School Dinners We All Remember

Everybody has a school dinner they still think about, and it's usually a pudding.

Here's the whole thing, roughly by era, including the bits nobody enjoyed.

The puddings, which is what you actually remember

• Pink custard, poured over sponge, and still the single most-cited school dinner memory in Britain.
• Chocolate concrete - a hard chocolate slab, cut in squares, served with mint custard. People have spent decades trying to recreate it.
• Semolina with a blob of jam in the middle, which divided the country absolutely.
• Tapioca, universally known as frogspawn.
• Manchester tart, jam roly-poly, spotted dick and treacle sponge.
• Arctic roll, cornflake tart, and gypsy tart in Kent where it is a genuine local institution.
• Rice pudding with the skin on, and the argument about whether the skin was the best part.

The main courses

• Spam fritters, battered and fried, a staple well into the eighties.
• Turkey twizzlers, which became famous nationally in 2005 when Jamie Oliver's campaign put school food on the front pages.
• Toad in the hole, shepherd's pie, corned beef hash and liver and onions.
• Fish on a Friday, with parsley sauce whether you wanted it or not.
• Mashed potato with lumps, and the powdered version that had none.
• Cabbage boiled to translucency and served regardless.
• Chips on a Wednesday, or whichever day your school did them, and everyone knew which day it was.

The system

• Dinner tickets, dinner money in an envelope on a Monday, and the shame attached to free school meals in a lot of schools.
• The hatch, the trays, and the compartments that stopped the custard reaching the gravy - usually.
• Dinner ladies who stood over you until you finished. This was normal and is now, rightly, not.
• Sitting with your class at a long table with a monitor at the head serving.
• Grace before eating in a lot of schools.
• Third of a pint of milk in the morning, in crates, warm by the time you got it - free for younger children until the policy was cut in 1971.
• Packed lunch as the alternative: crisps, a Penguin, a Sunny Delight or a Capri-Sun by the nineties.

How it changed

• Nutritional standards for school meals were largely abolished in 1980 and the service was opened up to competitive tendering, which pushed costs and quality down.
• Jamie Oliver's 2005 series put the subject on the national agenda and led directly to new standards and more funding.
• Turkey twizzlers were withdrawn in the wake of it, and returned years later in a reformulated version.
• Universal infant free school meals were introduced in England in 2014 for the first three years of primary.
• Modern school food is, by almost every measure, better than what most people on this page remember eating.

Shop cards

How to write it so it lands

• Pink custard beats every other answer combined.
• Chocolate concrete recipes are real and widely shared.
• School food today is genuinely better than what's on this page.

Where to shop next

• Sweets that disappeared
• Toys of the 80s and 90s
• Christmas presents every child got
• Computers and consoles we grew up with
• Phones before mobiles
• Dial-up, MSN and MySpace
• Cassette tapes and taping the charts
• Video shops and late fees
• The Argos catalogue and the wishbook
• School stuff we all had
• Cars, caravans and the British seaside
• Things kids today will never understand
• Out until the streetlights came on
• What childhood cost then vs now
• Sweets quiz
• Guess the year quiz
• Growing up in the 80s and 90s
• Free feel good tools
• Shop cards
• Planning the party? Birthday party ideas
• How to make a balloon arch
• Photo booth prop ideas
• Birthday cards for kids
• All guides

Frequently asked questions

What was pink custard made with?

Ordinary custard coloured pink, often flavoured with a little strawberry. It's the most-remembered school dinner in Britain by a distance, and several companies now sell a version for exactly that reason.

What was chocolate concrete?

A dense, hard-baked chocolate shortbread slab cut into squares and served with mint custard. It's a genuine school-kitchen recipe and versions of it circulate widely.

Why did turkey twizzlers get banned?

They weren't banned by name. Jamie Oliver's 2005 campaign led to new nutritional standards for school meals in England, and the product was withdrawn. A reformulated version returned years later.

Why did children get free milk at school?

Free school milk was provided to improve child nutrition after the war. It was withdrawn for older primary children in 1971, a decision that attracted considerable public anger at the time.