wartime memories

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Wartime Rations – Day Thirteen

With enough bacon saved for tomorrow’s breakfast, we finished up our meat ration tonight with lamb chops. I’d also saved enough cheese to make scalloped potatoes, so it was all very rich and delicious.

Lamb chops

Pudding was a special request repeat of the bread pudding from last week.  Once again I used the recipe from The 1940s Experiment Website. Both pudding and website are fabulous, so please check them out.

Bread pudding 2

Given that my two week experiment eating wartime rations is coming to an end, here are some of Anne’s thoughts about VE Day and the wind down of the war in Britain.

From Anne:

Well, there we were on VE Day: church bells rang, hooters hooted, and loudspeakers belted out the song of the day – ‘I’m going to get lit up when the lights go up in London – I’m going to get so lit up, I’ll be visible for miles’ and the cheering and dancing went on for hours.

But there was still the Far East and the Yellow Peril to be dealt with, so after the parties it was back to work, and back to wartime food AND rationing. The Atlantic was as far as possible cleared of German subs and minefields so we could have started importing more, but by now the country was so impoverished that we couldn’t do much more than continue importing the same wartime amounts of staples – tea, sugar, etc.

The islolationists in USA had kept them out of hostilities until Pearl Harbour, though we’d had the benefit (huh!) of Lend-Lease without which I have to admit, we probably would have been starved of food and armaments. The shock of the bill for the L-L supplies came shortly after the end of the European fighting, so poor Mr Atlee, with all his plans for tremendous social changes, had to drop many of them. Did you know we didn’t finish paying off that gargantuan debt till about 2004? However, he managed to give us the Health Service.

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Wartime Rations – Day Twelve

Had the usual – porridge – for breakfast, with soup and the last of the meat pie for lunch.

Dinner was macaroni – again – but now that I’m getting the hang of how to tease out the rations, I added fried bacon and onions to the sauce. A real guilty pleasure.

Macaroni2

Anne’s memories today are in response to two questions I posed yesterday about storing and reheating food (thank heavens for fridges and microwaves) and also treats at the cinema.

Over to Anne:

As far as I remember, it was a case of Bring your Own treats (at the cinema).  I think the ‘ice cream girls’ who paraded the aisles during the intervals had probably disappeared to the Services or factories.  For myself, it was something from Colquhoun’s (the bakery beneath the flat in Byres Road) with cash I’d swapped my sweet coupons for! or perhaps an apple  or a scrubbed carrot.  From Colquhoun’s it would depend on the state of my purse – most likely a sausage roll or (the best treat for me) a mutton pie   You don’t seem to be suffering from feeling hungry, but I did – but then I was a growing girl!

Without a fridge, especially in the summer, it was difficult to keep meat fresh – cooked or uncooked.  All I had as a young wife was a ‘meat safe’ which was just a ‘box’ of wire to keep flies off.  I kept it in the coolest room, in the shade, and where it might catch any draught going.  I had been well warned by Mother that I should not re-heat cooked meat after it had cooled unless it was a stew or something that I could bring back to the boil again – I’d run a strong risk of its containing bacteria.  

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Wartime Rations – Day Eleven

If I was a sensible wartime housewife, I’d have made mince and potatoes for dinner last night and then put the leftovers into a pie to provide a bit of variety for tonight’s meal. As it is, I’ve just had some leftover pie –  having already had some for lunch, AND with plenty more remaining for tomorrow – so I’m afraid it’s a rather repetitive photo today.

Meat pie2

It does go to show, however, that with little cold storage back then (except for larders in the winter) housewives must have had to plan ahead so as not to waste food.  Or could they plan ahead if they had to shop daily and food wasn’t always available on that day?  Hmmm.

We’re off to the movies tonight. Normally I’d have some popcorn, but I’m so full from these wartime meals that it’s unlikely I’ll eat anything more before breakfast.  But it did get me thinking; Did they sell treats at the cinema during the war?  (Could they, if sweets were rationed?)  Will need to ask Anne about that.

The other thing I haven’t eaten during this experiment is fish. I’d been saving this entry of Anne’s until then, but just in case I don’t get around to eating any before Sunday, here it is.

From Anne:

Fresh fish was not rationed, but supplies were limited – it was not safe for boats to go beyond a narrow strip of coastal water, and long queues formed outside a shop that displayed any.

