Cornflake tart. Spam fritters. Green custard. Turkey twizzlers. Chocolate concrete. These are some of the dishes that instantly transport you to the school lunch hall – and inspire either pure nostalgia or horror.
Over the past five years co-hosting Table Talk, The Spectator’s food and drink podcast, I have spoken to people from all walks of life – politicians, chefs, writers, campaigners, entrepreneurs and artists – and they all have unique relationships with food.
But school food defies all reason. It presents a binary, true love or hate. Some look back with delight, seeking out spotted dicks and instant mash for ever more, though none tastes as good as the dishes they had at school in Kettering in 1989. Others can barely look at a rice pudding without gagging.
There’s something powerful about school dinners: they stay with us. And often they play a role in defining how we think of the institution we attended, and of food itself.
Many a book captures this power. The endlessly replenishing wish-fulfilment feasts that fill the dining hall of Hogwarts, the ritualistic taking of kaffee und kuchen at Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s chalet school series, and the punishingly bad and scant porridge ‘which looked like diluted pincushions without the covers’ at Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall. Such descriptions tell us far more about the experience of being at the schools than pages of prose could.
But love them or loathe them, there’s a certain pride in those unusual dishes we had to endure. Like weird house names and the humiliation of cross country in public places, the food we survived at school forms an unbreakable bond. And the weirder the school dishes were, the more iconic.
Lara, who attended Westbourne House in the 1990s, tells me of a school-invented pudding called ‘Swedish Apricot’, a slab pie with an apricot compote base, a layer of whipped cream, and a cornflake and golden syrup top. A regular feature on the menu, it was a firm favourite. ‘It seemed so sophisticated,’ she recalls wistfully. Swedish Apricot has survived, still a staple of the current Westbourne experience; more than 25 years later, a recipe for the pudding appeared in the school magazine.
Lara’s was not the only school to make the most of cornflakes. Dora, who was at St Mary’s School Ascot, recounts a birthday treat that parents could pay for (how formal!): a traybake made up with the odds and sods from the breakfast buffet, a fondly remembered cereal hotchpotch.
It would be hard to get away with many of those esoteric school delicacies today. Manchester’s Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, who grew up in Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside, told me about a particularly popular lunchtime choice at his school, known among pupils as an ‘icy dinner’. An ice-cream van was allowed on to school premises in the middle of the day, and the icy dinner connoisseur would enjoy an oyster ice cream, a 99, and another ice cream boasting fan wafers.
Kirsty, who attended Knowles Hill School in Newton Abbot in Devon, mistily recalls her school serving deep-fried jam sandwiches, made with ‘cheap white bread, battered and covered in sugar, like extremely wrong doughnuts. They were amazing’. Of course they were, how could anything possibly compete?
Naturally, the older the school, the greater the possibility for traditions, and Hugo’s memories of school food at Eton in the early 2000s are deliciously in keeping with the school’s reputation. He remembers the 1940s-style pots of fish and meat paste that were always served with toast at chambers (the school’s mid-morning break) despite being entirely untouched. In the final year, certain students were invited to take part in ‘a champagne breakfast’ – a full English served with champagne – which took place at the normal boarding-school breakfast time of 7.30 a.m. and was followed up with a full day of lessons, which perhaps took the shine off it a little.
I am disappointed to find few tales of Eton mess being served at every meal, boys bathing in whipped cream and strawberries, lobbing broken meringues across classrooms. Most Old Etonians I speak to have no recollection whatsoever of it during their time there. Max does remember it being a mainstay from his school days, where presumably in a bid not to be ostentatiously self-referential, it was known as ‘strawberry mess’. He recalls the pudding making a regular appearance at the annual 4 June picnic (which, incidentally, does not take place on 4 June). But rather than being served by the school, Max remembers Eton mess as a dish brought from home by parents attending the picnic. This, he tells me, accounts for the deconstructed nature of the eponymous pud – ‘avoiding the absolute faff of making and transporting a pavlova intact down the M4’.
Certain Eton students were invited to ‘a champagne breakfast’, a full English served with champagne
Of course, boarding schools present many more opportunities for the oddities of adolescent eating. Hugo remembers, more keenly than the fish paste or champagne breakfasts, the Dolmio sauces and ‘extraordinary’ amount of spaghetti and Pot Noodles that dominated his boarding school days. ‘I once had four packets in a day,’ he says. ‘That really stayed with me.’ It’s hard not to be reminded of the transactional weight that such instant noodles and packet soups hold in prisons.
Such is the power of food – especially where the consumers have very little power elsewhere – that even seemingly everyday foodstuffs can take on disproportionate weight. When I speak to an Old Radleian, he speaks rhapsodically of an unassuming-sounding chicken sandwich, which I mentally dismiss as generic school canteen fodder. But lo, it turns out the boys of Radley feel differently: I stumbled upon ‘The history of Radley in 100 objects’, an online archive of things that sum up life at Radley College, and no. 11 is a – sorry, the – chicken roll. Described as ‘one of the great mysteries of Radley’, it shows the importance that everyday foodstuffs held to a bunch of kids who were at the mercy of grown-ups and time-tables, tracing its ‘iconic’ status back to written records from at least 1999.
Some schools are alive to the power of the food that they serve, and occasionally use it to make wider points to their pupils. Angus, who attended Westminster Under School, recalls an annual event where pupils would draw ballots to determine how they would eat for the day. ‘Rich man, poor man’ meant that one in ten of the students would eat like a rich man (‘a chicken pie, perhaps’), while the other nine were on short rations.
Though this was presumably meant to instil a sense of moral responsibility and a taste of injustice in the students, it didn’t always have the impact it should: to schoolboys, the bread and butter afforded to the poor men was more delectable than the fancier fare. Once the meal was over, the rich men were mercilessly chased by the poor, in Les Misérables style. Angus suspects the scheme no longer operates.
Things are different today. A combination of big contract companies that manage the dining of a whole bunch of schools, and the most bougie establishments boasting private chefs and nutritionists among their staff to cater to the demands of pupils and parents, mean that the days of idiosyncratic dishes that become the stuff of legend are over. Homogeneity reigns. Will this generation grow up with equally fond memories of authentically made tagine or gut-health-balanced acai bowls? Can Swedish Apricot survive? We can only hope so.
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