"You didn't tell them about

the fritz fritters," the Whirlwind said to me. We were talking about my post on school food.
School food is familiar to the Whirlwind as she lives at school during the week. She also gets fed extremely well there. There are not a lot of boarders at her school and the kitchen staff seem to understand girls and their eating habits.
Breakfast at school is cereal (or porridge in winter) and toast. Once it would have been a cooked breakfast of some sort but that went before the Whirlwind even went to school.
We had cereal at school too. The school bought stale cereal from some outlet or other. I remember reading the "use-by" dates on the packets and it was always past the use-by date. What we got depended on what was available.
We also had cooked breakfast at my boarding school. Most of the boarders came from farms and they expected a cooked breakfast. There were boiled eggs some mornings. They were always hard boiled. I used to save mine to eat at lunch time. There were baked beans on toast. The beans were, at best, luke warm and the toast was limp and soggy. Once in a while there would be a spoonful of tinned mushrooms and a piece of bacon about three to four inches long. A small sausage and a half a tomato was another combination. I believe there was bacon and egg on Sundays - but I escaped to spend weekends with my grandparents. Breakfast there was another story altogether.
And then there were the "fritz" fritters. "Fritz" is a form of pale pinkish coloured german sausage. It is called "German" in other parts of Australia. The original form was probably made in the Barossa Valley - out of the left overs from the bratwurst, metwurst, liverwurst and other wursts.  It is cheap. Some butchers still give small children slices of it to keep them quiet for a moment or two. There is even a variety with a "smiley" face in the middle. Yes, cheap and vile - and loved by many.
At school they sliced this sausage up, dipped it in batter and deep fried it. It was then served up in greasy pools on cold plates with great dollops of cheap tomato sauce. I never ate it. (I am allergic to vinegar so not even the tomato sauce attracted me.) There was never any problem finding someone who wanted my share. They used to take it in turns around the table.
The Whirlwind shakes her head over this. Would she eat it? "They would never give us something like that!"
No, they would not.