What have they done to....... Ambrosia rice (or other food products).

[Time Waster]

1. I'm not "an old person" , not by the general standards of this forum anyway . A mere 61....

2. It's not been that long since I last ate Ambrosia. Certainly within the last year. And no, it never tasted that bad. In fact it used to taste quite nice. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought it again .

1. Like a toddler hanging off her mothers arm looking up, or the wife looking up to her husband (in some families) things like height and age are relative grandpa!

2. Fair enough, but there's often a misguided view of old times and I'm as guilty as anyone at that. Foods like school semolina and ambrosio rice pudding I left behind as a kid. Didn't like it then so no point going back. But I do miss old fashioned school yoghurt and ski yoghurt. None of this fashionable fah-yeah muck!

 

[Slick]

1. Like a toddler hanging off her mothers arm looking up, or the wife looking up to her husband (in some families) things like height and age are relative grandpa!

2. Fair enough, but there's often a misguided view of old times and I'm as guilty as anyone at that. Foods like school semolina and ambrosio rice pudding I left behind as a kid. Didn't like it then so no point going back. But I do miss old fashioned school yoghurt and ski yoghurt. None of this fashionable fah-yeah muck!

If you remember school semolina you are obviously not as youthful as you would like to think.

 

[Time Waster]

If you remember school semolina you are obviously not as youthful as you would like to think.

Ten years younger than Brandane. He could have been halfway through secondary school before I started at primary. A big difference from that perspective, less so now.

Although they did have semolina or rice pudding occasionally in my secondary school. I preferred sponge with some kind of fruit, jam or sauce all smothered in something yellow and thick but not sure it was strictly good enough to be called custard! I left school at 18 so semolina was still a thing in the 90s

 

[Gwylan]

I went to school in 1951!
Deposited at the bus stop for the 10 mile ride to school.
Mother met me on return.
Day 2 I was on my own.

Lunch was prepared by food criminals masquerading as cooks. But, it was that or nothing. I got used to eating what I was given.
Mysterious stews, roof tiles boiled until they resembled over cooked liver.
Semolina, tapioca and whatever the latest aid shipment had delivered.
Jam etc was in micro doses so as not to disturb the subtly nuanced burned flavour.
There was the mysterious cake like thing that came with yellow liquid passed off as custard.
Oh my how I yearn for the good old days?

 

[Alex321]

In defence of Ambrosia, according to the label on my (empty) can, it contains no artificial sweeteners. It contains only 9% rice though! The rest is basically sugar (8.7%) and a mixture of skimmed and full cream milk. Whatever; it still tastes like .

A proper home made rice pudding will only contain a small amount of rice by weight, it will be mostly milk (we use a mixture of regular and evaporated milk to make ours).

A can of evaporated milk, a pint of full cream regular milk, 2 oz of dried pudding rice, and 2 oz of sugar, if I remember the recipe (my wife usually makes it currently, I haven't made one for a few years now).

 

[Alex321]

It is all down to convenience - 2 minutes to open a tin and heat it
against 2 hours to make and cook it

Yes, but if you are making a roast, it just goes in with that, then stays bin a bit longer. The actual hands on effort is only a few minutes at most.

 

[Time Waster]

I went to school in 1951!
Deposited at the bus stop for the 10 mile ride to school.
Mother met me on return.
Day 2 I was on my own.

Lunch was prepared by food criminals masquerading as cooks. But, it was that or nothing. I got used to eating what I was given.
Mysterious stews, roof tiles boiled until they resembled over cooked liver.
Semolina, tapioca and whatever the latest aid shipment had delivered.
Jam etc was in micro doses so as not to disturb the subtly nuanced burned flavour.
There was the mysterious cake like thing that came with yellow liquid passed off as custard.
Oh my how I yearn for the good old days?

My mum used to ask me what I had for lunch at school. It was an attempt at finding out about my day. My partner has the same game of evasive answers from our son. Anyway I could quite honestly answer my lunch consisted of puke pie. We never knew what was under the roof tile heavy pastry square but that description was pretty accurate. If you didn't manage to keep it down it looked the same second time around! Sorry to be so crude but school dinners were best described as character building. It took a strong character to eat it!

Then when 12 or 13 I was with the rugby team playing a local private boarding school out in the countryside. It was weekday after school, so they provided dinner. OMG! We got a full Sunday roast with amazing roasted potatoes, chicken, carrots that weren't boiled grey and other foodstuffs I forget what they were. It was as good as a decent pub Sunday roast. Traditional but so better than what we ate at school. How the m other lot live, eh?!

 

[Reynard]

It's worse than that, they also have to compete with what people can cook at home, and they're not obliged to publish nutrition data like the manufacturers are.

I recall when the BBC published an article about the high level of sugar in Dolmio sauces. It wasn't long before the foodies were all crowing "Oh I don't eat that muck, I make my own", followed soon after by sharing their favourite recipes. So I calculated the nutrition information, and showed them that there was as much sugar in their "healthy" home-made sauces as there was in the Dolmio.

There's more to eating a healthy diet than just cooking your own recipes then telling yourself they're healthy because they're home-cooked, and manufacturers can't win against that problem, whichever side of the fence they come down on.

The issue with the Dolmio sauces* is the fact that they have added sugar to make them more palatable.

The natural sugars already present in the tomatoes and onions that went into the sauce do not count towards your recommended daily sugar intake, but any added sugar does. That was the bone of contention with respect to ready made pasta sauces.

If I make pasta sauce from home grown tomatoes, then I find there's a good balance between acidity and sweetness, but if using canned tomatoes or passata, then some tweakage *may* be necessary. However, I find that if I add a teaspoon of smoked paprika to a tomato-based sauce, then it makes it taste sweeter without adding any extra sugar.

