Blast from the past - school dinners

The memory of school dinner is a hard one to swallow, that uninspiring, unappetising repast, which punctuated our days with beef casserole, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Pedigree Chum, vegetables boiled to within an inch of their lives and ice cream scoops of grey, lumpy mash.

Delights such as boiled cabbage that smelt like a navvy’s socks, watery turnip, peas so hard they could inflict puncture wounds, spam fritters (what were they?), liver and onions (no words), undercooked and lardy chips, were served up in a gym hall scented with the aroma of well-worn gutties, ancient PE equipment and the sweat of little people who had just previously forward rolled and cartwheeled on big smelly mats.

All meals were washed down with lukewarm water dispensed into metallic beakers from a metallic jug by a big P7 or a harried, hair-netted dinner lady.

But the salvation of the school dinner experience was dessert. School puddings were the antidote to the gut-churning main event. From the perfect cuboid of ice cream served on a Friday, topped with chocolate sauce, to steamed sponge and custard, desserts were divine. I even loved tapioca, the soggy pudding of chewy pearls, referred to by children just about everywhere as ‘frogspawn’, and semolina and stewed prunes. Yum.

Blancmange - its dictionary description – “sweet opaque gelatinous dessert made with flavoured cornflour and milk” – hardly describes the joy of this pudding. I loved it.

Sponge came in various incarnations. My favourite was the one with jam and coconut sprinkles, fluffy, sweet, heavenly. Doused in custard it was scrumptious.

We had pink custard with the skin on top, ginger sponge with white custard, swiss roll and custard, a cornflake cake thing, the crumble cousins, apple and rhubarb, an ultra-sweet confection of caramel cake atop a biscuit base (basically condensed milk) and a sponge with apple on the bottom.

On rare treat days, there was Arctic Roll, the naff pudding of claggy swiss roll, ice cream and ‘red’ jam, which is now the laughing stock of the culinary world. But after a plate of beans and frazzled sausages, it was ambrosia.