and, well, floor scrapings by the look and taste of it.  It was nasty.

Mrs Roberts was the name of one of the…er….”cooks” that churned out some of the worst tasting food I’ve ever had the bad fortune to be forced to eat.  And Mrs Gilbert was the dinner lady, I can only remember there ever being one.  She was there the whole time I was at the school and may even have still been there when my sister attended it some nine years later.  Mrs Gilbert was lovely, despite the fact that she was charged with making sure that every one of us ate every morsel from our plates.  We weren’t allowed to go out to play until we’d finished.  This mightn’t have been a problem were it not for the fact that pretty much all of the meals were absolutely disgusting.

The problem probably stemmed from making meals from the cheapest of ingredients. For example you’d think that something like spaghetti hoops wouldn’t be a problem.  I loved spaghetti hoops when I had them at home.  But the ones we got at school were vile, the tomato sauce tasting like nothing in nature, tainted as it was by who knows what.  Metal mainly, thinking back.  I can still taste it unfortunately.  Oh and the mashed potato!  I’d seen the barrel sized vats of instant mashed potato stacked up by the kitchen door, but had never dreamed that when mixed with water their contents could be so horrible.  I can’t even begin to explain how it tasted, but it was nothing, NOTHING like potato. And yet lumpy, somehow, despite the fact there was clearly no potato within a hundred feet of it.  The custard was also lumpy.  Perhaps it was made with the instant mash powder, but just dyed yellow.  It tasted foul, too.  There was a curious white custard as well that was reserved for use with chocolate sponge which just tasted of nothing.

If we’d been offered choice in our meals perhaps it wouldn’t have been as bad but we had one option every day and if we didn’t like it it was too bad.  Very few people at the time were vegetarian but if you were then on most days, well, that was tough too.  Regardless of what we were given and regardless of whether we liked it or not we had to eat every last bit.  Even on the days when the “meal” on offer was a lump of cheese, a splat of mashed potato and several over-boiled carrots.  A nod to the budding vegetarians maybe. I’m not sure who dreamt it up but I don’t think they won any awards for culinary genius.  And I hated cheese, still do unless it’s melted.  School dinners were a living hell.  Which is probably why they stopped them all together after a few years and we all had packed lunches instead.  Much better.

3 Responses »

  1. Yep, Mrs Gilbert was still there! She used to turn a blind eye when I really couldn’t finish sandwiches and slip them into the bin so Mrs Petter didn’t tell me off. And air my lunch box when mum thoughtfully made me egg sandwiches…

  2. 7 yearas of boarding school, 4 of those as a vegetarian. i lived off tomato ketchup sandwiches…
    school food screws you up…and i hated cooked cheese too…

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