News reaches us today that Michael Gove is looking to purge the school system (only the actual schools, though, not his free schools or the academies) of greasy, fatty foods, limiting deep-fried nonsense to only two servings per week. Which sounds like a good idea and everything. But has also made us nostalgic for some of the gross-yet-beautiful food items we used to look forward to back in the day. And the best techniques for eating them.
Sponge cake with icing and hundreds and thousands
The enjoyment of this sweet, fluffy cake was all about the white-yet-see-through icing, the PVA-y liquid atop the sponge. People would re-arrange themselves in the lunch queue so that they would be given the corner bit, where the most icing would drizzle down the sides. If you were really decadant – and you were – you’d ask for enough custard to float the cake. The only thing better than this? A bakewell tart.
Lamb cutlets
More breaded bits than actual lamb, the gravy would ever-so-slowly soak into the crumbs, slowly tenderising the tough lamb inside. There is no other place on earth that you would ever get this sort of treat, and that’s why it is the pinnacle of school food. The same goes for the oven-cooked ‘fried’ fish that would always be in the exact same shape, just at varying degrees of cooked.
Potato smileys/potato waffles
We’re happy to lump these together because they had the same motives, objectives and achievments: to be the effective compliment to baked beans, yet to never aim above the simple, yet important task of being fried mashed potatoes.
Potato croquettes
These little cylinders of potato substitute (as, the more we think about it, all these ‘potato’-based foodstuffs must have been) were just the right consistency to mop up gravy, and the satisfying crunch as you cut through them is something we miss to this day.
Turkey dinosaurs
This animalistic treat (wait, are dinosaurs even an animal? Jury’s still out, but hey, at least turkeys are) was perfectly accompanied by ketchup and that holy trinity of vegetable mixes: carrot squares, peas and sweetcorn. We might have to be controversial, though, and say that turkey drummers were a preferable alternative, as with the former, every now and then you’d be presented with the horrifying sight of a dinosaur’s burnt off limb.
Turkey Twizzlers
As much as we might love Jamie Oliver’s recipes and forgive him the extra 15 minutes and expensive Magimix it always takes to make his ‘15 minute’ meals, we’ll never forget his vendetta against Turkey Twizzlers. Fused turkey (and pork), mechanically formed into the shape of pig's tail, dusted with some sort of tomato powder, simultaneously crunchy and soggy; all so perfect, yet sadly castigated.
Square jelly
When you’re cooking for hundreds of snotty children, there’s no time for moulds. So jelly was square. That was, until you would half-swallow a big spoonful, strain it through the gaps in your teeth a few times and then spit it back out onto your spoon, giggling then calling it ‘medicine’. We all did that, right?
Thick-pastried pie
Soggy, fraying, crispy, crunchy, flakey and tough all at the same time, the crust of a massive beef pie was only perfected by the mayonnaise-thick gravy that would accompany it.
The hash brown hotdog
A rare yet memorable thing, this was a run-of-the-mill frankfurter inside a semi-hollow cylindrical hash brown. Like a sausage roll but with potato and onion instead of pastry.
Wrinkly sausages
The casing around the sausage would tighten up, leading to a sort of wrinkle around the beige-grey cylinders. The sausage inside would contain loads of tiny little bubbles. Of what, we don't know. Oh, and the ‘sausage’ inside a sausage roll was always the texture of paste.
Mini carrots
Tiny, firm batons of carrot, you’d be tempted to eat the entire thing, but then get a horrible taste as you chomped on that hard, bitter green bit at the end. Dinky, yet disgusting.
Jacket potatoes
Seen as the slightly lesser alternative to the main meal, they’d be topped with a special cheese that would never, ever, ever melt, unless faced with scalding hot baked beans. Looking back on it, if we’d known then what we knew now – that jacket potatoes take ages to make, we probably would have snapped them up a bit more back then. That said, the brown, bitter jacket on the potato is nothing on a home-made one, right?
Choc Ices
Squeezing the end of the wrapper until it all cracked, you could push the wrapper inside out and onto your tongue and then eat it off of that. A struggle, but a tasty struggle.
Sadly, though, so many of these will be consigned to history, just like the fabled spam fritter. Farwell, stodgy muck. It’s probably for the best.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.