Fishmongers then also sold chickens, and Mother would beg the bits that got cut off when they were being prepared for sale – necks, intestines, claws etc. The claws she would wash, then scald to clean them and loosen the scales; I can remember the job of scraping the scales off.  Then they were ready to go into the more or less permanent stock pot along with any other edible scraps; there was always soup to make from Dad’s veg.

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Wartime Rations – Day Ten

Tonight’s meal had the potential to be a disaster.

“We’re having minced beef pie, for dinner,” says I.

‘Hope it’s not like the pie my mother made,” my husband replies.  “I detested – detested – it.”

(To be honest, I never much liked my mum’s mince pie either.)

Strike one.

“I’d like to have something other than potatoes tonight,” says I. (I’m a bit sick of them.) “Is cauliflower with parsley sauce okay?”  What he hears is the second sentence, not the first, so when I served up a meal with no potatoes he produced a bit of a pouty lip.

Fortunately, the beef pie was goooood.

Mince Pie

For pudding I really wanted rice pudding, but according to Anne (see below) that wasn’t available.  I’ve been trying everywhere to get semolina instead, but couldn’t find what I needed. So, I don’t know if it was a cheat or not, but we had tapioca with a splodge of strawberry jam.   We also nibbled on a few fresh strawberries afterwards. At this time of year they are so sweet and juicy.

Tapioca

I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying having pudding every evening.  In ‘real life’ I rarely ever make them and was a bit anxious when I stood on the scales this morning.  Turns out I’ve lost 3 lbs since starting this eating regime. I can honestly – honestly – say I’ve never felt hungry once.

A few thoughts on pudding and fruit from Anne.

RICE pudding?  No, no.  You can only have semolina (unless you stocked up before September 39).  The best make of semolina was from the Marshall factories and was called Farola, but I don’t know when it came on to the shelves; a check on Wikipedia says Marshalls introduced their short-cut macaroni in 1935, but doesn’t give a date for the introduction of Farola.

Strawberries, yes – but I don’t know if they reached the whole of the UK.  In Kippen there was a huge fruit growers and I earned a lot of pocket money there.  Lots of children helped with that harvest and most went for the big fruits like strawberries because they were allowed to eat some while they picked!  I, on the other hand went for small ones – black and red currants, or jaggy ones – gooseberries, because the pay for those was six times that of strawberries.  Unlike you, I love gooseberries so did eat when I got to the big juicy dessert ones – red or yellow.   I suppose  you got these products in shops local to such nurseries – or as far as the petrol allocation let you take them.  

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Wartime Rations – Day Nine

Another winner! My son didn’t have time to go home for dinner tonight between work and going to his night class, so I invited him over to share our rations. “It’ll be okay,” I assured him, but I’m not sure he was convinced.  Fortunately the three course dinner was a hit.

Pea soupWe started with vegetable soup made with dried peas instead of my usual lentils, followed by sausages, baked potato with butter, carrot/parsnip mash and raw broccoli. (My husband won’t eat green vegetables if they’ve been cooked.)

Bangers and mash

Sausages weren’t rationed during the war, but their meat content was very low with most of the filler being bread.

bread pudding

For pudding I decided on Bread Pudding and it was delicious.  I got the recipe from The 1940s  Experiment.com website.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do. There is so much fascinating content to be found there.

I haven’t been at all hungry on my rations.  In fact, I forgot to eat lunch today because I was still full from a late-ish breakfast of porridge and toast. But I can’t pretend I’m really experiencing what it must have been like during the war. Even though a food might be on the ration – eg eggs – if there weren’t any to be had, you did without. Sometimes the shortage lasted one week, often more. In that case it was make do and mend, and in that case, as Anne comments below, mothers usually denied themselves for their families.

From Anne:

Mothers, I am sure, became thinner before anyone else, though children and expectant mums got extra milk, vitamins and some rather horrid concentrated orange juice; sometimes there were eggs for ‘blue books only’. (Blue covers denoted children’s ration books.)

Soap and washing powders were rationed too. That wasn’t a problem to us in Glasgow. With its wonderfully soft water the ration was more than enough; in fact Mother used to send unused soap coupons to her family in the hard water areas of the Midlands who were finding the allocation too small.

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Wartime Rations – Day Eight

My husband wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea when I asked him to join me in my second week of eating wartime rations, but give him credit, he’s agreed to play along.  It helped, I think, that I told him he could ‘pretend to eat at the Savoy’ every lunchtime when he was at work and rationing would be limited to meals at home.  Still, he was a bit anxious when he walked through the door this evening to discover what his rations would be. Homemade burger, bubble and squeak, mashed carrots, followed by apple crumble.

