Of Custard & Burgers

I suppose everyone has memories of school custard: I do, and thankfully I only faced it for one meal. The experience of that single thing put me off school food to such a degree that I henceforth took sandwiches for lunch, right up until the freedom of the sixth form allowed us to eat outside the school premises: in my case, usually at the cafe at the Bearwood bus station on Hagley Road, which served one of those rather dubious foodstuffs of one's past that one absolutely craves in later life: its absence and temporal distance making the memory sweeter still.

In the case of the bus-drivers' shack, it was the burgers. Not your Mackie-D or BK Whopper, still less than the affected "prime burger" with its damnable brioche buns and skyscraper height, or the ridiculousness of Wagyu-burger pricing insanity. No, this was quintessential, burger heaven: tinned pork-burgers cooked to within an inch of their existence: thin, wide and caramelised in all the right places, in a proper, soft burger bap. I never even bothered with fried onions, as the taste was in there from the griddle anyway. Just a garnish of that uniquely vinegary tomato ketchup that burger shacks always seemed to serve up. Like the taste of Nib-Its [blog posted passim], I can conjure up the flavour of these rather dodgy discs of meat(?) to this day.

As to the custard thing? My rather negative experience at the one and only school lunch I ate was thrown into stark culinary contrast by my experience of great home cooking. My mom and my nan were both great basic cooks, and on the pud front, my mom made really good (powdered) custard; whilst my nan would make the self-same Bird's custard up to rival blancmange for consistency. However, it was always delicious and never lumpy. The school custard served up to us on that fateful first day at Lordswood, however, was not only lumpy, but refused to leave its large aluminium catering jug under the force of gravity alone. Horrendous is the closest adjective that to this day springs to mind.

Still, five years of sandwiches, crisps and fruit squash actually did me no harm whatsoever, and I'm still here, very much alive and fit to tell the tale, over half a century later. I suppose I'm even pickier over my food these days, but some of these things from my youth are still part of my epicurean palette: Heinz Tomato soup, their baked beans, Birdseye Fish Fingers & Cadbury's Dairy Milk, to name but a few...