I taught my students how to make Angel Delight tarts for a Convenience Food lesson. The aim was to show how quickly you can make a dessert.
I got letters from parents –
‘You should be teaching them to cook not open packets!’
Read my story on this link.
And if you want to make the recipe it’s here. It does get students to eat more milk which was a target of the day.
How Delia stopped me from making 300 mince pies.
Click the link to see my reading from Cream Horns and Vol au Vents at my book launch.
READ the the full story on this link
Watch the amazing Linda reading my story of visiting Manzes in 1970s Walthamstow.
Yes they served and sold live eels. Talk on this link
Listen to Gilly Smith interviewing me on Cooking the Books Podcast.
My book I taught them to cook is a blistering expose of teaching teenagers in 1970s London how to cook fatty pastries and cakes.
But it was fun.
This YouTube video is Part 1 of planning to write Cream Horns and Vol au Vents
There’s a diary for 1973 to get the dates right.
A list of rude cooking words
Planning the characters and changing names
Planing 1974 with three day week and blackouts.
This photo is a group of my students. I am on the right wearing an all-brown outfit. High, suede leather boots, a brown mini skirt, roll neck jumper, belted at waist and a jaunty cap.
Read about those days in Cream Horns and Vol au vents.
Story on this link
When the wheat, oats and barley were ready for harvesting in Northamptonshire fields, I’d pick some for my classes to taste as part of their food lessons.
Read about these stories in my latest book Cream Horns…
‘Before I return to London, I drive into the countryside and climb over gates into the fields ready for harvesting, carrying a pair of scissors.
Large bundles of wheat, barley and oats make excellent visual aids for my lessons, displayed on a nature table in my classroom.
London children often have no idea how some of our food is grown, and may never have tasted the seeds from the ears of wheat.’
In the 1950s, Britain produced 1 million chickens a year – today it is over a billion. Intensive farming in the late 1960s reduced the price of chicken.
In 1972, chicken was too expensive for me to cook at school and there was nothing in the textbooks or exams.
Read about my chicken lesson here. From I taught them to cook
Today chicken is the most popular meat around the world.
Photo by William Moreland on Unsplash
How I tried to teach my students to wash up in my lessons.
Do you ever dilute Fairy Liquid?
Story from Cream Horns…
Delia’s How to cheat at cooking helped stop me making mincepies for the school Carol Service 1973
Read about it on this link
Jenny Ridgwell 