Rice pudding.
I was looking at the menu for the posh and wallet-traumatising restaurant Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden today. Mrs B and I have booked it as a birthday treat for me. We love a meal that makes you go WOW. And in an effort to decide in advance what to eat, I was drawn away from my obsessively ubiquitous choice of chocolate for dessert towards rice pudding of all things. Obviously not just rice pudding, but vanilla rice pudding mousse with amaretto and malt ice cream. And it has made me think about school dinners.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who ate something highly objectionable as a child that caused me to avoid that food for decades thereafter as you might avoid a trigger happy maniac with a paint ball gun that fires dog turd pellets. This is because of school dinners.
Who came up with the idea of rice pudding? Savoury dessert is a rather disgusting oxymoron. Apart from when it’s cheese and crackers that is. Was it some traditional society that was dependent for survival on a single crop, which meant that they had to use it for desserts as well? Is potato cake a dessert? Whatever. Rice pudding served in schools, which was a daily occurrence, was just wrong. It tasted wrong. Like French kissing your cousin. No, thank you.
So, steered clear for decades, then tasted some recently and thought, oh! When it’s not being boiled to buggery in a school canteen vat, it actually tastes nice. So, Clos Maggiore may well knock me sideways with what would be rice pudding at its very best.
Am I getting rice pudding muddled up with semolina? They both had the consistency of baby sick and one had a dollop of jam on top as if someone had just bled into your bowl.
At primary school, school dinners were so disgusting, you’d prefer to chew on one of the disinfectant blocks from the urinal. And dinner ladies (not mentioning any names, Mrs Adams) tended to be testosterone-imbalanced, gruff dictators who were too masculine for the army or truck driving, and who demanded that you “EAT ALL YOUR DINNER,” or they would bark at you like the Doberman dogs in the graveyard in The Omen until you fully shit your pants.
Therefore, I took packed lunch to school. Not necessarily healthier, as I loved a crisp sandwich, so my mum indulged me with two slices of unbuttered Mother’s Pride and a packet of Prawn Cocktail.
But when I got to secondary school, St Ignatius lower school against all odds turned out a decent array of lunch fare. Especially the chocolate and syrup cornflake cake, which you could manipulate into a sphere, put in your blazer pocket and eat like an apple in the playground as you watched that day’s main event fight.
Finally, just to say, that I would not drink milk (unless mixed with a healthy sized tablespoon of Nestle milk shake powder) for many, many years on account of free school milk at primary school. A classic example of impracticable altruism. It was free, but without enough refrigerator space, it was warm and topped with a thick layer of cream. Fucking horrible. Thatcher was right to snatch it away in the early 70s.
