I’m looking again at my mother-in-law’s Surrey County Council School Meals Service Recipe Book. She was the head cook at a school in Surrey, in the 1960’s (and maybe earlier) and this Recipe Book is dated 1966 – however, I think the first print of these books was in 1956. It was twelve years before that, in 1946 while the war was still grinding on, that the 1944 Education Act made school meal provision, with legal nutritional requirements, compulsory for local authorities.
Surrey County Council took its responsibility for providing meals to the pupils of Surrey schools very seriously; its 1947 School Meals Regulations stated that ‘The School Meals Service can now properly be said to form an integral part of the educational system and represents a very considerable item of expenditure in the annual estimates of the Education Committee’. A primary aim of the School Meals Regulations was to equip all new schools with a separate kitchen and adequate dining accommodation, and this objective was achieved by 1956. The majority of existing schools were already so equipped, but some schools were still provided with meals which were transported in insulated containers and served in school halls, hired premises or, in some cases, in classrooms.
https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/history-centre/marvels/school-dinners
The first chapter of mother-in-law’s book is meat dishes – the recipes are enough to feed a school of children, so there has to be a bit of maths to reduce the quantities for a normal family! Here are some recipes:
Scotch eggs
- 50 eggs hard-boiled
- 9 lbs beef and 2 lbs bacon – or 11 lbs pork, minced twice
- 2 lbs bread or sausage rusk (this would be the rusk you would add to sausages, not rusk made of sausage meat) soaked and with the water squeezed out
- divide into 50 portions approximately
- pepper and salt
- egg or milk and brown breadcrumbs for coating
- fat for frying
- beat all the ingredients for the sausage mixture together to a smooth consistency
- divide into 50 portions (approximately ¼ lb each )and wrap round the eggs
- egg and crumb, fry in deep fat until golden brown and well-cooked
- cut each Scotch egg in half and serve either with gravy and two vegetables or cold with salad
Spanish meatballs
- 15 lbs steak finely minced
- 1½ lbs semolina
- ¼ lb minced onion, fried
- 2 oz salt
- 2 teaspoonfuls of pepper
- 8 eggs (optional)
- water to bind
- 10 pints of tomato sauce or gravy
- mix all the ingredients (except tomato sauce or gravy) and divide into portions with the help of a potato portioner
- form into balls and arrange inn baking trays (with lids)
- pour over the tomato sauce or gravy and cover with lid
- bake in a moderately hot oven for one hour, remove lid and cook for another half hour
- serve with additional sauce or gravy
Meat squares
- 16 lbs minced beef
- 6 lbs raw minced potato
- 4 lbs raw minced carrot
- ¼ lb minced onion, fried
- 1 quart water, pepper and salt
- ½ lb dripping
- piquant sauce or a few drops of anchovy essence
- mix all the ingredients well together
- pack into well-greased baking tins. Mark into squares. sprinkle the tops with breadcrumbs and cover with pats of dripping
- bake in a slow oven for two hours
- serve with thick gravy
What strikes me, is there are no additives apart from salt and pepper (and only 2 oz of salt and 2 teaspoonfuls of pepper in the nearly 20 lbs of other ingredients), and piquant sauce/anchovy essence for the meatballs. There is possibly more animal fat than would be acceptable today, but most children would have walked or cycled to school – and in rural Surrey that might have been several miles, schools and homes would not have been as warm as they are now, and children would have been more active than many are these days!
My featured image is an old one from Bletchingley, in Surrey where my mother-in-law lived
Lois Elsden 