Pink custard, tapioca, liver and onions: The school dinners we miss the most
Hands up if you remember pink custard. Mashed potato served with an ice-cream scoop? Vast trays of meat pie, chopped into neat square rows with a metal spatula? If you do, you were lucky enough to be a pupil during the halcyon days of school dinners.
All together now: drop the plates in a crash in the dining hall – hooray! In these cold weeks at the beginning of the year, a square of chocolate sponge pudding (with a dollop of lumpy chocolate custard) could be exactly what you need.
There’s certainly something Proustian about reminiscences of semolina and jam, stirred together in a magenta swirl. “The memory of school dinners is probably the most emotional legacy of our time at school,” says Gary McCulloch, the chair of the history of education at UCL. “Even though I’m in my 60s, I will never forget the ‘pig bin’ where we would flick our leftovers, then dash out of the dining hall before anyone could stop us.”
Recollections of the quality of our school dinners may vary.
“I have vivid memories of weeping into a tongue salad,” says Becky of her childhood at a Cornish primary school, where you weren’t allowed out to play until you’d eaten everything. “The worst was rice pudding day, when my poor friend Leanne (who quite liked rice pudding) ate six bowlfuls so our whole table could go out to the playground.”
But for everyone who is still traumatised by the sight of jelly – as David, a barrister in his 50s, confided to The Telegraph last week – there were others who adored their school lunches.
“My primary school meals were amazing – old-fashioned Lancashire dishes such as meat and potato pies with pastry topping, stews, hot pots, sponge desserts and home-made ice cream,” says Kathryn.
Sally recalls: “The food at my primary school was so good, I still dream about it to this day. I loved semolina, tapioca, steamed chocolate pudding and oh! deep-fried doughnuts with hot jam sauce and vanilla custard.”
A lucky few children even enjoyed a fine dining experience: “At our prep school in Nottingham, we had a chef from one of the cruise ships who served canapés to the school children,” says Catherine.
Whether you consumed canapés or cheese pie, there’s a consensus that school dinner standards have fallen since the middle of the 20th century. As a Southampton headteacher last year asked of his school’s contract caterers: “How difficult is it to bake a potato?”
Rationing leads to school dinners for all children
School dinners became mandatory in the UK under the 1944 Education Act. They had been optional since 1906, but parents were mostly required to pay for them, so it was only the wealthier children who benefited. “Because of food rationing, the Government felt they needed to make special provision for all pupils,” says McCulloch.
The classic meal at the time was very limited: meat and two veg. “Quality very much depended on where in the country you lived,” says McCulloch. “Kids in the countryside ate better. People were very suspicious of vegetarians.” Hence, there was no special provision for them, nor children with other dietary needs.
“After the war, the focus was all about the move to a better society,” says McCulloch. “The Government decided that making pupils sit down to lunch – for children to learn middle-class manners and to use a knife and fork – was part of the process of civilisation. It was seen as unpatriotic not to finish your whole meal – an attitude that lasted years after the war and was passed on to the next generation of children.”
Many midlifers will recall the reign of terror of the dinner lady, standing at your shoulder while you force-fed yourself liver and onions. “This is what people tend to remember,” says McCulloch. “The control in the dining room, which lasted all the way through to the Seventies.”
From meat and two veg to fish and chips
Maria Traka is head of food and nutrition at the Quadram Institute in Norfolk, and one of the authors of the paper The nutrition of school dinners through the decades.
“A typical meal in mid-century would be meat hotpot with vegetables and potatoes followed by pudding with custard for dessert,” she says. “Until the 1960s, children would have been provided with water to drink, but from that decade on children were given squash at lunchtimes which brought unnecessary, unhealthy amounts of sugar into their diet.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, technology changed with the introduction of efficient ovens and fridges, as well as more training for staff, leading briefly to improved quality in meals.
But the 1970s saw schools stocking up to serve cheap, frozen food in large quantities for the first time. There was never any choice. A typical meal of the time would be fish and chips, followed by jelly and ice cream as dinners became increasingly processed, high in sugar and low in nutritional value.
Government outsourcing leads to a drop in standards
Many people still recall Margaret Thatcher’s government “milk snatching”, but the Conservative administration’s impact on school meals was far wider. “As the years passed, the Treasury increasingly cut costs,” says McCulloch. “The 1980s saw privatisation and a wide variation in standards as the state was no longer responsible for the quality of school lunches.”
