So much has changed in the past few decades, with the rapid advances in technology, and not least, how children learn at school.

Not only has the way they study been radically overhauled, but much of the subject matter is also unrecognisable compared to what we learned 50 years ago.

Some of the practical subjects children study at school have simply moved with the times.

For example, when we were upper school students, the boys learned woodwork, metalwork and motor mechanics, while the girls were offered lessons in cookery and needlework – or ‘home economics’ as was the blanket term for all things a potential ‘domestic goddess’ might need to know.

Girls were offered lessons in ‘home economics’ which taught them everything from managing finances in the home to consumer issues, nutrition and food preparation (Image: Newsquest)

These days, there is an all-round interest in cooking – largely due to popular TV shows such as The Great British Bake Off, and YouTube ‘cooks’ who video themselves incessantly making everything from cheese on toast to elaborate fermented concoctions.

But back in the 1970s and 80s, cookery classes were a very different experience.

My first cookery lessons, apart from looking at mum’s Be-Ro cookery book, were at middle school when I was nine years old.

There were both boys and girls in the cookery classes. I use the term ‘cookery’ rather loosely here, given that one of the classes was on how to polish silver.

We had to bring something from home to clean. It’s not as if any of us owned anything remotely valuable, plus we were highly unlikely to pursue careers at Downton Abbey-style stately homes.

So, I persuaded my mum to let me borrow an old pewter mug that belonged to my dad.

Somehow, we whiled away a whole lesson with tins of ‘Duraglit’ wire wool in hand, and polished until we could see our faces in our chosen ornament.

One of the home economics classes taught Emma and her classmates how to polish silver using ‘Duraglit’ (Image: Contributed)

Those who didn’t have anything to bring from home were tasked with polishing the teacher’s silver – quite a savvy move by her, now I come to think of it!

Our school cookery room left a lot to be desired.

One day, when my friend Lisa and I were searching for washing-up products, we made a rather disturbing discovery of a mouse trap in the cupboard under the sink.

I then made the fatal mistake of telling my mum, and from henceforth, she refused point-blank to eat anything that I’d made at school.

Not that our culinary creations were that appetising to start with, you understand.

But the thought of a tiny four-legged creature having scampered merrily over the mixing bowls made our ‘melting moment’ biscuits even less appealing.

Once we made scrambled eggs on toast, complete with the crusts cut off and a fancy little cress garnish.

Some students made rather more sophisticated dishes than scrambled egg on toast and junket (Image: Newsquest)

I cushioned my creation over multiple bumps as we wended our way home in ‘The Cronk’ double-decker bus.

Having somehow managed to ferry my dish home relatively unscathed, I was then greeted at the door by mum who enthusiastically snatched the scrambled egg on toast from my hands.

I was initially thrilled at her seeming eagerness to tuck in, only to be brought back down to earth as my creation was hurled unceremoniously from the kitchen window to the waiting ducks outside – all in one seamless move!

This became the pattern for all of my ‘bakes’, with mum saying: “You only have yourself to blame for telling me about the mice,” which was a fair point really.

Another bizarre dish we ‘cooked’ was junket – a type of set dessert, made by curdling milk with rennet, which involved a soluble tablet.

Of course, nobody’s junkets set in the allotted timeframe, which left a class-full of children tasked with carrying a bowl of slop home without a major tsunami-style spillage.

School cookery classes were often a fun experience and taught valuable life skills, long before the internet was invented (Image: Newsquest)

By the time we got to upper school, we made more elaborate dishes and there were no mice in sight – not that this made mum any less suspicious.

We baked all the favourites such as pineapple upside-down cake and apple crumble. It was also the heyday of cooking with ‘margarine’ – something I absolutely hated.

The cookery teacher was a wiry little Scottish lady who told me in no uncertain terms that I would “get rickets (a childhood disease that caused weak bones) if I didn’t eat my marg”.

From that day hence, the cookery teacher became known as Marg Rickets.

Upper school cookery classes were stressful, as I shared a unit with my best friend and another girl who was, to put it politely, a bit of a menace.

On one occasion, she submerged the whole food mixer, plug and all, in the washing-up bowl after smothering it in cake batter.

I then spent the whole day dreading that the next pupil to use it might electrocute themselves.

Many schools had cookery lessons for boys and girls – even in the 1970s (Image: Newsquest)

Then there was the time we laboured over ‘stargazey’ pizza – a modern take on a Cornish pie made with pilchards with heads pointing upwards towards the stars.

It was pretty hard to emulate in pizza form – especially with tinned sardines.

Having broken the ‘key’ to open the sardine tin, instead of painstakingly laying the fish in their proposed formation, my friend scraped the contents into a heap in the centre of the pizza dough and disguised it with cheese.

Then, adding insult to injury, she surreptitiously swapped it with my much more polished version and gained an ‘A’ grade.

Meanwhile, I got a D-minus for her ‘no-gazey’ version, which Marg Rickets described as a “shameful, sorry mess.”

Do you remember having cookery lessons at school? What were some of your finest (or worst) creations? Write to me with your cookery class recollections and pictures at ebrennanhere@gmail.com.

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On another occasion, when my friend was putting sausage rolls in to bake, she accidentally touched the hot oven door and dropped the tray.

We hurriedly scraped the sticky pastry-clad sausage meat from the floor, complete with balls of fluff from under the stove.

Once baked, I watched the malformed sausage splodges – and my classmate – like a hawk. After pizza-gate, there was no way I was taking the wrap for those as well!