Pasta?!

Just before we started this week RAF man and I were talking about what we would eat. One of the things we were trying to decide was whether or not pasta was available and we thought probably not. It's only made from flour, which we certainly have, but would there really have been factories in England making pasta instead of something more useful to the war effort? And surely it wouldn't be worth importing, after all it wasn't something people were used to eating on a regular basis anyway.

Then I opened a wartime recipe book and the first thing I saw was a pasta dish! So of course I had to include it. The sauce is made from tinned tomatoes (which you might well have grown at home and bottled yourself), onion or leek, a handful of parsley and some grated cheese stirred at the end. It's then mixed with the cooked pasta and baked with some breadcrumbs on top.

I don't think I've had anything quite so "un40s" in all the time we've been doing this experiment! It felt like cheating, the only thing missing was some garlic bread and it could have been an ordinary night. A dish like that must have seemed so exciting and different after days of various things with brown gravy.

 

 

 

Mind you, such frivolity couldn't be allowed to last and we returned firmly to the 40s as soon as the pasta was done. "Something with brown gravy" must always be followed by "something with custard" and today it was a very nice crumble. Yum!

 

Dumplings and Jam

Day three in the 1944 kitchen was a meat day! This week we are having some extra nice meat to make a sunday dinner, not a roast of course but something nice. Since meat was rationed by value (rather than weight) choosing something more expensive means we don't get very much and as a result we have had meat free main meals for a lot of the week. Not today though, today we had beef stew and dumplings. The dumplings look so lovely and pale! You really do get very sick of wholemeal flour all the time, making everything you cook heavy and often an unattractive shade of grey. Housewives would sometimes use stockings to sieve the flour, getting a much whiter flour and bran that could be fed to the chickens. It's quite a bit of work but worth it for the odd light, fluffy dumpling!

Pudding was a baked egg custard. I have wartime recipes that use powdered egg and powdered milk but as we have extra milk for the baby and plenty of eggs from the hens I used both fresh. Baked custard is specifically mentioned in a leaflet on feeding an 8-12 month old baby so I thought I should get some practice in!

Every time we do a week on rations I always have a lot of sugar left over and tend to assume I'm saving it for jam making. Well, the strawberries in my garden are ripe so I guess it must be time to use some of that sugar! In the 1940s sugar wasn't considered as unhealthy as it is now, in fact new mothers were reassured that their babies would get a perfectly healthy diet even though the usual amount of sugar wasn't available. That meant that jam wasn't seen as the treat it is today so much as a way of literally preserving fruit, keeping all the goodness to be enjoyed year round. The WI's reputation for jam making came from ladies who couldn't bear to see gardens full of fruit just rotting away while other people went hungry. A lot of the ladies didn't really know how to make jam, certainly not to an acceptable standard, but they had to learn. After all, every single jar made with extra sugar allocations would go into the rationing system. Not one could be kept by the makers, even though they provided the fruit. Somewhere a hard pressed housewife would use her precious coupons to buy a jar of jam that you had made, it would be letting her down dreadfully if the jam wasn't up to scratch. So the ladies of the WI enforced the scrict rules and high standards that are still seen in village shows today. Not because the institute is all about jam, but because it wasn't and had to learn to be.

 

 

 

 

Be prepared, there is a war on you know!

On Tuesdays the 1940s baby has a very un-1940s swimming lesson and it always wears him out. So, in anticipation of his long nap I planned lots of cooking for today! I've been thinking a lot about how a 1940s cook would have organised herself and I'm pretty sure that her pantry wouldn't have been filled with ingredients so much as half made meals.

A modern cook might menu plan, or they might just decide what they want to cook each day. Either way a typical person doesn't do anything about a meal until just before they want to eat it. A few hours before if it's a roast dinner admittedly, but that's a weekend thing in most homes. On a working day dinner takes under an hour from start to finish, probably more like half an hour. Or fifteen minutes if you're lucky.

Typical 40s meals (and 30s meals, since the 1940s housewife learnt to cook in the 30s) take a long time to prepare. There are puddings that need to be steamed for hours, recipes in many stages, and stews that need long slow cooking without an electric slow cooker. Even a cheese sandwich involves making cheese spread, to stretch the ration. I just don't think that a housewife would necessarily do that work right before each meal. If she did she would never leave the kitchen, and without running water or electricity she had a lot of other work to do just running the home, to say nothing of digging a victory garden, caring for her own children or evacuees and helping with war work. She didn't have time to be chained to the kitchen.

