by coffin_dodger » Tue Oct 15, 2019 9:19 am
At junior school - in the early 1970's - a favourite being served by the school canteen was 'spam fritters'. Thick slices of spam, coated in batter and deep fried. The serving tray, containing the spam fritters and sat on the hot plate, was literally swimming in fat. If they had been fried lond enough (and this wasn't always the case), the outer batter was crisp and crunchy, with a nice hot, smooth interior of spam meat.
As a child, I never questioned what 'meat' the spam was.
We had a dinner lady that must have been 70 yrs old, but back in the olden days people looked a lot older than their years suggested. She shuffled sporadically amongst the tables at which we sat, giving us the evil eye if we had left any food on our plate, muttering about 'bloody kids these days don't know how lucky they got it these days if they knew what I had to eat during war' and ocassionally shouting 'eat that pea!' or a derivitive of. We called her 'Granny Grumble' and were quite petrified of her. We had to show her our plate as we left the table to confirm that every morsel (often including much gristly meat) had been consumed.
Sometimes, if I didn't like a particular school dinner - and Granny Grumble was about - I would scrape it from my plate onto the floor beneath the table. I did this many times and assume that the other canteen staff took pity on the children that could not face the wrath of Grumble.
Ah, spam memories.
