Thriftlady's wartime experiment

thriftlady_2

I've been vaguely wondering about doing it again actually, not promising anything, but maybe another couple of weeks on the rations......

Glad folks are still enjoying the thread;)

thriftlady_2

mama67 wrote: »

DS2 is having a class trip to Eden Camp in North Yorkshire as they are studying WW2. www.edencamp.co.uk

We actually went last summer whilst staying near Pickering.Very good day out, have the Mess hall up and running as the restaurant serving some wartime foods.
Would say be there for opening time as you will easily fill the day.

.

Ooh, we're staying near Robin Hood's Bay this summer, we'll definitely be visiting , thanks for the link mama67:T

dawn1980

This was a really intereseting thread. I found it when googling for information about cheaper cooking and war rations. I read the whole thread and really enjoyed all of the information. Especially peoples memories.

I ordered the three books by marguirite patten. Can't wait for them to arrive.
Thankyou for an interesting read.

pipkin71

thriftlady wrote: »

‘Grow fit not fat on your wartime diet ! Cut out ‘extras’; cut out waste; don’t eat more than you need.
You’ll save yourself money; you’ll save valuable cargo space which is needed for munitions and you’ll feel fitter than you ever felt before.’

Ministry of Food Bulletin


Well, that about sums up why I’m feeding my family on wartime rations this week and, all being well next week and maybe beyond. I’m not so worried about cargo space, but the rest of the above bulletin is very appropriate.

I’ve always been fascinated by the home front and have amassed a collection of articles and books on the subject. One of the first was an article in the BBC Good Food mag back in 1998 which challenged a family to manage for a week on rations. There was a more recent article in Good Housekeeping doing the same thing but marking the 50th anniversary of the end of rationing. Another interesting article is this one –http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3847041.stm
Because the amounts of rationed food varied throughout the war it is difficult to be completely accurate and authentic but I’ll do my best. Also sometimes it was difficult to get hold of non-rationed foods like onions, fish and sausages. I won’t have this problem as, let’s face it, it isn’t difficult to get hold of any foodstuff you like nowadays.

These are the weekly rations for one adult
Meat –this was rationed in money not by weight but it was roughly equivalent to 2 lamb/pork chops or 12 oz mince/stewing steak or you could combine rations to buy a decent sized joint. Chicken was scarce. Offal and sausages were not rationed but hard to get. Wild game such as rabbit was not rationed.
Milk (whole only available)- 3 pints
Sugar- ½ lb
Butter – 2 oz
Margarine – 4 oz
Cooking fat (dripping/lard) – 3 oz
Cheese (English hard cheese) – 3 oz
Bacon and ham -4 oz
Eggs -1
Dried egg -¼ packet (equivalent to 3 eggs)
Sweets and chocolate -2 oz
Jam- 3 oz
Tea -2 oz (18 teabags)

There was a points system -16 per person per month –which allowed you to buy tinned goods, orange juice, cereals, rice and pulses.
Off ration were: bread (though not after the war), potatoes, oats, fresh fish, and homegrown fruit and veg.



For our family of 2 adults and 3 children I’ve made some adjustments to the rations –Ok I’m cheating a bit

Meat- 3½ lbs
Milk -16½ pints (children between 5-18 got 3½ pints)
Sugar -2½ lbs (I doubt we’ll use all this)
Butter – 30 oz –this is where I’m cheating, I’m taking my marge as butter too. I hate marge and prefer natural ingredients and since the calories are the same it won’t affect the nutritional aspect of the experiment. 30 oz is 3 packs plus a bit.
Cooking fat -15 oz
Cheese -15 oz
Bacon and ham -20 oz (this week we’re having 8 oz ham and12 oz bacon)
Eggs – a tricky one -dd is allergic as you probably know, so the question is, would we have got her ration and divided it between the rest of us or would she have got extra cheese or meat instead ? I’ve decided not to take it or substitute anything else for her as we’re probably going to be cheating quite a bit anyway.
I’m also undecided about taking the dried egg as fresh, because from a nutritional pov there’s no difference in dried egg and fresh eggs. So if I take the 3 dried eggs as fresh we have 16 which I’ll be pushed to use. We’ll see, I don’t really want to make egg dishes for 4 of us and something else for dd.
Sweets and chocolate -15 oz ! this is really more than we have in a week, so no problem.
Jam – 10 oz, that sounds like a lot but ds1 is pretty liberal with the stuff. It’s all hm btw.
Tea – I don’t know if children got this. Even so 36 teabags for OH and self is more than enough.

Things I’m definitely cheating on
Coffee
Wine
Neither of which were rationed, just not as popular as they are today.
Orange and apple juice for the children –they don’t drink much, but I don’t want a mutiny and I know they won’t notice the other wartime strictures –in fact they’ll get more sweets than they’re used to. Maybe I’ll swap sweets for juice.

Resources I'll be using:
We'll Eat Again
The Victory Cookbook
The Postwar Kitchen
all by Marguerite Patten
Good Eating -this is a facsimile book of a wartime cookbook published by the Daily Telegraph. It has some really interesting recipes and includes garlic in a few which I was surprised about.http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Eating-Suggestions-Wartime-Telegraph/dp/0230014348/ref=pd_bowtega_1/202-4560088-2422211?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182245548&sr=1-1

Shopping - I'm buying most of my fruit, veg and milk from a local farmshop and most of it is locally grown. The kids have to have apples though so they're imported at the moment (roll on August when the first of our homegrown crop is ready) I also rely on frozen peas but at least they're British. Meat is from my butcher and everything else from Tesco or Waitrose.


