Special Collections & Archives: Snapshots from the Archives

Snapshot from the Archives: Past Repasts (Former Freshers' Fare)

In this Snapshot we celebrate both "Snack-tember" and FAO World Food Day with a look back at food and nutrition in our colleges over the years.

The British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) has designated the month of September 2025 as "Snack-tember", aiming to encourage children and young people – and those involved in their care and education – to make healthier, more sustainable and better informed snacking choices. World Food Day calls for action on a peaceful, sustainable, prosperous, and food-secure global future. With all our new and returning students arriving on campus for the new academic year, it seems timely to look back at some of the menu choices offered in the past, both to Roehampton students and to the children at associated schools. Some of these past menu options ("dead baby", anyone...?!) may make us appreciate the much more varied campus catering on offer today! 

Food and nutrition in teacher training has always been important at Roehampton and is still in our PGCE curriculum today; and  Nutrition as a subject in its own right is taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in our School of Life and Health Sciences. Read on for more tasty morsels from the College archives...

Whitelands Archivist, Gemma Bentley writes: 

An emphasis was placed on the teaching of nutrition or cooking from the earliest days of Whitelands' foundation; female teachers were expected to have the same domestic skills as housewives of the time. The report ‘as to the proposed Female Training Institution’, presented to the National Society on 24 June 1841,  includes the following proposals:

"A Cook and a housekeeper with one or two inferior servants will be allowed, but all the light housework should be performed by the boarders [students] and the principle laid down by the Society to be acted upon according to the best of her own judgement by the Head of the Establishment should be to identify the character of a good housewife with that of a Schoolmistress.

In accordance with the same view, she will attach great importance to every kind of needle, culinary and other industrial work, of which the knowledge can prove useful to children in National Schools and it is hoped that this Department of the Institution may assist in defraying the expenses."

Fifty years later, the continuing importance of these aspects of teacher training can be seen in the 1891 Whitelands College annual report. This featured question papers for Sanitary Science and Theoretical Cookery examinations. The latter included the question: ‘How would you teach a child to make a meat pie for her father to take into the fields for his dinner?’ - which gives a poignant glimpse into the lives of some of the children they would go on to teach. Both exams carried £5 donated prize money (about £500 in today’s money).

College catering

We also have evidence from this time about what the students themselves ate. The college’s ‘Jubilee Annual Report’ for 1891 includes a ‘Dietary’ section detailing the seemingly unchanging weekly menu. The only substantial meal was the midday dinner, while there was bread, butter and coffee (tea on Sundays) for breakfast and tea, with bread and butter and half-a-pint of ale or broth for supper.

Sunday: Cold roast beef, vegetables, tarts or puddings

Monday: Roast leg of mutton and vegetables

Tuesday: Hot roast beef, vegetables and suet pudding

Wednesday: Irish stew, vegetables, batter pudding

Thursday: Salt beef, vegetables, currant or treacle pudding

Friday: Boiled leg of mutton, vegetables, rice pudding Saturday: Pea-soup, boiled mutton, vegetables

We don’t know what the students thought about the food at this time, but we do have some feedback from the 1930s. The Archive holds some reminiscences written in 1984 by  Marjorie Harfst, a student at Whitelands from 1933 to 35:

"My only critical memory is of food. Most of us rated it pretty low. I always maintain that for two years I lived on bread and potatoes and all the mountains of calories we gorged in our rooms. So I emerged two stones overweight, and refused to eat eggs for a further two years. We had such charming names for the dishes offered, e.g. Murder on the Alps, Putney Pavement, and (horrors! a grey flannel roll with a thin pink liquid oozing out) Dead Baby!"

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Froebel Archivist, Kornelia Cepok writes: 

The growing and cooking of food has always been an important part of Froebelian teacher training, and was integrated into the curriculum at Froebel's original kindergartens. Cooking is one of Froebel's Occupations, being an activity in which children can engage creatively whilst developing vital skills, knowledge and attitudes (such as measuring ingredients, handling utensils and learning to share tasks and meals). You can read more about this on the Froebel Trust's website. 

Froebelian schools and kindergartens also gave children the opportunity to grow their own food, engendering a close connection with nature and knowledge of food production. The schools would have their own kitchen gardens where the children could tend to the plants and eat the produce. This postcard from the Froebel archive, written in the mid-nineteenth century, shows an illustration of Froebel's "Spiel-platz" at Blankenburg, with a handwritten note reading "The children's little gardens are plainly seen."  

Such scenes were still common at Froebel schools in the early twentieth century. This photograph shows children digging a garden at Froebel demonstration school in Colet Gardens, West Kensington in 1903:  

Froebel College also has a long history of growing food on campus. The 1922 issue of "The Link" (Froebel Student magazine) mentions a "small newly-planted orchard" in its description of the new premises. The Froebel Education Institute (FEI), as it was then, had just bought Grove House and its grounds the year before and it is reasonable to assume that they had planted fruit trees for the supply of the college kitchen to cater for their residential students and general college life. The kitchen garden, the orchard and the wider college grounds were used as part of the curriculum as well, with the entire holistic cycle of food growing and caring for living things being a Froebel Occupation (as above). 

