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No 'yuk' on the menu today!
SCHOOL dinners. Remember the stench of cabbage, lumpy mash, glutinous gravy, the kid who added salt to water jugs, the crescendo of sound from kids communally eating.
A new book brings it all back, rather than up. School Dinners skips through the good, bad and spotted dick of stodge, substance and postwar style which marked din-dins of yesteryear.
Primary school teacher Becky Thorn's book looks at an era when tank tops were cool, lapels wide, Jamie Oliver hadn't gummed his first Farleys rusk, and dinner ladies were called - dinner ladies. Not general assistants.
We ate in canteens, not refectories, didn't have salad bars, vegetarians were gently derided, and our day turned on just how clumpy the custard was for the sponge puds to die for. For kids who only had sweet on Sundays - and then canned fruit topped with conny-onny (condensed) milk - school dinners were fabulous.
For my family they were free too. It still didn't stop my brother complaining he had "eaten ants" one day - revealed as chocolate vermicelli.
So what do the kids of today think of school meals - or the meals their grans and mums and dads ate before nanny state inflicted Master Oliver upon them? At St George's CoE Business and Enterprise College (for they don't call them schools any more, either!) at Marton, 700 of the 900 pupils have school lunches.
The big surprise is they look great - and some familiar favourites are there too as well as healthy options. Traditional sponge puds, with custard. No wonder some start with the sweet and work back to the main event.
There's a heady waft of pasta bake, spicy pizza, roast meats, rather than soggy cabbage.
It leads by the snout, siren-like, to the lair of dinner lady, sorry, general assistant manager Barbara Taylor. Her favourite from school days? "Chocolate sponge with peppermint custard."
There's a recipe for that in the School Dinners book.
These kids are far more discriminating than I ever was. They pick and choose, return if hungry. They watch their weight and what others eat, and are far more self aware than my generation. When we ask for a pic it's the the lads who dive for hair gel and mirrors, not the girls.
But first, the staff. Assistant head Christine Ibbotson was at school with me, Montgomery Secondary Modern, back in the late '60s, and says: "Everything was yuk apart from the pud and custard." She won't touch semolina to this day.
She also remembers the postwar motivational methods deployed by staff.
"Eat everything on your plate or you're dead". Fellow staff fared little better. One recalls standing on a seat and shouting (of the chicken supreme) "I'm not eating this, it looks like vomit." He was sent home.
Another remembers: "No choice whatsoever but Thursdays meant pink custard with inch thick skin and glutinous globules of luminous pink, strawberry smelling goo! Wonderful, tooth-rotting, calorific comfort food..."
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Sunday 27 May 2012
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