Menu for yesterday

Breakfast - little pancakes made with sour milk (very wartime) and golden syrup, orange juice

lunch for kids -ham sandwiches, strawberries, carrot sticks and bread pudding
lunch for me -leftover rice and smoked mackerel with salad, apple

kid's snack -leftover choc chip muffins (needed eating)

supper -leftover sliced pork in gravy, leftover spuds + some fresh ones mashed and fried till crisp (yum), broad beans and peas
raspberries with top of the milk.

Today's menu
breakfast for the kids - porridge made with milk, a drizzle of golden syrup, toast, butter and jam and orange juice.

I had a banana with my porridge which is definitely cheating but it needed eating and wasting it would have been worse;)

lunch for kids -cheese and carrot sandwiches, carrot cookies, strawberries

Not sure what I'm having- possibly beetroot soup and bread, but I need some protein at lunch or I get ravenous by 4, maybe I'll have my egg ?
OH has taken a tuna sandwich and an apple.

Supper - final remains of roast pork in a hash with veg or as rissoles with salad and spuds.
Duke pudding for afters (breadcrumbs, carrot and dried fruit- very good)

Kids' snack -apples or raisins.

Hope that's of interest, feel free to ask questions:)

Hi thriftlady.

I don't know if you're aware but I home educate my DDs. Anyway, this week we are looking at rationing and I'm very interested in spending a few days living on rations so they can really experience what things were like.

I haven't read all of the thread yet but will be doing so over the next few days, to get some sort of idea of what we will be eating.

First question I suppose is any tips or pointers?

I'm looking forward to the challenge but DDs aren't so enthusiastic.

Pipkin xxxx

mary43

Haven't had time to read all through this thread but what I have looked at is fascinating.
I was born towards the end of the war and remember our meals.......very basic but filling, we always had 'pudding' of some sort, plenty of jam (courtesy of grans fruit trees and bushes) and cake............make do and mend was very much the slogan of the day........patches on elbows, socks darned..........definitely not a 'throw away society'.
We never did have powdered egg, once again thanks to grans chickens, plus her huge garden full of fresh veg.
Sweets were on ration until the 1950's as I recall and we never had much of those and to be honest,it was a case of what you don''t have you don't miss.
Today I expect the 'food specialists' would say our diet was too stodgy, not good for us at all but when you think of the population from those times who are still around today................can't all have been bad can it ?
We got dirty and washed ourselves with whatever soap there was.......showers were unheard of as was a daily bath..........once a week in a tin bath in front of the fire was enough.

Not sure I'd want to re-live those days quite as they were with the lack of heating and mod cons but as far as the food went, I think we ate very well and with appreciation for it. And I've yet to taste a suet pudding like Mum used to make.

thriftlady_2

Hi Pipkin,
It is an interesting experiment and I found it quite fun. I didn't actually tell my kids what I was doing until we were a few days into it. They didn't really notice any difference except that they got sweets:rotfl:

I did cheat quite heavily -replacing marge with butter and using a freezer and a fridge.

I used authentic recipes from the books I mention on the thread but lots of it I just made up using what I had. There are quite a lot of recipes on the internet

Incidentally there is a programme on telly tomorrow (I think) looking at living on wartime rations -sounded a bit gimmicky to me, but might be worth a look.

Have a read of the thread for other tips and lots of fascinating stories from other posters. Enjoy and remember to 'be like a kettle and sing':)

Sarahsaver

bbc2 tomorrow evening at 9pm Sue Perkins and Giles Coren living on wartime rations;)

thriftlady_2

mary43 wrote: »

Today I expect the 'food specialists' would say our diet was too stodgy, not good for us at all but when you think of the population from those times who are still around today................can't all have been bad can it ?
.

Actually Mary nutritionists are very fond of extolling the virtues of the wartime diet The TV programme I mentioned on tomorrow is going to come to the same conclusion I expect. The benefits of the diet are due to its high veg content (they were unrationed and people ate more in order to fill up) and the limited amounts of fat. Yes, dripping and lard were the preferred fats but they were rationed so you had to be sparing with them. Everyone ate national wheatmeal bread and lots of oatmeal, pulses were used more than before the war, cheese was limited and all these things helped contribute to a healthy Britain. Children in particular benefitted from school dinners, milk and orange juice. Children from the poorest families got their share and grew taller and stronger.

Of course the nation's good health was partly due to the amount of exercise people got just going about their daily lives.

mary43

Oh yes..............dripping ! How could I forget that..............everything was cooked in it and tasted so much better for it.
I was thinking the 'foodies' might have thought the stodge in the diet not good for chlorestrol and that sort of thing.
We had a desertspoonful of Malt extract every morning after the cod liver oil........(yuk ! ). Any mould on pots of jam was scraped off and we carried on with the rest, same with cheese, which if I remember rightly wasn't half as tasty as the cheese today. Meat certainly tastes different but then the cows and sheep and chickens were fed differently and had a much better life than a lot do now.
I remember grandad getting water from the well and it had to be boiled before we could use it.Milk came straight from the cow -two small churns lasted a day. No fridges but just a mesh meat safe and a cold slab of marble-seemed to work.
I seem to remember a programme on tele a while back where a family lived as if it was war time, eating on ration, making do with alternatives to make up and so on.That was an interesting programme. Might have a look at the one on bbc2 tomorrow but get the feeling from what I've seen that it won't be that serious when really, judging by the price of things and the awareness people have of how food is produced it might just be the right time to show a programme of hints/tips/recipes and so on.

Oh just to add.............you're right about the exercise........after tea it was the general thing to take a walk plus for our amusement we had to play outside........no push button toys then ........and stress ! I don't think it had beem thought of.

Sarahsaver

Sue Perkins said she felt healthier after the wartime diet;)