An excellent slideshow of photos from a school cafeteria in Queens.

My strongest school lunch memories go back to elementary school, because junior high involved unremarkable pre-wrapped sandwiches and unremarkable sandwiches from home, and by high school I was spending lunch breaks in the library or in the stairwell behind the social studies department.

Our elementary school cafeteria was the ground floor of the convent; the elderly sisters lived upstairs, slowly forgetting their English. The cafeteria smelled, always, like soup and cleaning spray and candle wax. Food was prepared and served by Joel, the blind chef, and his team of fiftysomething French-Canadian ladies — some nuns, some non-nuns.

I loved the food they served. Personal favorites included shepherd’s pie made with salty-sweet canned creamed corn; sliced pickled beets, ditto from a can; fish chowder, which also starred in the annual fish chowder supper fundraising event; and apple crisp, which contained very little cinnamon and a lot of white sugar.

This was precisely the right food to feed middle-class Catholic children in central Maine in the 1980s, in case you were wondering.

Related: pate chinois, alt. term for shepherd’s pie. And an accurate recipe (though in my cafeteria, the topping included a dusting of sweet paprika, which sank into the potatoes and formed a thin orange layer that could be peeled off, provided the tray had been out long enough to congeal.)