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"Frogspawn" Still hated after all these years!!!!

jennyann

jennyann

Gone but not forgotten. R.I.P.
I found this article in todays London Evening Standard newspaper and it
gave me a laugh about school dinners"

TAPIOCA TOPS SCHOOL DINNERS HATE LIST
6 August 2003

Tapioca is officially Britain's most hated school dinner, a survey has found.

The slimy dish, nicknamed "frogspawn" by generations of children, has topped a poll to find the nation's least favourite school foods. Cabbage came a close second followed by overcooked veg, lumpy mash and lumpy custard.

Other meals bringing back nightmare memories included Spam fritters, semolina, liver and blancmange. Brussels sprouts only made it in at number 20 in the poll of more than 2,000 BBC Good Food magazine readers and users of the Friends Reunited website.

The top five favourite foods (in order) are fish and chips, ice cream, sponge pudding, jam roly poly and jelly.

One in three people surveyed said they had devised clever ways to dispose of their lunch when the dinner ladies weren't watching, from putting it on someone else's plate to wrapping it in a hankie.

And over half of those questioned admitted they had been so scarred by school dinners that the experience still affects their eating habits.

The survey, published in the latest edition of the Good Food magazine, also found the most popular nicknames for school dinners.

Custard was known as "cat sick", peas were nicknamed "bullets" and Spotted Dick was better known as "fly cemetery".

The Top 20 Hate List: 1 Tapioca; 2 Cabbage; 3 Overcooked veg; 4 Lumpy mash; 5 Lumpy custard; 6 Liver; 7 Semolina; 8 Fatty/grisly meat; 9 Blancmange; 10 Beetroot; 11 Spam fritters; 12 Gravy; 13 Macaroni; 14 Butterbeans; 15 Mince; 16 Fish; 17 Peas; 18 Stew; 19 Carrots; 20 Sprouts.
 
There was an interesting proggie on the telly last night where they took thirty sixteen Y.Os. and put them into a 1950s school environment. They had spam fritters and that sort of stuff. Boy did they find the whole experience hard going. :?

They were given a maths test which they thought was a 1950s O-level exam. Some of them got no more than 12% (these were pupils awaiting the results of their GCSEs).

It seemed they were at sea with long division and multiplication because they weren't allowed to use calculaters. :(

There was even more embarrassment when the teacher announced that the test was in fact a 1950s 11+ paper!!! :shock:

Could it be that all that lumpy custard, cabbage etc. was food for the brain :?:
 
Frogspawn and suchlike

I could be right wrong, but I thought 'Frogspawn' was SAGO PUDDING. I remember big transparent, tasteless and gooey blobs which looked very much like frogspawn. I cant remeber that they had any taste.
As for semolina, I had some last night, but nowadays we call couscous, pour boiling water over it, leave it for five minutes to rise and warm up, and use like spuds or rice. Nice with Sunday's leftover beef and some Chinese patch-choy chopped and lightly fried in butter.
I well remember tapioca, but don't know the difference from semolina. I believe it comes from rice, which I hated as a kid.
My mum and grans used to boil all these cereals in milk (unfortunately they had a thing about sterilised milk and wouldn't touch it (it would have been so much bettter, as it was with custard).
You can do some really tasty and inexpensive things with all of them, either sweet (with fruit) or savoury. Either way don't be afraid to throw in some spices - a tiny bit of cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, and even cardamom is smashing. I have a second coffee grinder which I use for grinding the seeds and bark up in very small quantities to last a week or two in a small container. I don't like buying powdered spices because the aromatic oils dry out quickly, and you are left with a rather tasteless dust.
Peter
 
SAGO (Frogspawn)

No one I knew liked Sago or Tapioca pudding especially the school's version of it. It was the most unappetising dessert ever invented. The worst savory dish was Pom (sorry Chris). I am not even sure what vegetable that was but it was supposed to be like mashed potatoes and tasted like Cloy paste.....dreadful stuff.

In Vancouver there are several Bubble Tea shops that sell the favourite Asian drink made of tapioca. I was invited to go for a Bubble Tea a few years ago and was amazed to see that the bubbles were actually small tapioca
spheres treated with fruit flavourings so that they would be different colours.
The drink often contains a milk and fruit mixture and served cold. The drink is drunk with a very wide straw to suck up the tapioca spheres. I didn't realize what it was at first because in this drink the tapioca is rather chewy.
 
