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.
I was taught to cook in the 1970s by a lady who would have been a young woman during WWII. We were taught menu planning, nutrition and a 'waste not, want not' approach which I still adopt today. She used to inspect our potato peelings to be sure the parings were wafer thin!
ReplyDeleteIsn't it interesting? These days if you get taught cooking at all it's likely to be things like how to chop an onion or make a sauce, not the skill of organising the kitchen.
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