This map created by a student c1950 shows that Grove House's kitchen gardens (bottom right corner)  and orchard were still in use at that time:

This tradition continues today with the Growhampton food sustainability project run by the Students' Union: growing and preserving  produce on campus, tending free range chickens, and teaching students and the local community about sustainable food production. The old orchard still supplies a wide variety of apples, and is surrounded by abundant blackberry bushes.

In 1918 Froebel student Doris Densham kept a notebook detailing all of the daily activities she planned for the kindergarten at which she worked, presumably on placement.  These activities revolved around the seasonal cycle of nature: gardening, growing and preparing food (e.g. growing beans and potatoes, harvesting tomatoes to eat later that day, or making butter and cream cheese). This would instil in the children a deep understanding of nature, our dependency on it, and collective responsibility towards living things in relation to it. This page from her notebook shows the careful preparation that went into even the simple activity of picking string beans, and what the children would gain from it:
“Indirect aims: 
To develop sense of colour, appreciation of nature, to strengthen fingers and develop sense of order and sense of form. To train children to use scissors.” 

The importance of these activities survives in the Froebelian curriculum today, as shown in this recent case study from  Guildford Nursery School.  

The FEI also ran nursery schools in underprivileged areas of London, and placed great importance on good nutrition for these children, who were often undernourished. The annual reports of these schools, held in the archive, give full details of what the children ate. The following examples are from Somers Town nursery school in 1914 (left) and Notting Hill nursery school in 1921 (right). The main course offer is not much different between the two (Scotch broth, bean or lentil soup, stewed beef, fish on Fridays), but the dessert menu has improved slightly by 1921, with chocolate blancmange added to the suet pudding, stewed fruit and custard of earlier years.

This photograph shows children from the Notting Hill Nursery School enjoying a meal outdoors during their summer holiday at Rookshill in 1933:

When the schools were evacuated to the countryside to avoid London bombings during the Second World War (as recalled in a previous blog post)  it was seen as a boon in terms of access to fresh food. You can sense the delight of Miss Jebb, FEI Principal at the time, when she wrote in December 1941 that the relocated children of Somers Town School were ‘busily eating poached eggs (think of it!)’ and ‘demolishing baked apples and very milky milk pudding’ - luxuries that were not available to those still surviving on powdered egg and rations in the cities!

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And finally, Southlands Archive Historian, Gilly King shares this culinary memory that originally appeared in The Southlander magazine in 2023. At the Southlands 150th Anniversary meal that year, our Muslim Chaplain, Sabiha Iqbal, found herself exchanging food nostalgia with one of the guests, Angela Macquiban, who had studied at Southlands from 1969 to 1972. The exchange inspired them to co-write an article, entitled Food, Friends and Fun, reflecting that 'There’s nothing like experiencing a meal together, sitting at a table eating can lower barriers and build bridges - often a way strangers become good friends.'  

Angela had fond memories of a particular dessert that was served at Southlands at that time, known as ‘Swedish Apricot': 

"‘Swedish Apricot’, was a delicious pudding that was served to students on special occasions. The recipe was published in an issue of the Southlands magazine not long after Angela left college so it seems students must have been keen to try making it themselves. Angela had made it countless times over the years and it's always gone down well, literally! It is very easy and very delicious, as Sabiha and a dozen students can now attest too!..."

Thanks to Angela, you can 'keep the Southlands culinary tradition going' with the recipe she has shared below. From this distance it seems classic 1970s fare that might not meet the BNF's health and nutrition standards today - but as Angela and Sabiha point out in their article, it can very easily be made into a sustainable recipe, if you use vegan and fair trade ingredients.

Ingredients:

250g dried fairtrade apricots

1/3 pint whipping cream (or vegan substitute)

125g butter or vegan margarine

125g  fairtrade muscovado sugar

Cornflakes 

Method:

Soak apricots and stew until soft then mash (tinned apricot can also be used, or mango, pears or other fruit - just drain the syrup).

Place apricots in a serving dish and when cool, cover with whipped cream.

Melt butter/margarine and sugar in pan over low heat, then add cornflakes and mix well. When cooler spread mixture over cream.

Southlands continues the tradition of sharing food as a way of bringing diverse people together. Last year's International Dessert Festival, for instance, encouraged students to contribute a dessert from their home country's cuisine. The Instagram story gives a tasty flavour of this delicious event! 

Why not try this recipe and let us know how you get on - and perhaps share your own favourite family or regional recipes with us in the comments!