Just Desserts
Last night I had roast pork for dinner, followed by trifle. Not exactly a world-changing event, but to have a real home-made dessert is a rarity these days, even in the Bison household. For the most part we make do with fruit, cookies, ice cream or yoghurts, none of which require any preparation.
It wasn't that way when I was growing up. I remember just about every main meal each day included a dessert, which we would call a pudding. Incidentally, the main meal would be served in the evening. When I was small we had "breakfast, dinner and tea" so the main meal was tea. As I got older we started having "breakfast, lunch and dinner" where dinner was the evening meal. I thought this might be a sign of moving to a higher social class, but it might just have been that when I was young we had our main meal at school during the day, and these were known as "school dinners".
Puddings at home were usually dense, high calorie events, often involving lots of flour, sugar and fat. Steamed syrup puddings, baked apple cakes, apple pies and jam roly poly. We also had home-made sponge cakes, trifle, fruit salad and custard. In spite of this, all of us were thin children, a result of something called "exercise" which is apparently unknown among the lardy, Game Boy playing couch vegetables of today.
School dinners opened up a new world of possibilities, both good and bad. On the good side was Gypsy Tart, which was a sugar/caramel mixture on a pastry base, about a million calories per slice, which tasted - well - perfect. I have never tasted anything like it since, and would kill for the recipe even now. This was balanced out by rice pudding, which looked and smelled like someone had vomited in your bowl. This being school, you didn't have the option of not eating your meal. I remember the first time I encountered rice pudding - I lined up and got my bowl, sat down and spooned some into my mouth. It had the texture and feeling of swallowing back sick, and I consequently ate no more. School dinners were a lottery - you never knew what was coming. Usually it was bland and tolerable but occasionally it would be something vile and inedible. Like rice pudding. Or semolina pudding, which was like sick, but with smaller lumps. Sick in a blender, perhaps. When I got older they started pasting the week's menu on the wall outside the canteen - this meant you could see rice pudding coming, and the dread would build over days.
Consumption of crap food was enforced by "dinner ladies" who would make you sit at your seat all through the lunch break if they thought you hadn't eaten enough of whatever shite they were serving that day. I remember one kindly old dinner lady releasing me from the grip of cold rice pudding so I could play outside in the sun. However, the head dinner lady was an old bag called Mrs. Hayward, with a wrinkled face and a mouth like a cat's arsehole, corroded with bitterness. She it was who had condemned me to sit with my rice pudding all dinner time. Once she sent me back to the table and I turned and stuck my tongue out at her (I was very small - we hadn't learned to flip people off or instruct them to suck our balls then). She made me stand in the corridor until the headmistress came along. When she did, I pretended I had only been licking my lips, and was sent out to play. Mrs. Hayward got to hear of it and came to accuse me of being a little liar. This was true - but only because she was a vile old bitch.
Even when pudding looked good, cruel tricks could be played. There was a certain sponge cake which had chocolate chips in it - this was second only to gypsy tart in the pudding rankings. However, it was indistinguishable from a sponge cake which had no sugar, and contained dead-fly currants instead of chocolate. You could be all ready for sponge cake chocolate delight and instead find yourself with a mouth full of dry, tasteless, currant-bearing wadding. I used to wonder why the school couldn't make good puddings every day - why did we have to eat the bad stuff? Was this some attempt to build character in us by forcing us to endure pudding hardship? Some peculiarly British concept that too much actual pleasure was bad for you? "They like gypsy tart so we'd better balance that out with something unpleasant. Let's do semolina pudding with apricot sauce, and make the little bastards eat it all!"
Now that kids can choose their own meals they are spared the school dinner assault course of lumpy mashed potato, gristly old meat, dried vegetables, warm beetroot, putrid fish and, of course, rice pudding. By the same token, they never know the pure joy of discovering that not only is it gypsy tart for pudding today, but you're getting the corner piece. For a little more excitement in your life, put down the Game Boy and line up for school dinners.
Copyright 2007 Edward Bison
It wasn't that way when I was growing up. I remember just about every main meal each day included a dessert, which we would call a pudding. Incidentally, the main meal would be served in the evening. When I was small we had "breakfast, dinner and tea" so the main meal was tea. As I got older we started having "breakfast, lunch and dinner" where dinner was the evening meal. I thought this might be a sign of moving to a higher social class, but it might just have been that when I was young we had our main meal at school during the day, and these were known as "school dinners".
Puddings at home were usually dense, high calorie events, often involving lots of flour, sugar and fat. Steamed syrup puddings, baked apple cakes, apple pies and jam roly poly. We also had home-made sponge cakes, trifle, fruit salad and custard. In spite of this, all of us were thin children, a result of something called "exercise" which is apparently unknown among the lardy, Game Boy playing couch vegetables of today.
School dinners opened up a new world of possibilities, both good and bad. On the good side was Gypsy Tart, which was a sugar/caramel mixture on a pastry base, about a million calories per slice, which tasted - well - perfect. I have never tasted anything like it since, and would kill for the recipe even now. This was balanced out by rice pudding, which looked and smelled like someone had vomited in your bowl. This being school, you didn't have the option of not eating your meal. I remember the first time I encountered rice pudding - I lined up and got my bowl, sat down and spooned some into my mouth. It had the texture and feeling of swallowing back sick, and I consequently ate no more. School dinners were a lottery - you never knew what was coming. Usually it was bland and tolerable but occasionally it would be something vile and inedible. Like rice pudding. Or semolina pudding, which was like sick, but with smaller lumps. Sick in a blender, perhaps. When I got older they started pasting the week's menu on the wall outside the canteen - this meant you could see rice pudding coming, and the dread would build over days.
Consumption of crap food was enforced by "dinner ladies" who would make you sit at your seat all through the lunch break if they thought you hadn't eaten enough of whatever shite they were serving that day. I remember one kindly old dinner lady releasing me from the grip of cold rice pudding so I could play outside in the sun. However, the head dinner lady was an old bag called Mrs. Hayward, with a wrinkled face and a mouth like a cat's arsehole, corroded with bitterness. She it was who had condemned me to sit with my rice pudding all dinner time. Once she sent me back to the table and I turned and stuck my tongue out at her (I was very small - we hadn't learned to flip people off or instruct them to suck our balls then). She made me stand in the corridor until the headmistress came along. When she did, I pretended I had only been licking my lips, and was sent out to play. Mrs. Hayward got to hear of it and came to accuse me of being a little liar. This was true - but only because she was a vile old bitch.
Even when pudding looked good, cruel tricks could be played. There was a certain sponge cake which had chocolate chips in it - this was second only to gypsy tart in the pudding rankings. However, it was indistinguishable from a sponge cake which had no sugar, and contained dead-fly currants instead of chocolate. You could be all ready for sponge cake chocolate delight and instead find yourself with a mouth full of dry, tasteless, currant-bearing wadding. I used to wonder why the school couldn't make good puddings every day - why did we have to eat the bad stuff? Was this some attempt to build character in us by forcing us to endure pudding hardship? Some peculiarly British concept that too much actual pleasure was bad for you? "They like gypsy tart so we'd better balance that out with something unpleasant. Let's do semolina pudding with apricot sauce, and make the little bastards eat it all!"
Now that kids can choose their own meals they are spared the school dinner assault course of lumpy mashed potato, gristly old meat, dried vegetables, warm beetroot, putrid fish and, of course, rice pudding. By the same token, they never know the pure joy of discovering that not only is it gypsy tart for pudding today, but you're getting the corner piece. For a little more excitement in your life, put down the Game Boy and line up for school dinners.
Copyright 2007 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
7:58 AM
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