Gypsy tart is nice. I've never heard about it outside Kent, it's been discussed on here before. I can only manage a little bit of it. I don't remember having it at school as I only had school dinners a few times they were pretty crap. Then my dinner money went on fags so I never knew if they improved.

I went to school in Kent so that might explain it. The only thing I didn't like was the sauce they put on it, it was clear and was too sweet.

Having rice and chicken curry with red pepper. Then for pudding having a caramel and cream slice!

I can remember when we had milk with our school dinners and it was served in jubbly style cartons and we had to wait for the dinner lady to come and have to snip the corner off with her scissors.
What put me off school dinners was having to wait in line
by the table where the first sittings guys had to scrape thier scraps into a large metal bowl and by the time you saw that filled to the brim the thought of then eating anything was enough to make you sick

K x

I used to love school dinners with the exception of the salad. We used to have it occasionally and it consisted of ham, some limp lettuce, grated cheese, grated carrot and a couple of slices of tomato and cucumber. No dressing just half a slice of orange, I always was quite bemused why the slice of orange was there.

We always drank water out of big copper jugs and used to fight over the skin on the custard (even though I didn't like it).

A dinner lady would always check we'd washed our hands before being let into the dinning hall, if you hadn't you were sent off to wash them. I always used to just wet my hands under the tap so it looked like I'd washed them.

Sausage roll, chips, beans, two satchets salad cream and a slice of Manchester tart 39p lol

At primary school our school had no provision for doing dinners so we had to march to the next school and have our dinners there................

It always seemed to be winter...............

Bean pie, chicken curry and rice, ice lollies, sukies, gravy chips with cheese.

Gypsy tart without custard! The best thing about school dinners.

My primary school dinners were old muck - nothing noteworthy. The school didn't have a kitchen, so they were carted in from the neighbouring school two miles away in great crates. I remember recently finding out the budget per head for school dinners, and it was something really shockingly low, akin to prison budgets if not less. We're talking around £1 per child.

My secondary school dinners on the other hand were spectacular. The school catering staff actually won awards for their meals. We had things such as duck with roast potatoes and vegetables, and everything was faultless. I can still hardly believe that they managed it: I enquired into how they did it and found that the chef was really talented with the sourcing of products and budgeting of everything. I fondly recall an anecdote from someone in Senior Management, who told how she was showing some visitors around the school. When she mentioned the duck, they enquired if she was talking about staff meals. When she replied that the duck was for students and staff alike, they looked at her as if she was crazy.

The only thing I refused to eat was Prunes. I tried one, once, have never eaten a prune since

My school used to do the most amazing homemade chocolate sauce to go with ice-cream. I have tried a few times to replicate the recipe at home and I just can't get quite the same taste or consistency.

Our school did brilliant desserts actually - steamed syrup pudding, the aforementioned ice-cream and chocolate sauce, treacle tart, rice pudding and jam, jam roly-poly... all really good! Shame they were no good at the "main course"!!

I can remember Primary School dinners were so bad i would stuff the offending "gruel" into my blazer pockets, this went down well with mother Only highlights were pudding, Caramel shortbread or Eve's pudding etc.

burnt toast & beans
mince pie
massive slice of stinky pizza
pink custard
angel delight
jelly & cream

The puddings were classic:

Sponge topped with white fondant icing + custard

or

Chocolate pudding with white sauce

The best school dinner was Spam Fritter, Beans & Chips. Yum Yum!

I'm remembering Junior School in the 1950s and early 60s............the only main meal i remember is fish on Fridays...it was just a slab of white fish with no batter or sauce, a bit like those cod steaks ....I can't remember what we had on the other days.............

I remember the puddings though.............there was the 'white' puddings, rice, sago, tapioca, semolina, then there was the coloured custards, pink, green, orange............

At Grammar school I just remeber the dinners being generally excellent..............my favourite was something that we called 'haggis' but it wasn't haggis, it was a giant steak pudding, which you get a piece of

Also I remembewr when they introduced a healthy pudding which was a shortbread biscuit and an apple............