Burgerapple crumble

Phew.  Relief.  He finished all his main course  – “I don’t remember my mum ever making bubble and squeak”  – and asked for seconds of the pudding.  (And there’s still some left over for my lunch tomorrow.)

When I did my food shopping for the week this morning, I discovered two things: 1) my bill was a fraction of the usual weekly cost. 2) I only shopped the ‘perimeter’, which is the healthiest way to shop.

The one thing that put my bill up was the meat for one of my dogs.  He’s very elderly (15) and reluctant to eat anything now unless it’s homemade. (He’s eating the equivalent of all my meat rations – and then some – in one day!)  It got me to wondering what happened to pets during the war.  When I did some research, it made for some very sobering reading. Over four hundred thousand dogs and cats were euthanized in the first few days of World War 2.

Humans aren’t the only ones to make sacrifices during wartime. If you’re ever in London, check out the Animal War Memorial in Park Lane close to the junction of Oxford Street and Bayswater Road. It’s a very moving tribute to those proud, beautiful animals.

war memorial

To lighten the mood, and given my husband is lunching at ‘the Savoy’ all week, here’s an ‘eating out’ memory from Anne:

Restaurants were still open and supplied meals, but the plates were not well filled and if you didn’t get there early you would find most things scored off the menu, and were left with some sort of ‘savoury pie’ of mixed veg and herbs with a few breadcrumbs scattered over the top.  Then there were the ‘British Restaurants’ set up by the Ministry of Food; I never ate in one but the word went round that the meals were barely acceptable. Fish & Chip shops got a quota of fish and queues formed well before they opened; after it had been sold there were only a few sausages (mostly of bread) or meat-or-fish-cakes of dubious content.  After that it was chips with nothing.  The shops sometimes didn’t open at all – days when there was no fish on the market.  Fishing could only be done in near coastal waters and they didn’t always manage to catch anything.

I was still at school in 1939 and when I was evacuated the school was many miles away so I had to eat in the school canteen – not very inspiring.  I can remember macaroni cheese without much cheese and being many times faced with a plateful of mash alongside a small piece of Cheddar and some over-boiled cabbage, often followed by semolina with a dab of jam in the middle.  But we ate it all.

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Wartime Rations – Day Seven

Here in Canada it’s Mother’s Day.  My daughter and her husband invited us round for a glorious brunch, and there was no way I was going to insist, ‘I can only eat wartime rations’. Still, I might have felt a bit guilty about it had I not come across the following book. It appears that not quite everyone during the war was ‘In it together‘.  At least, not if you had money. So today I’m ‘pretending’ I had breakfast at the Savoy.

For dinner tonight… bliss.  A bacon sandwich, salad and stewed rhubarb.

Bacon Sandwich

The perfect end to the perfect day.

My original plan was to eat wartime rations for only one week, but I’ve decided to go for two as I feel I’m only just getting into the swing of things.  And I’ve persuaded my husband to join in – sort of.  He’ll be eating lunch out while he’s at work – just as people ate out during the war without it affecting their rations.  But if I can add his rations to mine then maybe I’ll have a little more flexibility in my food planning this week.

Besides, Anne still has some great memories to relate.

In the light of having a ‘luxury’ day, here’s one about the time her big brother brought home such a treat.  Known to the family as Alex, his professional name was Percy Huggins.  If there are any golf aficionados out there, they might recognise him as The Voice of Scottish Golf from the 50s through the 70s.

Alec & Anne crop

After Alex had done many, many more than the stipulated number of bombing flights he was transferred to the Azores on anti-submarine patrol.  Here there were bananas, and when he came home on leave (after VE Day), managed to bring us a few – Mother made sure their skins were put right on top of the rubbish bins so that when the lid was lifted the dustmen could wonder at them!

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Wartime Rations – Day Six

It’s been a really busy day, so here’s a quick catch-up.

Joy, oh joy!  After a week of porridge for breakfast, this morning I sat down to a boiled egg and toast.  Protein  – for breakfast  – yayyy!    Lunch was leftover beef hot-pot and crumble from yesterday.

MacaroniScones

And this evening?  A huge plate of macaroni, salad and some warm home made scones with butter and jam. What more could anyone ask for, really.

