Good Old Fashioned School Dinners: The Good, the Bad and the Spotted Dick

by Becky Thorn

Good Old Fashioned School Dinners, will transport you back to those halcyon days of school canteens, evoking the smells, flavours, tastes and textures, of beef cobbler, spam fritters, chocolate concrete and jam roly-poly. If you remember lusting after a Chopper, a Space Hopper or even The Milky Bar Kid, then chances are you’ll also have had school dinners like this. Steaming pies, sloppy mash and puddings drowning in custard evoke a plethora of memories, some good, others frankly awful – depending on what you had served up when you reached the front of the lunch queue. Good Old Fashioned School Dinners is replete with recipes to make over fifty dishes, including both traditional favourites and meals that were strictly school-canteen-only. They are all tried and tested, prised from the apron pockets of school cooks or otherwise recreated as authentically as possible. Cook yourself back to a golden age when tank tops were cool and lapels were so wide you could catch them on door frames. Fill your kitchen with glorious smells and fill the stomachs of loved ones with custard – you could even round up a few friends and have a ‘back-to-school’ dinner party.

Genres: Cooking

112 pages, Hardcover

First published August 29, 2013

Reviews

[DelAnne Frazee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Title: Good Old Fashion School Dinners: The Good, The Bad And The Spotted Dick
Author: Becky Thorn
Publisher: Anova Books/ Portico
Published: 8-29-2013
Pages: 130
E-Book ASIN: B00EW27IXY
ISBN-10: 1907554955
ISBN-13: 978-1907554957


Originally Published in 2007, Good Old Fashion School Dinners has been republished in an e-book format. Although this is filled with recipes from the UK, of which I have just begun to learn from some of my Facebook friends I so wanted to review it because it made me think of my own school days and the meals that were served. When in Grade School we always wondered why whenever they mowed the lawn there was spinach served the next day? What was that meat they served every Friday, not to mention who was brave enough to eat it?

Out side of those questions and the fact that the dishes are best known in the UK by the names given, some were often served here by a different name. Now the Macaroni Cheese, Chicken Pie, Meatballs, Pineapple Upside-down Cake, Rice or Tapioca Pudding and Apple Pie are pretty much universal, the others might seem a bit odd to some. Let me assure you they are tasty all the same. I first served my family Toad in the whole a few months back and my family enjoyed it so much I began asking for other recipes that my friends outside the United States grew up on. The Spam Fritters were next and went over rather well. I must admit the Treacle Tart, Cottage Pie and the Sausage Plait were better received. I went on to try the Liver and Bacon using Calf's Liver and found it was delicious. As was the Cornflake Tart. I look forward to trying even more of these unusual recipes.

If you are not from the UK or familiar with the metric measurements it is easy to get a hold of a conversion chart. Luckily as I said have many friends who send recipes that need to be converted and have gotten to where I can automatically do it without having to look it up every time. The recipes will take you back through the years to your childhood so enjoy, but be sure not to miss the second bell and be lat to class.

[Nick Turner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Delicious traditional British boarding-school style recipes e.g. spotted dick, toad-in-the-hole with a nod to modern mores (butter or margarine). I read an advance review copy of a new e-book edition.
This isn't a first cook book, the reader should be familiar with baking, boiling and frying. Some techniques are explained briefly e.g. baking blind. Some dishes require refrigeration. There are references (including advocacy) to wine drinking in the kitchen. Dishes serve four.
Ingredients lists assume knowledge of common abbreviations. Quantity measures are metric and intuitive (teaspoon, tablespoon). Make sure to read the recipe and ingredients list before starting cooking. Watch out for jokey references to overcooked school dinners at the end of recipes.

There aren't photographs of the dishes but the text is decorated with cooking-themed colour clip art; food, utensils, pots.
Many recipes include a tip to big them up for special occasions or a random blow out.

A drawback of e-book cook books is that it is difficult to fit an ingredients list, or a recipe, on an e-reader's small screen at a comfortable size for reading. Normally you could reduce the typeface size to fit more text on screen then hold the e-reader closer to your eyes to read the tiny text, or just change the page when needed, but if you are walking around the kitchen with food on your hands it isn't convenient. Some recipes or ingredient lists would not fit on one page whatever I tried - artful use of page-breaks so content is nicely aligned with the page could help this. There isn't an index so you can't lookup dishes by ingredients.

There are some fun extras to remind you of schooldays - jokes, general knowledge facts and themed quizzes (each with a hypertext link to answers at the end), also a maths test. In the review copy, two answers in the maths test were incorrect (assuming the usual rules of arithmetic). Using a backslash as a division sign is obscure for the audience of cooks. The extras appear to be graphics (text in graphics) which don't work with screenreaders (my Kindle's text-to-speech skipped those pages except for an enigmatic "For the answers click here").

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC via NetGalley

A fun little cookbook themed around English school dinners. Popular culture tends to envision these hot meals as horrifying but the recipes included within suggest tasty, relatively easy dishes to make that will help even the most novice chef produce a hot, filling meal. There are no photos (or there weren't in the ARC version) but the recipes are familiar enough that no images should be needed. School-themed jokes and trivia are intermixed between recipes.

[Debbie Southwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good home cooking style recipes such as hotpot, shepherds pie and spam fritters along with old school pudding favourites such as chocolate sponge and custard and butterscotch tart. Has some jokes and quizzes also included which makes it slightly more than just a recipe book.