Wartime recipes, substitutions and other related austerity hints

Bigjenny

Enjoyed reading this thread


There seems to have been very little protein in the WW2 diet from the meat, cheese and milk ration allowance by todays standards, high in fat, carbs and vegetables, so where did the extra protein come from.

mardatha

Pipneyjane, I'm an oxter knitter and I knit socks on DPNS (aye there's always one eh! lol). I use long Shetland needles, clamp needle 1 under my right arm. Needle 2 in between my legs (or usually sticking into one of them). Needle 3 goes in my left hand, and needle 4 waves about under my nose. Shetland needles are 16 inches long so decreasing for the toes can be really interesting...
I move them onto Knitpro Zings lol
I can use the shorter needles and circular needles but prefer to do it the way I learned, to old to change now

RicardaRacoon

Oh what a lovely tread! will have a proper sit down and enjoy it all when I find the time!


I am still astonished by how good the UK got the ration system working. In Switzerland - where I am from - they never even managed to get a seperate ration book for people suffering from diabetes... Oh and they also announced clothes ration a month in advance, resulting in panic buying...


Someone mentioned that we are spoilt for choices and oh is she right! I will never get why exactly we need 4 different tins of tomatos or why our local supermarket sells the same cocoa in a bag in the "hot drinks" corner and in a cardboard box with the baking stuff....

I try to do a ration book challenge for four weeks each autumn and while meal planning takes ages - as a vegetarian it is mostly about finding enough meals with cheese as there is basically nothing else to make things tasty... - shopping is soo quick because all you need is fruit and veg, some dairy, bread and the odd dry good. And no temptation from crisps and ready made meals...

RicardaRacoon

mardatha wrote: »

I was sitting the other night knitting a sock, reading a wartime book about other women sitting at fires knitting socks. Lovely timeless feeling.

My chief joy in life is sitting in my old fashioned wing chair with my knitting, cuppa and The UK home front radio. And yes, I have no problem admitting to it, old soul with 32....



But I think even better is knitting with others.

mardatha

Yes. I live very rural and don't see many people - but recently my ex next-door-neighbour came for a short visit and I found sitting knitting and chatting to her was much quicker, I got a lot done. Time passes faster when you have somebody to talk to

Toonie

PipneyJane wrote: »

Toonie, is your mum German? What are her recollections of the war and just after?

- Pip (ever curious)

Yes, my Mum is German. She was born in 1944. Her parents got kindergeld for having her (for producing a good little German). In fact when they got married they had to prove they were pure German.


My Mum's experience was a little different to a lot of people in Germany as her father worked in crop yields and testing them to see how well different varieties stood up to bottling procedures, so where they lived on had a huge amount of bottled vegetables which would be opened at different times to see how they were fairing and which types and varieties of crops did best, they also had a cow and chickens and so were not without various things. So her childhood was spent with lots of food. This was all in East Germany.

Primrose

Keen knitters may find difficulty in locating pure woollen knitted garments in jumble sales these days because many of our garments are acryllic, but during wartime such items of clothing were seized upon because even unsuitable garments could be unpicked and the wool used for knitting other more suitable items.

I recall my mother, who was a good seamstress but an unenthusiastic knitter acquiring one such hideous garment during the latter days of the war. Small as I was, I was recruited to help her unpick it and rewind the wool around the back of a dining room chair. It was subsequently used to make the most hideous woollen bathing costumers for my brother and myself.

With the price of new balls of wool today, jumble sales may still offer up opportunities for cheap woollen garments that can be unpicked and reknitted into something else at a fraction of the price of fresh wool.

Eenymeeny

We used to have a patchwork quilt at home that had as it's foundation a blanket which my Grandparents had received for their 'bottom drawer' when they announced their intention to get married when he returned from service in France during the first world war.
I presume that my mother added to it during the second world war or later, when fabric was hard to come by or rationed. It was a real patchwork quilt, made with odd cut out shapes, garnered from worn out skirts. jackets, trousers. Heavy, tweedy, woollen- type fabrics. I particularly remember a brown herringbone patch with green flecks in. Funny how the memory works isn't it? The patches were edged with herring-bone stitch in different colours of wool and the quilt itself was edged with strips of cotton fabric which might have been dresses or shirts previously. It was very heavy and rather scratchy to my young sensitive skin.
I remember when I was a child it had been delegated for use as a picnic blanket and thinking that it was old-fashioned and rather embarrassing to use in public when everyone else had super nylon quilted ones. How things change, I would love to have that blanket now and am actually wondering whether I could recreate something similar, although I suppose that it would only be special to me!

Primrose

This is not a wartime hint as such but for those who have enjoyed the reminiscing, I,ve just borrowed from our library a small book called "A 1940's Childhood. - from bomb sites to children's hour." By James Marsh.

A quick flick through it has promised to revive some very memories of my own so looking forward to delving into it in greater detail with a cup of tea on a wet grey afternoon.

I'm wondering if it mentions the hated communal Pig Bin into which local communities had to tip any leftover waste food (not that I suspect there was much of that with wartime rationing) so that local pigs could be fed. A trip to the pig bin with a smelly bucket of waste peelings was a chore my younger brother and I regularly came to blows over in our excuses to avoid it!

Wednesday2000

I just made a lunch with gravy and it occurred to me that I was doing something my mother and grandmother did. Using the hot water I cooked the vegetables in to put into the gravy.:)

Primrose wrote: »

I'm wondering if it mentions the hated communal Pig Bin into which local communities had to tip any leftover waste food (not that I suspect there was much of that with wartime rationing) so that local pigs could be fed. A trip to the pig bin with a smelly bucket of waste peelings was a chore my younger brother and I regularly came to blows over in our excuses to avoid it!

I remember helping feeding the pigs and piglets when I was on my family's farm when I was very young.

I have seen two people walking directly behind a horse on TV lately and it makes me cringe.:eek: I was warned as a kid on the farm that you don't walk directly behind a horse as it can get startled and kick out and badly hurt you if you are too close.