I suspect that when a girl was taught to cook she was also taught to organise her cooking, and given the recipes of the time that must have meant thinking ahead. Heating the oven once and filling it full would save time and precious fuel. Heating many pots while the fire's going and putting the all in the hay box at the same time would help keep them all hot, save fuel and get you a few days ahead. Deliberately planning meals that use cold cooked meat and then planning another meal that will give you leftovers, and a bone for soup stock, means you only have to cook meat once. So if there's an air raid, or you have to run to help a neighbour, or the WI receive an urgent request for help, dinner is already at least partly underway.

So today I thought like a 40s housewife. While I was in the kitchen I made several meals, things that reheat well or can be served cold and that take a long time to cook. I'm not in love with the pile of washing up that produces! But then again, if I had to carry water and heat it over the fire I would probably be glad to do the washing up all in one go as well.

Lunch today was a "fried cheese sandwich" with salad.

 

Dinner was a vegetable and egg curry. Obviously eggs were in short supply in town but, as I have said before, we live in the country and would have exchanged our egg ration for chicken feed. So with lots of eggs available we need to use them! I know egg curry is quite traditional but I had never tried it, it does work surprisingly well. I'd be more than happy to have that again, although maybe with a modern curry sauce rather than the 40s version!

 

 

 

For pudding we had apple dumplings and custard. The dumplings are flour, suet, a little bit of sugar and cinnamon made into a dough and wrapped around apple. As apples aren't in season now I used tinned and served the rest of the tin with the dumplings. They were quite heavy but they tasted nice and I'm sure they would be good after a long day of manual work.

 





Crispy batter and stretching the leftovers

Day 1 in 1944 and I'm finding that I've sort of hit my stride as a wartime cook. Admittedly I do use modern shortcuts (an electric slow cooker for example) so I'm not doing everything the way it would have been, but our aim was always to recreate the diet not the workload!

Planning the week's meals was easier this time round, I have more of a feel for what the diet was so I didn't have to spend quite so long looking things up and trying to work out what we have available. I thought I would try a slightly different approach this time. Rather than choosing the cheapest cuts of meat to get lots and stretch it as far as possible I decided to get something nice for Sunday and have more meat free meals during the week.

Lunch today was homemade vegetable soup with a little bit of bacon. It's funny, having thought we would be largely vegetarian this week it turns out that nearly every meal actually does have meat in it! But mostly the meat is just a little bit of something like bacon or ham for flavour, added to another dish. Not the big piece of meat we are used to having as the star of the show. I suppose there weren't very many true vegetarians in the 1940s so there was no need to make a dish entirely meat free, it was all about stretching the rations rather than cutting out animal products.

As it's Monday we had some cooked meat left over from Sunday dinner so I used it to make meat fritters. Just a simple batter with pieces of cold meat dipped in and fried. If they were fried in dripping or bacon fat it would add to the flavour nicely and although you do need quite a bit of fat to deep fry, even in a frying pan, it would all be saved and reused. The fritters were really nice, essentially like a very small battered burger, and made the meat stretch surprisingly far. As they were the leftovers we had would probably have only served one person but made into fritters it was easily enough for two. I'll be making them again.

Introducing the 1940s baby!

So, we started this project as a newly married couple setting up home (take a look at week one to see how that influenced what we ate) and now we are a family!

My 1940s baby will have just turned four months old as we head back to 1944 for the next week of the experiment, we thought we would squeeze another week in before he gets started eating solids.

A child under five years is entitled to 7 pints of milk a week (which could be exchanged for formula powder if needed), and the mother of a baby under 12 months is entitled to another 7 pints. That means that while he's still breastfeeding I am meant to get through 14 pints of milk a week! And I'm strongly advised not to share them with my family, they are meant for me and the baby. In the modern world I usually only have milk in tea so who knows what I'll do with 14 pints of it, maybe I'll make cheese?!

