Bread
Pudding And School Dinners
There is a small café in Hunsbury Park,
Northampton, which currently produces the world’s finest bread pudding. This
delicious product is worth travelling from all round the world to ignite your
gastric juices.
Just one Hunsbury Park Northampton café but there
are 2,050 shops in the Greg’s Bakers chain which all see the second best bread
pudding of the twenty-first century.
Historically my Nan’s bred pudding was the best
ever to emerge from a gas oven. Better even than Hunsbury and Greggs. My Nan’s
bread pudding was even eaten by King George V. I tell the story
in my book The Bridge House. I explain how King George every week sent a
uniformed footman from Buckingham Palace to Kingstanding in Birmingham to
collect his week’s supply of bread pudding. Some people think Kingstanding
takes its name from the Civil War where King Charles I reviewed his troops. No,
that is just a legend. The truth is the name comes from George V’s footman standing waiting for my
Nan to take the bread pudding out of the oven.
True ? Note
please how I have typed the word story in the above paragraph – story.
Story means fiction, something from a writer’s imagination. My Nan was real
enough and her bread pudding was the finest in the land but the reign of King
George never did reach fulfilment as His Royal Highness did not eat even a tiny
morsel of my Nan’s bread pudding.
Kingstanding, my Nan’s home and home to the world’s
finest bread pudding. Here’s a thought, if King Charles I had nipped down to
my Nan before reviewing his troops for a bite of bread pudding perhaps he would
have won the civil war so enabling Oliver Cromwell to have his head cut off
instead of committing regicide !
What is bread pudding ? It may have been able to set light to a royal
palate but it is essentially a
working-class dish using up stale bread rather than let it go mouldy. To make a
bake of bread pudding you will need: 8 ounces of stale bread soaked in water or
milk for half an hour. (Foreigners are not sophisticated to enjoy bread pudding
so measurements are given in proper British format. After all we won The Battle
of Waterloo and have kicked the European Union into touch. On then with proper
imperial quantities.)
To replicate the star quality of my Nan you will
also need: 2 ounces of caster sugar, 1 level teaspoon of mixed spice, 6 ounces
of mixed fruit, 3 ounces of melted butter, 1 beaten egg. 2 tablespoons of milk
and some extra sugar to scatter over the top of the pudding when it comes out
of the oven.
It is not difficult to find a recipe for bread
pudding on-line but none tell you how t o inject the magic touch my Nan did.
As a kid and as a teenager my Nan would give me a
very generous slice of bread pudding each time I visited her. Swinging out of
the sixties ever so briefly and into the disco seventies when I was away at
college training to be a teacher, my Nan would send me off at the start of each term with a tin of bread
pudding.
My Nan left us in 1984, aged 94, since when bread
pudding has never been quite the same. When I have finished writing this
chapter I am going to have a go myself at a recipe. If I come anywhere near to Nan’s
achievement perhaps, just perhaps I will send His Royal Highness Prince Charles
a slice. Charlie, I don’t think bread pudding will be quite your Mum’s thing
but I am guessing you will like it. After all it was a favourite of your
great-grandfather.
School dinners ?
Was bread pudding on the menu ? It was but it was steamed and not cooked
in an over, not served as a slice of cake but with custard it was served as a
soggy, unappetising thing to eat after the main course.
School dinners at Banners Gate County Primary
School were a punishment somewhere between the rack and the hangman’s noose. I
always went home for dinner, remember I told you it was not called lunch.
However, at Boldmere High School For Boys in The Royal Borough of Sutton Coldfield
it was too far and so school dinners were mandatory.
Dinners cost five shillings a week, twenty-five
pence. That’s five pence in today’s silly decimalised money. What kind of a meal can you buy from
McDonald’s for five pence ? Free school meals were available
for families who could not afford the
five pence a day. Throughout my time at Boldmere I only knew one friend
who could not afford to pay, his father was dead and his mother did not work as
she looked after her three sons. We, his class mates, never thought much about
the situation and never said anything so I hope it never caused him any embarrassment.
School dinners were good. Not every meal but to
give them three and a half stars in The School Dinner Michelin Guide would be
fair. If only boiled cabbage was not served that could be four stars. Boiled
cabbage aka seaweed, when that was on the menu the entire school stank of
it. The metal tubs of boiled cabbage
were returned unopened for the pig man to take away and recycle into pork chops
the following term.