Memories from Anne:

In summer, Mother bottled anything that could be bottled, and winters would have been very dull without the tomatoes, plums, beetroot etc that she’d done in the summer.  These things disappeared from shops once their season was over – very little fresh stuff was imported.  Finding sealable jars was the problem; most factories were engaged on munitions and the servicemen’s needs and shop windows were pretty empty; so the jars were handled very gently.  Remember, this was a time before fridges and freezers, so bottling was really all the preserving you could do.

If you have any family memories you would like to share of the Home Front in World War Two, please add them to the comment box.

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Wartime Rations – Day Five

Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939.  Although that declaration was followed by fighting in Norway and U-boat attacks on British ships in the Atlantic, so little happened for the next few months, that people in the UK started referring to it as The Bore War.

That all changed on Friday, May 10th 1940.  At 2am, the Germans invaded the Low Countries.  Three weeks later their grip on mainland Europe became absolute when the last soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force – including my dad – were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk.   It would be four long years before the British Army set foot on French soil again.

In 2009 I walked the 22 kilometre length of the Dunkirk beach with a friend. Unknowingly at the time, I took this photo of his dog tags very close to the spot where he actually stepped out on to the sands.

dunkirk beach

Getting back to my rations today.  No surprises when I tell you I had porridge for breakfast, eh?  Lunch was leftover Woolton Pie from last night with some Bubble and Squeak.  And then, treat of all treats – I had a piece of chocolate this afternoon.  My sweet ration is 3ozs of sweets/chocolate a week and I can’t tell you how wonderful that one single ounce of chocolate tasted.

Dinner was Beef Hot Pot and Beetroot (I’m really getting to like beetroot) followed by Apple and Rhubarb Crumble. Filling and tasty.

Rhubarb crumble Beef hotpot

A friend was telling me about how her father, who grew up in the countryside on the Isle of Wight during the war, was able to eat an egg for breakfast every day. When he got married and moved to the mainland, he was quite upset to discover his ration was now down to one egg per week – if they were even available.   When I mentioned this to Anne, she told me the following story.  I’ve never heard it before, and I think it’s a classic.

From Anne.

About the man from the IoW and his eggs – Yes, I’m sure that country folk fared better than us townies.  It isn’t easy to raise chickens in a city tenement, or to pot a rabbit or a pheasant with a shotgun.  Once when I was wandering alongside a stream in Kippen I came across a shot pheasant, dead but still warm, grabbed it and hid it under my coat till I got back to the house.  Mary (my mum) said she had no idea how to start preparing it so I’d better get on the bus to Glasgow and take it home.  Once there, I got the job of stripping off the feathers and then Mum, Dad & I had a good meal.  Took some of the best feathers back to Kippen to play cowboys and Indians.

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Wartime Rations – Day Four

Dinner tonight (after my usual breakfast and lunch) was Woolton Pie.  Trust me, an hour ago, things weren’t looking good on the cooking front.  I’ve never been great at making pastry, so attempting potato pastry for the first time… Let’s just say, I think it will take a bit of practice.

Woolton pie

But then, when I actually sat down to eat, things improved.  I certainly can’t complain about being hungry eating wartime rations.  In fact, I couldn’t finish my meal tonight, not because it tasted bad  –  despite how it looked, it ended up being pretty good after all – but because there was so much of it.

Britain faced several hard years of austerity after the war when even bread and potatoes became rationed, but after that, slowly  – slowly – things started to improve, although it wasn’t until July 4th, 1954 that rationing finally ended.  Fourteen years of rationing. Hard to imagine.

Which got me wondering when rationing ended in France and Germany, so I checked it out on Wikipedia: France in October 1945 and in Germany in 1950!  Can you imagine how galling that news must have for the British population. The Daily Mail newspaper commented, ‘Germany – the battered, shattered, defeated Germany – is to abolish rationing… Austrian shops are bulging with goods that the women of victorious Britain would like to see.’

Thoughts from Anne:

I married in the summer of 1947 and found myself with a kitchen when rationing was still quite severe.  At the butchers’, the butcher chose for you: he delivered a half pound of mince on Tuesday and two not very large lamb chops on Friday, and that was it for the week.  Rob came along in October 1948, but Blue Book rations had gone up a bit by the time he started having a little solid food – starting with fruit at about 3 months.  I can’t remember whether or not tins of prepared baby foods were available then or not, all I know is that I spent hours shoving fruit and veg through a fine strainer.

If you have any family stories of wartime rationing, please send them to me.  I would love to hear them.