School Dinner Recipes: Classic School Dinner Recipes from the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's

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Step One: Add the flour, sugar and cocoa powder into a bowl and mix together until uniform in colour. This is a really cheap recipe to make and uses only 4 ingredients. In fact, you've probably got them in already. You will need plain flour, granulated sugar, melted butter and cocoa powder. If you are a member of the lower classes or live outside London and the south-east, the midday meal is called dinner and is often the main meal of the day. But for the upper classes and metropolitans, the midday meal is called lunch. In the evening, the lower classes and northerners come home from work, school or shopping and sit down to another fairly substantial meal called tea at about 6pm. The pink custard you buy in the tins is not the same as the one we had at school. School pink custard was actually made with pink blancmange. You might think that's weird because blancmange sets in the fridge, but actually so does custard when you think about it!

In the summer there might be ham salad, consisting of a slice of ham, round lettuce, cucumber and half a tomato, served with boiled potatoes. If you lived within walking distance of your school, and your mother or a neighbour was willing to make you lunch, you could go home rather than stay school dinners, returning in time for afternoon lessons.With wars and rations in place, food shortages greatly affected school dinners. With most meals coming out of a can, foods such as spam, peas, potatoes and rice pudding were reoccurring dishes in the canteen.

In fact, if the kitchen had cooked too much food, there would be queues of Oliver Twist-style waifs demanding “seconds” - especially if that most coveted of foodstuffs was on the menu - chips. Request a Recipe! If you're after a partially forgotten classic, give us a clue and we'll try and find it for you! Chocolate Concrete was a delicious school dinner pudding popular in the 70s and 80s. This nostalgic and retro dessert consists of thin and crunchy chocolate shortbread that is sprinkled with sugar and served with a big dollop of pink, chocolate or mint custard.Me nan has it in sandwiches with a cup of tea.’ Spam was a London wartime favourite when food was scarce. I must ask for more stories when we have sit down lunch in my cookery room. If it's a good old-fashioned recipe you're looking for, then you've come to the right place. This is the type of pudding that threatens to fly off the table when you jab a fork into it! This is lovely eaten cold or at room temperature in the garden on a sunny evening. Please feel free to ignore the previous serving suggestion of tinned toms and mash. I prefer a watercress salad and glass of cold white wine, and so may you! Jam roly-poly Amy's Tip: watch the recipe video above so you can see the process from start to finish, particularly what the mixture looks like when it's breadcrumbs and how to press it into the tin. Ministers have announced that from next January, school meals in England will have to include at least one portion of vegetables a day - and no more than two portions of fried food each week.

Amy's tip: Scroll down to the custard headings for variations and the recipe for mint custard. Chocolate Crunch From a nutritional standpoint, school lunches today have come leaps and bounds thanks to Jamie Oliver’s campaigning. However, there's no harm in getting nostalgic about the retro and not-so-healthy school foods such as square pizza slices, chocolate concrete with pink custard, jam roly-polys and turkey dinosaurs that are ingrained so deep in our childhood memories.The Scottish Government have already announced that from August 2010 all five to seven year-olds will have school dinners for free, following a successful pilot scheme which saw more children opting for dinners and becoming willing to try unfamiliar healthy foods. Step Four: Sprinkle the top of the mixture with a tablespoon of cold water. Bake for 18 mins. When you take it out of the oven sprinkle over 2 teaspoons of sugar and leave it to cool. For a steamed or baked syrup sponge roll substitute the jam for the same quantity of golden syrup. Into the golden syrup add a couple of tablespoons of fresh white breadcrumbs. This helps the syrup to stay put in the roll and not escape all over the baking tray when heated. Pink custard But the main reason for avoiding school dinners is the choice. Battered Spam fritters appear on the menu at least once a week, served with chips and globby tinned spaghetti. I’ve watched the cook open the oblong Spam can, give it a thump and a pink solid lump drops onto the chopping board. She cuts it into slices, dips each piece in batter then deep fries them until crisp, just before the queues speed in.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power, free school dinners came to an end for thousands of families across the UK, leading to a drastic drop in the quality and nutritional value of lunches. This meant that dinners consisted of cheaper options such as potato smiley faces, chocolate cake and custard-filled desserts, with little greenery on their plates. Mix together the cornflour and sugar, add some of the milk a tablespoon at a time until a paste has formed. Warm the remaining milk in a saucepan and add the paste. Bring to the boil, continuously stirring. But in most working households this has been replaced with less elaborate arrangements now called midday dinner/lunch.’ The balance is truly present during this era; vegetables, potatoes and plenty of protein for a growing child," reports nutritionist Xander Pipe on 40s school meals.But very tasty and filling stodge is was too, fuelling us for lessons and endless football in the school yard at play-times, dinner-times - and basically at any opportunity. Colin Spencer author of British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, referring to meal-time terminology says in an interview Our school dinners are dismal, rushed affairs in a bleak dining room where students queue at the serving hatch to have food plopped onto faded plastic plates. Chips and beans are always on the menu and students smother their food in tomato ketchup, wolf it down and rush out to meet their mates.