In Defence of School Puddings

For the benefit of readers who didn’t grow up on TERF Island, I mean, the UK, ‘pudding’ can mean a lot of different things. For some of us it, it’s the generic term for the sweet course after a meal; dessert. It can also refer to a specific type of dessert that is steamed rather than baked; a Clootie dumpling if you’re Scottish, a Christmas pudding, or a Spotted Dick (vv English-coded, sorry I don’t make the rules). In Scotland we also have both a black and a white pudding. These have nothing to do with dessert and if you thought Haggis sounded gross then don’t look up a black pudding. For others, a pudding refers to a savoury baked bready-y thing hailing from Yorkshire that you have with a Sunday roast. But for all of us, a school pudding is a very specific, very nostalgic, almost sacred emblem of our primary school education. 

Jam roly polys; sticky toffee pudding; sponge cakes with lurid pink icing (Tottenham cake?); fruit crumble with thick, gloopy custard; jam and coconut sponge; Eve’s pudding. There were seasonal and regional variations of course, but every single school in the country would produce some kind of sweet syrupy sponge, baked in a large-format sheet pan, adorned with a basic white icing and a flurry of hundreds and thousands. 

Now, these types of old school puddings are having a sort of moment. On Broadway Market in East London, Benny’s, an ice cream spot, has started selling slices of cake and custard, branding them as 'school pudding': rainbow sponge, Tottenham cake, chocolate sponge, and jam and coconut. They even have apple crumble and rice pudding. 

I was mostly a packed lunch kid at school. I don’t know if it’s because I was too impatient to wait in the queue for lunch; or too fussy to eat what was on offer; or maybe lunches were too expensive. I asked my mum: ‘did I not like the lunch?’. Correct. Plus apparently my pals were also packed lunch kids. All I remember is that I threw half of my lunch in the bin every day (sorry mum). On the days I did have school dinners, it was the pudding I was after. If you looked down the queues and saw those perfectly square slices of sponge covered in sprinkles coming off the line, you knew it was going to be a good day. A bowl of semolina or rice pudding, though? Inauspicious. 

I checked in with my friend who went to a nearby school to see what she remembered about school puddings. She told me she was friends with the dinner ladies who would scrape round the syrup sponge tin and give her all the gooey good stuff that accumulates around the edges. It's always a good idea to made friends with the dinner ladies.

She sent me the menu for her five-year-old's school, not far from the schools we went to in the 90s. In the three week menu rotation there is exactly one day where the kids are offered a sponge pudding. There’s a solitary lemon drizzle cake, the odd oat cookie, and some strawberry Angel Delight. Every day for afters there’s fresh fruit. Most days there’s either natural yoghurt or cheese and biscuits. My friend says her kid doesn’t eat the cakes at school; he gets better ones at home. I guess when your mum is a pastry chef you develop strong opinions about such matters.

Things are a little different here at the Ottolenghi School of Kachumber Salad, I mean, my five-year-old’s school. On the menu this week there’s apple crumble for three days, and either lemon drizzle cake with poppy seeds or toffee apple cake on the other two. 

These are not the school puddings of the 90s. These school puddings have been reined in; disciplined by the School Food Standards (England) and the Nutritional Requirements for Food and Drink in Schools Regulations (Scotland). They’ve had the sugar slashed and the fibre dialled up. They’re low fat and high in fruit and oats and wholemeal flour. These are diet cakes. Clean eating cakes. No fun cakes.