The 1940s Experiment

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The Wartime Woman

Having just been to see the film Monuments Men this afternoon, I’m back in WW2 mode!  But this time with a little bit of a twist.

During my research for my month of eating rations in January, I came across these two books.

Wartime woman

The interesting twist on both these books is that not only do they give you a sense of what life was like for women during WW2, but they also bring it up to date: How to be a wartime woman in the 21st Century.

Please check them out.

The Ministry of Food and Wartime Housewife.

Also, here are two great websites.  The first concentrates mostly on wartime recipes, the second (which I only discovered last week) examines women’s lives in the 30s and 40s with an interesting emphasis on the Australian experience.

I highly recommend both of them.

The 1940s Experiment

The Wartime Woman

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Wartime Rations – Day 3

I’ve had a really busy day, so I’m afraid this is going to be a short post talking only about today’s rations. The one thing I’ve discovered about eating fresh wartime food is that cooking it takes up quite a bit of time.  Especially when I’m trying out new recipes.

Breakfast and lunch were the usual – toast for breakfast, then soup, a sandwich and fruit for lunch.

Soup

I experimented with dinner tonight. With not a huge variety of vegetables available at this time of year during wartime, I decided to try out a recipe for Brussels Sprouts soup which I found in The Glasgow Cookery Book. My first reaction was Ewwww.  But you know what?  It was absolutely delicious.  (Apologies for the blurred photo.) I only made enough for three small servings (one each tonight and one for my lunch tomorrow) but I wish I’d made more and will definitely ‘supersize’ it next time!

I’ve never cooked with powdered eggs before, so tonight I thought I would make a bacon/onion/cheese frittata as I didn’t have time (or the egginclination) to make a quiche pastry from scratch. To be honest, it didn’t look great, but tasted okay.  Not great, just okay. Thank goodness for the onion and bacon to give it flavour.  However the Curried Potatoes that I took from The 1940s Experiment website were a great hit and very simple – although I did miss out the oatmeal.  (Oops! I just pressed the publish button by mistake and don’t know how to undo it, so some people reading this might only get half the blog!!)

For dessert we had individual apple crumbles again.

As I said above, preparing and cooking all this homemade food from scratch is very time consuming… but the smell in the house is fabulous.  A visitor has just walked in the door – my husband and I finished eating about 30 minutes ago – and her first comment was, “Wow, something smells good.”

Even more important, it tastes good!