Beyond that it's quite difficult to find out what a baby's (or mum and baby's) rations are. When pregnancy was confirmed you were given a green ration book, which was the book for all children under five. During pregnancy the baby's rations were meant to be eaten by mum, so she got extra meat for example. Then the book was "altered" when the birth was registered, giving all that extra milk for one thing. But I can't find out what else was included. Did you still get a meat ration for the baby? What about fat or cheese? Reading between the lines I suspect that you were expected to start weaning at six months, certainly babies had a generous egg ration from that age.

I'm going to have to do a bit more digging, maybe if I pull out some old childcare manuals I'll get some clues. It is interesting stuff, if anyone has any leads do sent them my way!

Run Rabbit, Run (but not too fast!)

Day five in the 1943 kitchen and the haybox slowcooker is out again.

This time it's rabbit stew. So far I have avoided using rabbit, even though we have a considerable number invading our garden and eating the veg patch every night, because it seemed like cheating to have meat that was extra to the rations. But it's now week three so I think we have shown that we can stick to the allotted amount, and our 1940s counterparts would have had no hesitation in shooting the rabbits and saving the veg from all those tiny teeth!

Actually, I did cheat a bit here. We have a local butcher who sells rabbit (the other customers always look at me strangely when I buy it for some reason) but I forgot about half day closing and he was shut when I went to get one. I suppose I should have reacted as a wartime housewife would have and come up with a meatless meal but I kind of wanted to include rabbit this week, for something different to talk about if nothing else! So I used the next best thing, chicken thigh. Some people think it's indistinguishable from rabbit, personally I disagree. But it is close enough.

There were lots of interesting recipes for rabbit, depending partly on it's age (apparently you can judge that by squeezing the skull to see if it's soft - not for the squeamish). Boiling was good for an older animal and you could then take your boiled meat and put it in dumplings, make potted meat, or just serve with parsley sauce. I went for a simple stew with vegetables, parsley, salt and pepper and stock, served with dumplings (brown ones, that wheatmeal flour gets into everything!)

After dinner we had hot cocoa. Interestingly the British Restaurants always served a hot drink but there was only one option, either tea, coffee (made with extract) or cocoa. Can you imagine your average working man being told that the only available drink with lunch was chocolate? I'm not really sure how well that would go down now, but then it was a good way to get people to have lots of nutritious milk. Being pregnant in 1943 means I'm meant to have 10 pints of milk a week so I have decided to adopt the same policy. There have to be some advantages, right?

How breadcrumbs can make a meal

It's amazing the things you can make a meal out of really.

During the 40s with cheese in such short supply housewives were advised never to serve cheese with bread or biscuits. Something like that wouldn't be much more than a snack, or perhaps a teatime meal that could easily be replaced with something else. Instead the cheese ration was viewed more along the lines of a different type of meat, something to be made into a tasty main meal. Today we had cheese pudding, which obviously had quite a lot of cheese in it, the majority of our weekly ration in fact, but the rest of the pudding was quite interesting.

Basically it was made from stale bread. It was meant to be breadcrumbs but I just tore the bread into small pieces, let those out to dry for a while and used them as they were. You pour hot milk over the bread with some seasoning and leave it to sit for half an hour, by which time it will have gone rather porridgey. Because my bread was in lumps rather than crumbs I gave it a stir with a wooden spoon and it soon went smooth. Then you mix in the grated cheese, a beaten egg (or reconstituted dried egg) and a little margarine, put the whole soggy mess in a greased pudding basin or pie dish and bake it in the oven. I stirred some chives in as well since the garden is full of them and put some chopped tomato on top.

I honestly had no idea how this one would turn out, would it just be a stodgy, soggy mess with all the "wheatmeal" bread and milk? Would it be a sort of bread sauce with no texture? Or taste a bit like a cheese toasty? I handed RAF man his plate a bit apologetically and hoped it would prove edible!

It turned out to be really nice! I'll admit it isn't my new favourite food or anything but I would be more than happy to make it again. It was quick, easy, tasty (the crispy bits round the edges were especially good!) and a great dish to have up your sleeve when it seems like there is nothing in the house. I definitely suggest that you give it a go!

PS
If anybody is wondering where RAF man got his name, or where you can see him in action, do go and check out The Tail End Charlies.