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.