The first thought that comes to mind when I think of the food we had at the school was that it was wholesome but not extravagant bland but not characterless; something that one gets well used to while at the school but would not like to go back to later. Like most things are in life it was a mixed bag.
During the vacations ,this was one aspect that visiting mamas and mamis , these days called uncles / aunts, had lots of questions to ask about. After the first question “Why Sainik School?” the next query invariably went like “Kalambara enna poduva ?” . The question literally translates to “what do they put in in morning ?“. Even in Tamil it sounds more like feeding cattle or horses than children. I presume it meant a lack of choice and feeding of children en masse. Then other questions follow like whether it would be like Aathu saappadu, meaning home cooked food. Some go into the details of the kind of rice and cooking oil used. In a typical brahmin household parboiled rice for meals was sheer blasphemy, and so were certain types of cooking oil. I generally answered in monosyllables in yes or no format . Honestly I never knew what I was eating except the name used for the final form. Khaja was a sweet served generally on Saturdays ; I could fairly describe what it looked like and tasted like but if someone were to ask me whether it was made of atta or maida , dalda or groundnut oil, sugar or jaggery and so on I was totally clueless.
I was never a foodie and never cared to remember what I had for the previous meal and what I am likely to have for the next meal. It is quite unlike my children who would ask about the menu for dinner at the breakfast table and could say with authority , “no not Chinese, we just had it three days back!”. Till date, I can have idli or bread ,day after day without getting bored or even repeat the breakfast fare for lunch. I wonder if the trend started at the school where the menu was fixed for years together ! Can’t really say that as I see many of my then class mates now turned to greedy gourmands . Who knows!
Coming back to the main idea of what we ate at school, I’ll go over some of the unique features and dishes rather than the weekly menu that was repeated for forty weeks in a year; considering that about 12 weeks went off in vacations. Every place has some unique signature dishes . If you ever come across an Ex NDA , someone who has been through its haloed campus in the last seventy years of its existence , ask him about cold coffee, scrambled eggs, or tipsy pudding. You will find an instant gleam in the eyes followed by cartwheels and back-flips for the next 5-10 minutes!
We too had some unforgettable dishes like cutlets, Jaangri, mysorepak and so on. More then the dish itself, it is the association of a weekday with a particular item that one remembers fondly; Thursaday Jaangri ,Fridays Cutlets, Saturdays idli & Khaja , Sundays Dosai and Mysorepak and so on. Items like sweets and cutlets and Dosais were controlled items while rice and sambaar /daal were unlimited. Bread for breakfast, as I recall, fell somewhere in between highly controlled and totally decontrolled. There was a default number of four slices per head which was more than enough for people like me and there were boys who, always asked for more like Oliver Twist. Butter , Jam and milk were limited in any case so one learnt to stretch these items through half a loaf of bread or more. There was a peculiar way of eating bread in that slices were further broken into small bits and stuffed into half a tumbler of milk. It is amazing to learn how many slices can be stuffed that way to be eaten with a spoon like some kind of pudding.
I know I have missed out totally on meat dishes, as those days I scrupulously avoided non veg stuff including eggs. The kind of vegetarian substitutes we used to get were pathetic; a handful of monkey-nuts, a spoon of butter or some such thing; nothing really to write home about. The potato cutlet in place of fish cutlet was an exception.
There were some guys who were very choosy and would demand bread in place of idli ; but by and large, most of us were omnivorous. Anything on the table was demolished with gusto, with a keen eye on what else could be got from neighbours and / or a helpful waiter.
If you ask anyone , what was the single most despised item of food, it is likely to be something we called “chukka roti”. Much later in life I learnt that it was “sookha roti” in hindi meaning dry bread with no oil or ghee, that became “chukka roti “ for us Tamilians. It was covered with powdery atta ,dry and bitter . On hindsight it must have been made through subsidized govt supplied wheat flour. Be that as it may, I never recall leaving anything on my plate ; sweet, sour, burnt or bitter. The practice stands till today.
One can’t ignore that we are all prisoners of our times. Those were the days when most people consumed food from Public Distribution System and open market was expensive . There was no junk food . Be it at home or the school ,one waited for the regular meal times and were not too picky about food . Nothing was wasted and anything edible was always welcome. Today , when I go back to the Boys Mess or cadets’ Mess as they call it now, I tend to compare it with the food at NDA or other residential schools. But looking through the eyes of a young boy in the 70s, I must say, it was one of the best fares one had as a child.