The school dinners I had back in the 90s in senior school were mostly poor. Basically, if you didn't like chips you went hungry (or to the local takeaway). Worst of all the chips were horrible soggy, pale, flabby things with a strange taste reminiscent of popcorn.

The dinners in primary school were much better, with much more variety - and their chips were much nicer too!

I seem to remember you could buy a dinner for £1.35, and this was only back in 2005.

Anyhow, from primary school my favourites were things like Gypsy tart, rice pudding and lasagne.

Yes we had turkey twizzlers...mmmm..
The burgers I'm pretty sure were not proper meat as they were like jelly with a beef taste. And on Fridays we would get burger/hot dog and chips with the burger for some reason, served in a paper bag with a smiley red tomato face on the front.

I can't remember the dinners as i didn't eat very much!.Loved the puddings Chocolate sponge with white custard, Giant Melting moments with pink custard and chocolate Brownies being my favourites ....

Primary school 1969-74

Secondary school 1974-82

I was fortunate in 2 things.

1: My Primary School was 2 minutes from home - and during the time I was there my mother didn't work.

2: She had seen what they offered up.

I went home for lunch

Even then I can recall the horrid smell of boiled veg - with cabbage to the fore - and other things that could turn the stomach.

I know from fellow pupils that the food was consistently vile - some would regularly hurl their guts aftewards - many would look unwell. It certainly looked dreadful.

And they had to clear their plates. The on duty teachers might not insist on this but there was a "Supervisor" who would normally check pupil's plates before they left the table. She was a horrid woman (probably from central Europe - might well have driven a Panzer in WW2) with a permanent look on her face like she was drinking vinegar. She would force everyone to totally clear their plates - she even made kids eat what was clearly gristle. On Friends Reunited there were a number of comments on her - none even close to pleasant. Apparently, if you were clever (and maybe lucky as well) you could stick really inedible stuff into your socks and get past her - she would check pockets.

As a consequence I didn't have school dinners at Secondary School either. I was told by a couple of comrades who attended both schools that the Secondary dinners, although far from great, were much better. That school was 10 minutes from school so normally I would go home but sometimes took in a packed lunch - this would have to be eaten in the dinner room, and the smell wasn't all that much better.

When I saw Jamie Oliver offering up superb looking lamb tajine (seeing parents refer to it as 'muck' and 'rubbish' then passing bags of chips through the school fence - or insisteing they 'must' be given turkey twizzlers made me weep) and simiar for a great price made me wish such an idea existed when I was at school.

But then seeing a dinnerlady who had so little idea how to prepare pasta (yes pasta) that she boiled it back to it's original state suggeted I missed nothing

Other than blanchmage I adored school dinners both at junior school and Comprehensive. College not so much but by then I was more into skiving off and hitting the pubs.
The homemade pizza at secondary school was lush and their mac and cheese and lasagne was also really nice.

At my first primary school the dinners were delivered from a central kitchen miles away and heated up on the premises so they were not good, especially the watery reconstituted dried mashed potatoes, which literally melted in your mouth and on your fork! Most of my lunchtimes were spent in the dining room, being told that if I didn't finish my main course I couldn't have a pudding (great result, as I hated the puddings as well, including the blancmange, semolina and pink custard!).

When we moved house I went to another primary school where the cooking was done on the premises and was wonderful! I especially remember porcupine meatballs (made with rice so that the bits of rice stuck out from the meatball like a porcupine's spikes - allegedly!). The only negative thing I remember from those school dinners was when I loaded about five "chips" on my fork, only to discover that they were actually parsnips when I ate them! I have never been able to eat parsnips again to this day! Bleurgh!

This. This post is great, only i managed to sneak by the supervisor bitch, with my pockets full of rubbery liver n' onions. I also had a teacher in primary school who would leave the extra milk cartons that our class had on a warm, window-sill and at the end of the day make a few unfortunates drink them To this day i can't drink a glass of milk, on cereal, in tea etc its fine, but not "straight". Evil woman

Beef mince on fried bread with a sprig of parsley on top.