Wartime recipes, substitutions and other related austerity hints

Justamum

unrecordings wrote: »

Although to counter that, it's not necessarily about the taste of actual tuna per se, it's about a generic taste & texture similar to that of a nice bit of tuna. From an omnivore's perspective - if you like tuna, just eat tuna.

I agree that if you actually eat fish then eat real tuna. For a vegetarian or vegan who wants something to replace tuna, this aint it!

unrecordings wrote: »

When Mrs Un & myself first got together (some 20 odd years ago) I researched and pretty much spent a day making some mock duck Buddhist style - which is more or less a very very very complicated dumpling. I ended up with something about the size of a small chipolata and she refused to eat it because it looked like slugs :rotfl:

I've never tried that. If it takes that long I don't think I'll bother! I like quick and easy cooking.

unrecordings

Justamum wrote: »

I agree that if you actually eat fish then eat real tuna. For a vegetarian or vegan who wants something to replace tuna, this aint it!

I guess it's (the mock tuna) just a response to the current trend of replacing meat. I'd never seen it before, so maybe it's a little early to market, and maybe harder to perfect. I've not tried it, but will take a taste when it's opened

Justamum wrote: »

I've never tried that. If it takes that long I don't think I'll bother! I like quick and easy cooking.

To do it properly is a lot of work - lots of kneading, steaming frying - I mentioned Buddhism, because it was considered some kind of high art to be able to replicate those tastes & textures without actually killing anything. Anyway it was an experiment - I like experiments...

Justamum

unrecordings wrote: »

I guess it's (the mock tuna) just a response to the current trend of replacing meat. I'd never seen it before, so maybe it's a little early to market, and maybe harder to perfect. I've not tried it, but will take a taste when it's opened

My daughter quite liked it, but she's never eaten fish so had nothing to compare it to.

[Deleted User]

I made a wartime apple trifle for our lunch today, very simple but tasty in that it's just stale cake with a drizzle of sherry (or in our case apple concentrate) topped with stewed apple and covered with chocolate custard. It's been sitting in the fridge overnight and the cake will have taken on some moisture from the apple and the custard will have set properly. Cheap, uses up leftovers and is delicious, always feels like a treat!

Wednesday2000

I remember Eucryl powder, I think my grandparents used it at one point.

I remember being bathed in a tin bath in front of the fire in Ireland when I was very young, probably late 1970s. It's one of my earliest memories. I don't think the house had central heating in those days.

My Grandmothers used to do to quite a few things on this thread. I remember being taught to rub the marg wrapper on the baking tray.

They stayed frugal for all their lives even when they didn't need to be.

I haven't eaten meat since the early 1990s but I still remember the taste of a bit of bread being dunked in the dripping from the roast meat. OMG, I wish there was a vegan version of that now.:rotfl:

RebeccaAnn wrote: »

This isn't a wartime recipe and may not be any use to anyone but I shall add it and hope no one minds.

I make a mock tuna mayo from chickpeas as I managed to buy lots of tins at 4 for a pound. You could use dried chickpeas and pre soak.

Drain and rinse 1 can of chickpeas, cover with water and then bring to the boil ( apparently you can make this without heating but I find them too hard). Reduce the heat and simmer for 5 mins. Drain then rinse in cold water until cooled. Fully drain, mash leaving some larger pieces. Add mayo until a tuna mayo consistency. Add finely chopped pickled gherkin, wholegrain mustard, salt and pepper to taste.

Oh, I love that!:)

monnagran

Wednesday2000, I think this is pretty general for your mother's and grandmother's generation.
Life had never been easy for them, they were no strangers to being cold, hungry,and having to work very hard just to survive. When the war arrived, it was pretty much more of the same except that survival became a lot more difficult.

Life was very much stripped to the bone. Nothing, absolutely nothing was wasted. I remember crawling around my grandmother's floor while she was dressmaking, picking up the tacking threads that she was pulling out of a garment, so that she could use them again. Everything was used until it just couldn't be renovated any more.
Paper was so scarce that newspapers were reduced to one or maybe two folded sheets. Envelopes had fresh paper pasted over the address and were used time and time again. Not only did you have to write on both sides of the paper, when you had finished you wrote in the margins. We had one relative who not only wrote on both sides, but as well as writing horizontally, turned the page round and wrote vertically over the top. Her letters were a bit of a challenge to read.

