Wartime recipes, substitutions and other related austerity hints

Hard_Up_Hester

I was born in 1951. My nan taught me to use butter/ marg paper to grease tins and I still do and save tacking thread.
I live on a boat, use bottled gas and solar for electric.
I cook meals on top of my stove in the winter and not on the hob.
I collected kindling and wood for the stove. throughout the summer when walking the dog.
I boil my tea towels as the solar will run a cold wash in my machine but not sure hot wash.

unrecordings

Justamum wrote: »

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

Just tried some - I can see what they were trying to do, but it's more that VBites (fka Redwoods) woolly chicken/beef/gammon roast texture rather than a clean flaky fishy texture. As for the taste yep, just wrong...

aussiecanuck

Oh my. This is the first thread I felt I had to take part in.
I was born in Leeds in 1941. I well remember dripping. We ate it on bread til I was a teenager in Canada. Loved it.
Anyone remember liberty bodices? They went well with the long brown stockings.
When we left for Canada in 1950, my Mickey Mouse gasmask was given away.:( and the ration book was thrown into Liverpool harbour, along with many others.

Natty68

Oh I love this sort of thing. I have several wartime cookery books plus some original make do books.

Looking forward to reading all the way through the thread and getting some good tips etc...

monnagran

Natty 68, I hope you do get some good tips, but I also hope that you can get a flavour of what it was like to be alive then and to cope with not only the ever present threat of sudden death and/or the loss of your home and all your possession, but also the strictures that rationing brought with it.
If you understand that, the tips will make more sense.

aussiecanuck, its nice to have a fellow war survivor on board!

Primrose

Shortly after the war ended, my mum's sister married a Canadian serviceman and emigrated out there. His family over there sent usvarious food parcels during those difficult rationing post war austerity years and some lovely little girls clothes which were totally unobtainable here and seemed as if they'd come from fairyland.

But what I remember most what the wooden crate of dried bananas they sent us which sat In our coolest room for ages as we slowly ate our way through them. I don,t recall ever seeing a fresh banana in its yellow skin so this is what I imagine all bananas looked like - sticky shrivelled brown dog turds which looked very unappetising and by the time we'd reached the end of the crate my mum had used just about every culinary recipe in her limited repertoire to disguise them.

I saw packs of them in a health food shop just like this a while ago and it certainly brought all those memories flooding back. In retrospect I've no idea how the bananas were treated to become like this because the only dried bananas I'm normally familiar with are those dehydrated ones you find in muesli and other mixed dried fruit packs. Perhaps food dehydration was not a common process in those war and immediate post war years.

THIRZAH

My aunt married a Canadian serviceman and she used to send over her children's clothes once they had outgrown them. I can remember some thick coloured tights and being teased at school as no one over here wore them. No dried bananas although she did fill the gaps in the parcel with candy.

ancientmum

I was reminiscing the other day with a friend of a similar age about our fathers' pipe smoking. I remember being sent to the corner shop aged about 11 to buy a tin of tobacco. He had a cabinet in the garage filled with these tins containing stuff that might come in handy.

Helebore

I worked in a health food shop in the 80s and you could get those dried bananas then, the brown ones! I also used marg/ butter paper for greasing tins when I lived at home, that's what my mum did.

Hard_Up_Hester

I had to wear a liberty bodice because I was such a skinny scrawny child, bloody hell what happened!