Cream Horns and Vol Au Vents

by Jenny Ridgwell

I live in a dingy bedsit, try to get off the shelf, wear too short skirts and eat out in London when someone else pays. But my students must learn old fashioned skills from old textbooks—invalid cookery, starching a traycloth, offal dishes and always use a d’oyley—for the wretched exam. It’s the first years when boys learn to cook but many just want to eat—no theory or exams thankyou. This memoir is a part of the history of food teaching in UK schools and I am one of the few Cookery teachers left to tell the story…