There was one pudding, frog spawn, which returned
to the kitchen the same was but everything else was Ok (ish). Some knew it as
tapioca pudding but no self-respecting frog would ever lay claim to it.
When Moses came down the mountain he had tablets of
stone for the cooks at Boldmere High School For Boys, the menu to be served
every Wednesday and every Friday. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday the school cooks
were allowed to use their own initiative.
Friday was fish, every Friday was fish. Supposedly
pseudo religious respecting those of the Roman Catholic faith it was always
fish on Friday. Fish served with hard lumpy potatoes. I speak of The Royal Borough Of Sutton
Coldfield, it was King Henry VIII who gave the town its royal charter. I think
if King Henry VIII learned of fish being served at Boldmere High School For
Boys on Fridays the entire kitchen staff would have followed the path of his
ill-fated wives Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour !
Wednesday was stew. Pre-Boldmere I did not like
stew but there I enjoyed it and secretly looked forward to Wednesday.
The other three days were a mix and match. We were
always served a road dinner once a week. Roast meat, potatoes and usually peas
which were also known as bullets. No firearm in the British Army ever had such
an armour piercing bullet as school peas.
SPAM, on a special day Spam Fritters. Today Spam is
a term used for malicious e-mails and other interventions on our computers.
Spam, however, means Specially Modified American Meat. Did you know that ? president Trump when you spam out your silly
twittering on social media do you know the meaning behind your actions ? Spam
today means rubbish and Specially Modified American Meat was rubbish. You can
not buy a tin of Spam today, you can if you are foolhardy pick up from the
supermarket a tin of Pork Luncheon Meat. Same thing. Originating as food for
the fighting troops during the war Specially Modified American Meat was garbage
but we lads liked it when it appeared at the serving hatch.
Spam was American. Corned Beef was British ! It was
known as Bully Beef, bully somehow meaning British.
Puddings would vary from jelly and blancmange to
apple pie. Some pies even had apples in them. Ginger stodge puddings, ginger sponge
and fruit sponge puddings were the best. If The Ritz Hotel started serving
these it would double its trade overnight.
Liquid refreshment was in the form of water, jugs
of water on every table. The cooks did pay us the compliment of keeping the
water cool ahead of the jugs appearing on the table.
Prior to entering the dining hall we all had to
line up at the washroom and clean our hands. The more petty duty teachers would
inspect our hands before we ate. Sad.
The duty teacher had to say grace before we ate.
After he had spoken we replied AMEN. Then grace had to be repeated after the
meal. The silly little teachers who
thought they were clever spoke grace in Latin and would drone on and on and on
and on.
There were only two forms of grace which needed to
be spoken: For this plateful make us grateful. Then on days when seaweed
or frog spawn was to be served: For what we are about to receive may the
Lord have mercy upon us.
Dinner tables sat eight boys, two of who were
servers. It was their job to collect the trays of food from the serving hatch,
dish out the meals to the other six then eat themselves what was left – usually
a bigger helping than anyone else. If seconds were available it was their job
to put up their hands to secure additional food which was again shared equally.
Clearing up after dinner the servers delegated jobs ton the other six then
adopted a non-manual supervisory role for themselves.
On our table there were six first-formers and two
second year bully servers. Enough was enough. One day, after we had finished
eating we withdrew our labour.
“What’s going on here ?” the duty teacher demanded
to know.
“We’re on strike,” my mate Jim explained.
No negotiating but the strike was immediately over
on the instruction of that duty teacher. That should have been a temporary
industrial action but the next day Jim, myself and six carefully selected
others took over another dining table, kicking away its original residents.
There we established democracy of serving, eating and clearing away. Democratic
save for one job Jim insisted keeping for himself. Our table was not far from
the serving hatch, very convenient for collecting and returning trays. When the
table had been wiped down the cloth had to given to Jim who would throw it over
his shoulder into the serving hatch hoping to hit a cook with it. Only once did
he actually score a direct hit, the words the lady uttered when she came to our
table waving the cloth I do not, to this day, fully understand the meaning of.
Time for bread pudding. I am going to make some ! Off to the kitchen I doubt I will achieve the standard of Nan,
somehow I think I will probably fall way short of even that served as part of school dinners !
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