School Lunches of Yesteryear
by Paula Bosse
Morning prep work: the calm before the storm
by Paula Bosse
Above, Dallas lunch ladies shelling what looks like black-eyed peas for an unidentified school’s midday meal. I can’t say I’ve ever imagined lunchroom employees ever doing something like this. In the 1920s and ’30s, schools used fresh foods when they could, but they were definitely using a lot of canned fruits and vegetables, too. All this effort — and all these women — for peas.
In a quick search for what school lunch menus were like in the late ’20s and early ’30s, here were a few delicacies that would never be found in a school cafeteria these days:
- Roast veal
- Sardine sandwiches
- Creamed onions
- “Italian hash”
- Banana and peanut salad
- Salmon loaf
- Tongue salad
- Stuffed dates
- Prune whip/prune salad/prune pudding
Yummy!
***
Sources & Notes
Photo from the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.
*
Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
Love seeing women in history
Thanks for sharing
LikeLiked by 2 people
My parents were teachers in a series of small towns in the Texas Panhandle. Everyone of those school cafeterias served most excellent yeast rolls!
LikeLiked by 2 people
I always LOVED those rolls.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder if those stuffed dates aren’t just some more prunes sailing under a flag of convenience.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ha!
LikeLiked by 1 person
In the 1950s and 1960s when I attended DISD schools, fresh hot rolls were offered every day as a part of the daily lunch, and were available for separate purchase as well. Boy, were they good! Probably Dallas was the only place in the world where school kids regularly made ice cream sandwiches by placing a block of ice cream between two squashed dinner rolls. THAT was great.
Hadn’t pea shelling machines been developed by the 1920s?
I didn’t see “school burgers” on the menus. School burgers were the most reviled offering in the history of DISD lunches, I imagine.
LikeLike