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.