This trend continued well into the Nineties. A 1999 medical survey suggested children during rationing in the 1950s had diets with a higher nutritional value than children in the 1990s.
By this point, children were allowed to bring in packed lunches as an alternative to the hot, cooked meal. “But these were unmonitored by staff and likely to be of poor quality,” says Traka. Soon, the official fare provided by the schools was no better. By the 2000s, canteens were largely serving pizza, fries and chicken nuggets as standard.
“This cost-cutting eventually led to the days of the Turkey Twizzler and Jamie Oliver’s famous campaign,” says McCulloch. “The problems of childhood obesity could no longer be ignored.”
Jamie Oliver gets Turkey Twizzlers taken off the menu
In 2005, Channel 4 aired Jamie’s School Dinners, a four-part series which examined the state of Britain’s school dinners, particularly the poor nutritional value of food served out of the school canteen and how it impacted educational standards.
On the back of the series, over 270,000 people signed a petition calling on the Government to provide better quality meals. In the following years, schools banned the evil Twizzler and fizzy drinks, and added healthier options to the menu.
A Turkey Twizzler would never cross the path of Rose Stokes, 75, one of the UK’s longest-serving dinner ladies. Over her 51 years in the kitchens of two Birmingham primary schools, Stokes has dished up a total of two million meals.
“When I first started in 1974, the meals were very traditional,” says Stokes. “Meat pie, with potatoes and veg, stews and hotpots. The puddings were rhubarb crumble, apple pie and rice pudding. I still love to cook these for my grandchildren.
“We made everything from scratch – I’d start the meat pie by mincing chuck beef, and would bone the fresh fish with my own hands,” she says. “Over the years, more things have come frozen as it’s more cost-effective, but I still make my meat pie and the pastry from scratch.”
What has been her kids’ favourite meal over the decades? “My chicken curry with lots of garlic and herbs,” she says. “No, I can’t give you the recipe: it’s a secret!”
Stokes maintains the main pleasure in the role has been to help her charges try meals they may otherwise not have encountered. “They’ll tell me ‘I don’t like it’ but I leave the spoon in a bowl by the hatch for Reception children to try and they often change their minds,” she says.
Variety is the spice, but could still do better
More than one former pupil spoken to by The Telegraph explained that school dinners were their first experience of British food. “Coming from an Anglo-Indian family, we only really ate Indian food at home, so I found the English food you got at school unbelievably exotic,” says John.
Gabby, who is Jewish, agrees. “This was food I never ate anywhere else. Shepherd’s pie, corned beef hash, fish and chips – I loved it all.”
Pies and chips still make up much of the typical school menu, but according to Stokes, the pupils now have a broader palate. “The children are more sophisticated,” she says. “They like roast dinners and spaghetti bolognese. We also have special theme days, like Chinese New Year, where we decorate the hatch and dress up to serve it.”
There’s also more emphasis on the nutritional guidelines. “Some guidelines were always there, but they are stricter these days, so we use less salt and sugar and we serve a variety of salads,” says Stokes. Indeed, in 2015, new regulations came into effect, stating that every school meal would have to include at least one portion of vegetables or salad and a wide variety of fruit and veg.
The changes also included a limit on the amount of deep-fried food cooked every week and restrictions on fruit juice portions for pupils. Commentators still criticise the current offerings, with a headteacher from the South West recently describing his own school lunches as “very beige” and carbohydrate heavy.
There are also still people who mourn the death of the Turkey Twizzler. In 2018, a petition was set up to bring them back, which has had over 27,000 signatures.
For Stokes, the old favourites still win over the crowd. “One of my signature dishes has always been my old-fashioned ‘concrete cake’ – a cross between a sponge and a biscuit,” she says. “It’s served with custard, but only the standard yellow kind – the pink and chocolate custard went by the wayside at some point.
“When I’m walking around my local Birmingham streets, I take great pleasure in seeing the generations of pupils that I have fed – the parents, their children, even their grandchildren,” says Stokes. “Quite a few of them come up to me in the street and they all tell me how much they loved the chocolate concrete.”