* and other brands / own brands

 

[Brandane]

How the m other lot live, eh?!

Having attended one of said "private boarding schools" for 5 years (not as a result of family wealth - it was paid for by my dad's job as a perk (??) for living abroad) I can categorically say that the catering at my particular school was utter shyte. And I mean REALLY shyte.
e.g. A typical day... Breakfast. Bowl of corn flakes with 2 pints of milk to share between a table of 8 people. Followed by ONE morning roll with a sliver of butter, in which you could put (if brave enough) marmalade. The cheapest type of marmalade from a huge catering tin, which was put into smaller dishes and which stayed in said dishes for the rest of the school term.

Lunch.... Small portion of "stew". Lucky if you found any meat in it, basically watery gravy with veg.. Served with mashed potato (instant smash, not real potatoes). Pudding of steamed sponge and custard.

Dinner.... Watery "soup" (packet soup using far too much water). Main course... Beans on toast. And not a lot of beans, maybe 3 tablespoons. No pudding.

Forgot to mention our breaktime "treats" mid morning and afternoon. 2 digestive biscuits.

The choice was, as always, take it or leave it. I could go on about the boarding school experience for days, but suffice to say if you think that is "how the other half live" you really don't know much about it*. It was so bad that I actually used to look forward to the airline food on the way home at the end of term. That was the only perk; holidays in Jamaica. In the 70's.. Loved that, but then I had lived there full time and gone to school there for 5 years prior to being shipped off to the ar$***le of the universe, supposedly for a better education. It wasn't. I sat bored for the first year as I had already covered everything (apart from British history, which bored me shitless anyway after learning about West Indian history) at school in Jamaica.

I left that asylum as soon as I could, 2 weeks after I turned 16. Weighing 10½ stone at a height of 5'11". Most likely malnourished too. I joined the Merchant Navy and could not believe how well fed we were. Others thought it was normal, but it was luxury to me!

*I am not disputing your story. But I knew people from other boarding schools who were in pretty much the same situation as I was. No doubt though, there were better boarding schools in existence, somewhere. If the care commission had been in existence back in the 70's things might have been better. They would have closed down that dive for sure.

 

[Slick]

Having attended one of said "private boarding schools" for 5 years (not as a result of family wealth - it was paid for by my dad's job as a perk (??) for living abroad) I can categorically say that the catering at my particular school was utter shyte. And I mean REALLY shyte.
e.g. A typical day... Breakfast. Bowl of corn flakes with 2 pints of milk to share between a table of 8 people. Followed by ONE morning roll with a sliver of butter, in which you could put (if brave enough) marmalade. The cheapest type of marmalade from a huge catering tin, which was put into smaller dishes and which stayed in said dishes for the rest of the school term.

Lunch.... Small portion of "stew". Lucky if you found any meat in it, basically watery gravy with veg.. Served with mashed potato (instant smash, not real potatoes). Pudding of steamed sponge and custard.

Dinner.... Watery "soup" (packet soup using far too much water). Main course... Beans on toast. And not a lot of beans, maybe 3 tablespoons. No pudding.

Forgot to mention our breaktime "treats" mid morning and afternoon. 2 digestive biscuits.

The choice was, as always, take it or leave it. I could go on about the boarding school experience for days, but suffice to say if you think that is "how the other half live" you really don't know much about it*. It was so bad that I actually used to look forward to the airline food on the way home at the end of term. That was the only perk; holidays in Jamaica. In the 70's.. Loved that, but then I had lived there full time and gone to school there for 5 years prior to being shipped off to the ar$***le of the universe, supposedly for a better education. It wasn't. I sat bored for the first year as I had already covered everything (apart from British history, which bored me shitless anyway after learning about West Indian history) at school in Jamaica.

I left that asylum as soon as I could, 2 weeks after I turned 16. Weighing 10½ stone at a height of 5'11". Most likely malnourished too. I joined the Merchant Navy and could not believe how well fed we were. Others thought it was normal, but it was luxury to me!

*I am not disputing your story. But I knew people from other boarding schools who were in pretty much the same situation as I was. No doubt though, there were better boarding schools in existence, somewhere. If the care commission had been in existence back in the 70's things might have been better. They would have closed down that dive for sure.

Wow, just how fortunate was I?

 

[Brandane]

There is a boarding school thread on this site, here. Seems quite a few of us went to them. Some good experiences, some not so good. The catering apart, I consider my overall experience as somewhere between good and bad. It was a shytehole but not as bad as it could have been. At least it wasn't in the same league as places like that which Nicky Campbell had to endure.

 

[presta]

The issue with the Dolmio sauces* is the fact that they have added sugar to make them more palatable.

The natural sugars already present in the tomatoes and onions that went into the sauce do not count towards your recommended daily sugar intake, but any added sugar does. That was the bone of contention with respect to ready made pasta sauces.

If I make pasta sauce from home grown tomatoes, then I find there's a good balance between acidity and sweetness, but if using canned tomatoes or passata, then some tweakage *may* be necessary. However, I find that if I add a teaspoon of smoked paprika to a tomato-based sauce, then it makes it taste sweeter without adding any extra sugar.

* and other brands / own brands

It was the sugar they were adding to their recipes that I was referring to.

 

[presta]

I could go on about the boarding school experience for days, but suffice to say if you think that is "how the other half live" you really don't know much about it

My school wanted to nominate me for a scholarship at the local boarding school, but I turned it down. As I recall "what's the point of having a home" was my comment at the time.

 

[Cycleops]

Anybody who buys tinned rice puddings needs their cooking skills updated

It's a bit more complicated than that. I would say that tinned rice pudding is a comfort food which takes you back to your childhood so not just a lazy person's dessert.