These attitudes never really left them.
My father was a prime example. In the days when washing-up liquid came in white plastic bottles, Dad would cut up the empty bottle into plant labels. One year, one of his grandsons gave him a bundle of 500 plant labels for Christmas. Dad was horrified at such profligacy. When we were clearing out his things I came across these plant labels, all carefully preserved against the possibility of a dearth of empty WU liquid bottles.

Even now, I can't throw away pens until their ink is completely and utterly exhausted and I pick up the elastic bands discarded by post men. What I am ever going to do with a hoard of elastic bands, goodness knows.

I know that I am preaching to the converted on this forum, but it is still unusual in this throw-away generation. There is a fine line between hoarding for the sake of it and and making full use of something until it is no longer viable.

I still love to make something useful out of something that would otherwise be thrown away. My DILs regard this as just, 'One of Monna's funny ways.' but it is the way we had to be during and after the war and who knows, these skills may come in very useful if we really are entering a period of austerity. Though I doubt that it will be the austerity that we of the wartime generation have experienced.

aliby21

I am very much enjoying this thread! I grew up in the 1970s so not wartime, but my dad was a teenager during WWII and I think a lot of that experience coloured the way we were brought up. We lived very, very well but one of Dad's favourite sayings (he had many) was 'waste not, want not' and nothing went to waste. We used to have a huge joint of meat for Sunday lunch, but it was carved into very, very thin slices, almost transparent - carving is a real skill and nowadays meat mostly seems to come in big chunks. Then the joint was recycled all through the week, sliced, diced, minced. Stale bread or left over cake was turned into puddings. The very few food items that weren't recycled went into the 'chicken bucket' under the sink for feeding the chickens.

Even in the 70s, and being very comfortably off, my mum used to darn socks, fold sheets sides to middle, and make a lot of our clothes. My sister is still scarred by being sent out in a pair of bright green checked trousers my mum made out of old curtains.

And it was cold! It really was not long ago at all that there was no central heating or double glazing, and now we have people on another section of the forum worrying because they cant keep their house at 20 degrees. And then mum always opened our window at night - even now I can't sleep unless the window is open!

Another thing that I think is very different from my childhood is the amount of alcohol consumed. We always had it in the house - it was the 70s we had the obligatory drinks cabinet in the corner, but it was only opened when mum and dad had a dinner party or at Christmas or other special occasions. And Dad had a bottle of beer with Sunday lunch. I don't know if they were particularly abstemious or if this was more the norm.

unrecordings

monnagran wrote: »

There is a fine line between hoarding for the sake of it and and making full use of something until it is no longer viable.

Makes me think of the 'useful bits of wood' syndrome - of which I'm afflicted, but trying to manage now one hand doesn't work (which has pretty much curtailed my carpentry efforts)

Blue_Doggy

Although I was a child in the 1950s, things were still quite austere in their own right, let alone the hangover from the war.

We always unwrapped things carefully, even Christmas and birthday presents, and we were taught to smooth and fold the paper for future use. String or (luxury!) ribbon were never cut but the knots unpicked and the string rolled up and put in the string jar.

There wasn’t paper spare for children to draw or scribble on, so envelopes would be opened out for that purpose. I still use the insides of envelopes and the blank backs of papers that come through the post for lists or notes. The pretty pads people give me tend to be put away as “too good to waste”.

I remember when I was learning to sew at school, being taught to unpick tacking threads carefully so they could be folded and reused.

Primrose

monnagran wrote: »

Wednesday2000, I think this is pretty general for your mother's and grandmother's generation.
Life had never been easy for them, they were no strangers to being cold, hungry,and having to work very hard just to survive. When the war arrived, it was pretty much more of the same except that survival became a lot more difficult.

Life was very much stripped to the bone. Nothing, absolutely nothing was wasted. .

Monnagram
I wonder how many of the Extinction Rebellion protesters currently blocking the streets in our cities are practicing even a quarter of the thrify wartime economies that their parents or grandparents had to adopt , and would probably protest heartily if they were suddenly forced to adopt such a lifestyle

Some years ago I found myself chatting to an elderly Polish lady in a park while we found ourselves watching parents giving their children bread to feed the ducks. She had apparently become a refugee here after the war, having been In some kind of labour camp in Poland. "Do you know", she told me "even after all these years I have to physically stop myself from going up to those parents and saying "Please don,t throw that bread to the birds. We didn,t have that much food to eat during a week in the war in Poland. But I don,t think they would understand and would think I am just a crazy old lady"

That's the problem I suppose. Those who have genuinely never known what REAL hardship is will never understand why those who did can never get out of the habit for preparing when those times might return.