Lovely Grub

Au contraire, Begging to be different but I loved "Frogspawn" and All of the aforementioned various most despised School meals,
The lovely Dinner Ladies used to ladle me extras & always up for "2nds"

You see, When your on a "different ticket !!" even as a Gram-grub, Any food tastes beautifull,,,,, :) John
 
I too loved 'frogspawn' ,hated the pudding we called chocolate concrete.
Goodness knows what it was made of but when you eventually got your spoon into it pieces usually flew across the room.
 
I loved Frogspawn, which is what we called tapioca. Mom always grated a bit of nutmeg and put a nob of butter on our milk puds. A bit non u today I suppose.

I find Couscous just as awful as semolina, no matter what tempting morsels you put into it. It still leaves a powdery taste on your tongue.
 
Frogspawn

I bet your Mom's Tapioca puddings were delicious Diana and Rice Puddings as well. The school recipe at my school was awful and you could almost say revolting. I generally enjoyed school dinners especially the Beef and Butter Bean Stew that was served. There were no kitchens at this school and the food was delivery. I believe it was cooked at Tedbury Crescent school in Kingstanding.
 
Frogspawn

Rod posted a recipe for Chocolate Concrete a while back on here. I bet it tasted better than my schools version. It was definitely concrete like and had probably been made the day before and had time to set into it's concrete like mass. Chocolate concrete has many mentions on the internet with
folks remembering it from schooldays in much the same way as we are.
 
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frogspawn

Im a huge chocolate concrete fan. Its sold at my youngest sons school every parents evening............it tastes the same but its just not quite hard enough.

Love rice and semolina too, but 'cant abide' tapioca or sago.......much to the disgust of my hubby who adores both.
 
Yes Rod concrete was served at my school with pink custard. I wonder why? I'd forgotten until you mentioned it. :D
 
From frogspawn to chocolate, and a soufflee

Thinking about chocolate, how about the magic "70%" black chocolate stuff which good supermarkets stock these days? As a kid I didn't like the bitterness and would only eat the so-called milk chocolate. Worse than that, our kids liked the white chocolate which didn't mess up the tablecloth, clothes, seat or carpet so much, but which I thought tasted of condensed milk.
The real black stuff, marketed by Sainsbury's a few years ago as "cooking chocolate" but now more widely available, is very different from the chocolate I ate years ago in Brum. I think the new stuff tastes magic. It deserves the praise it gets in the middle-class press, which sometimes claims it has medicinal qualities, although other experts warn that it is addictive. That's a good omen, I say.
Last Monday, Valentine's Day, our Barbara made a fantastic chocolate soufflee, using what dark chocolate we hadn't gobbled over the week-end. The other main ingredients were freshly ground almonds, cream and less sugar than the recipe in our Express Dairies diary she was using. On account of the shortage of real dark chocolate she topped up with some drinking chocolate powder.
The result was out of this world, and it lasted two days, the second time cold of course, with whipped cream. Almost as good as the day before.
Bon appetit!
 
Re: From frogspawn to chocolate, and a soufflee

I've just been looking at some old threads.
My Nan used to make lovely sago puddings, we called it "bally-pudding". Mom didn't like it and made rice pudding instead, complete with thick (yuk) skin!
At school I learned to make rice pudding, it was allowed to go cold and then cold tinned pears were put on top, the teacher called it Pear Conde....it was horrible too!
rosie.
 
Re: From frogspawn to chocolate, and a soufflee

Hated frogs spawn still do but I had forgotten about pink custard loved it.

We used to go to our Great Grans once a year for a fortnight in School Hols and her Daughter my Aunt lived down the lane she asked me and my Sister if we would like a pear we said yes please but when she gave them to us they were pickled pears they were horrid so when she turned her back I put mine into a pot plant. We still laugh about this to this day.
 
Our chocolate concrete was always served with bright green mint custard. Mom was a dinner lady at school and her friend who is now in her 80's was the cook, despite the fact that she is nearly blind, she can still reproduce all the old school puddings.
Sue
 
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