By Bernard Place
THERE are moments when memory arrives not in fully formed stories but in tastes and textures – or, more precisely, in the strange, wobbling consistency of foods that have almost vanished from British dinner tables. I was born in 1956, and some of my earliest recollections involve standing in a school dinner queue and trying to work out which milk pudding waited behind the serving hatch. Would it be semolina with a blob of lurid red jam? Tapioca, pale and faintly amphibian? Or sago – those translucent pearls that looked less like food and more like something siphoned off from a laboratory experiment?
Whatever happened to sago? And to all those dishes that defined the post-war British childhood? They have retreated so completely that encountering them now feels like archaeological discovery. But in the 1960s, these were staples – and not simply because they were cheap. In ways we rarely notice, the remnants of the British Empire were ladled onto our plates on an almost daily basis.
The Empire on a tray
Take sago and tapioca. They came from south-east Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa – places knitted into Britain’s imperial trading networks and, by the 1950s and 60s, into the Sterling Area. This mattered. In an era when Britain had to spend its precious American dollars sparingly, school meal planners filled the nation’s school dinner halls with foods that were inexpensive, long life, and available from countries that traded in sterling. We may not have been aware of the geopolitics behind it, but the British Empire was hiding in plain sight, spooned onto our plates. The same was true of corned beef from Australia, New Zealand or Argentina, and tinned fruit cocktail from Caribbean or Pacific suppliers. For many of us, the closest we got to “exotic” was a slice of tinned pineapple glistening under a tide of evaporated milk. Even the custard had imperial fingerprints: powdered, brightly coloured, and resistant to scrutiny.
School dinners, in other words, were not just a post-war welfare provision. They were also a micro-curriculum in Britain’s place in the world, served without explanation and eaten – mostly – without complaint.
No choice, no waste, and no escape
Two things stand out in my memory of those meals: the lack of choice and the complete intolerance of waste. This wasn’t a restaurant; it wasn’t even quite a cafeteria. You queued. You took what you were given. And you finished it. The “waste not, want not” ethic was still a cultural reflex, shaped by wartime rationing and the long, frugal shadow it cast over the 1950s and 60s. Nothing was left on the plate – not because every child loved liver and onions or embraced suet puddings with missionary zeal, but because waste felt like a moral failure.
And then there was the egg baked inside mashed potato – a kind of culinary riddle, as though a chicken had somehow laid an egg inside a snowdrift. These dishes may sound eccentric now, but to us they were simply the food of school days, as predictable as the metal trays, the steam fogging the windows, and the gradual shuffle up the line.
It is hard to explain to younger generations how normal it was to confront a pudding with a skin thick enough to withstand a gentle breeze. Or the half-dread, half-anticipation of seeing a suet roll slowly unfurl as it was cut, revealing a heart of jam or raisins. These were not “treats”, exactly. They were more like rites of passage.
When the world opened up
By the late 1960s and 70s the British palate was expanding. Immigration reshaped high streets; supermarkets emerged; air travel made novelty ordinary. School menus ventured cautiously into spaghetti bolognese and even, in adventurous regions, curry. Sago, tapioca, and their milky cousins became emblems of an older, greyer Britain – reminders of an era when the world arrived on our plates not as choice, but as imperial legacy.
Yet it is worth remembering that those school meals provided something important: a universal experience. No packed lunches to mark out differences. No allergies to negotiate. No children shamed by having “the wrong food”. The dinner hall was one of the great social levellers – even if levelling sometimes meant everyone facing the same lumpy mash.
A light Jersey inflection
Although my own memories are not from Manchester, I suspect many Islanders of a certain age will recognise the atmosphere. Every community that lived through the end of empire has its own version of these dishes, and its own stories of school meals served without fuss or flourish. I would be delighted to hear what readers remember of their own dinners at secondary school and the parish primaries.
Did your rice pudding have a skin? Was corned beef a weekly inevitability? Did anyone else encounter the mysterious egg-in-mash?
Food memories often reveal more about a society than formal history. They show how global supply chains shaped local diets, how austerity became culture, and how children absorbed – unconsciously – the patterns of an imperial world already beginning to fade.
A warm note of letting go
There is a temptation, when writing about this era, to imagine a culinary revival. Perhaps we should rescue sago from oblivion and give tapioca a modern twist. And I am sure someone, somewhere, is already doing that. But for most of us, these dishes belong to another age – to the world of wooden spoons, small glass milk bottles, and school corridors that smelt faintly of cabbage.
What survives is not the food, but the memory of it: the camaraderie, the rituals, the strange comfort of knowing exactly what Tuesday pudding would be. Whatever happened to sago? It slipped quietly off the menu when Britain changed. And perhaps that is exactly where it belongs – as a reminder of who we were, and how far the world on our dinner plates has travelled since.
A registered nurse for nearly 40 years, Bernard Place has been a clinician, teacher and researcher in intensive care units. From 2012 he managed departments in Jersey’s healthcare system and from 2015 to 2019 was the clinical project director for Jersey’s new hospital.
