War time recipes

Siebrie

I have a Dutch 'cooking in wartime' book. One 'recipe' suggests making a pot of coffee, then drying the ground coffee in the oven, and reusing it for a second put half-and-half with new ground coffee. Believe me, it's not worth it! Better no coffee than this vile tasting drink.

Katiehound

But maybe more acceptable than ersatz coffee which was roasted acorns & beechnuts(among other things!)

and now can't comment on  my own thread

tried below- can't get into a white space so the 'body ' is too short!

Fubsy is short & squat- what for coffee??
 whereas ersatz is 'substitute'

can anyone offer a way to get rid of the posting problem. I tried signing out. nada. I  don't want to clear cookies as I save my banking details.
Frustrating

YoungBlueEyes

Ersatz - there’s a word you don’t hear enough

RobM99

YoungBlueEyes said:

Ersatz - there’s a word you don’t hear enough

..or 'fubsy' - the word of queens and emperors!

YoungBlueEyes

Fubsy - just had to duckduck that, great word 🙂

-taff

@Katiehound clear the cache, but not the cookies...or see if you need a browser update, sometimes when I need one my browser doesn't play videos, or something similar...

London_1

I was always led to believe that the portion of meat on the plate should be around the size of the palm of your hand. It certainly was a lot less when I was growing up with rationingand austerity in the 1940s/50s.

My late Mum always had two courses ,soup to start with, then main meal OR main meal followed by a pudding never all three. I eat soup daily and its almost always home made as it costs buttons to make.    
The good thing about soup is its very forgiving, and you can throw almost anything in it to zip it up a bit.

One of my granddaughters came today with her little girl and we had a great long natter, and bless her she brought some bits and pieces, towards lunch. Still half a victoria sponge left over and some ham and some cheese, and the tail end of some tiger bread which will be used up with some thick chunky veggie soup.

When I think back to what my late Mum would fill her three children up with I am amazed, as todays kids would probably turn their noses up at  it.
We never had yogurts or instant  ready meal type food, and I was an adult before I tasted a burger
I'm still not over keen on them.  

But we didn't go hungry, and I probably eat more or less similar food to what I grew up with, but not the revolting Snoek fish. Porridge in the winter on frosty mornings kept you going until lunchtime. Cheese was always grated to make it seem to go further.

Nothing between meals,snacks or chocolate.Biscuits were definitely two and no more, and you never ever thought of going to help yourself to food from the kitchen, that was Mums domain.

Fruit was usually in season if available at all, and most folk grew a good deal of it.
Our Father had the largest meal as he was the person who went out to work then came the children, and Mum always ate last.

You had cocoa before you went to bed if your Mum had any, and to this day I still like a cup of cocoa before bed.

Puddings were usually milk ones rice, semolina etc with a spoonful of jam if you were lucky.My late Mum grew and bottled stuff,or made jam if she had sufficient sugar.
Butter was sparingly scraped on bread, or Echo, or Summer County marg which wasn't too bad if there was a bit of jam or marmalade on top.
It was so difficult to get a lot of stuff, and my Mum wouldn't countenance the 'black market' as she said it disrespected the merchant sailors who risked their lives to bring food to this country.
Her mantra was 'eat up or go without' and it was very rare anything was left on your plate. Lots of veg though, so it must have been healthier even with the odd stodgy pudding.

She had no fridge or freezer, yet our food never went off ,maybe because she shopped almost daily, and only bought what she could find.
In the neighbourhood if there was something in the local shops new, the news would fly round like lightening, and you would see the women with their string bags hurrying down to see what was available in the shops. No big supermarkets either, as you were normally at the same grocers for your food stuff.

But zero waste as when food is hard to get hold off you don't bin it. One good habit because of the scarcity is I have never ever taken sugar in my tea or coffee or on cereal/porridge either. it was a bit like gold dust and hoarded carefully, along with loose tea there was nearly always a pot on the go somewhere in the kitchen and it would get topped up with water until every leaf was used up The leaves would then be put on the garden round veg or flowers to help them grow I suppose, she had a jar that dead tea leaves went in, and when full was distributed around the garden. Her generation were definitely the forerunners of recycling at its best 

JackieO xx

annieb64

My mother never took sugar in her tea as my grandmother made them all save their sugar ration for bottling fruit or making jam.

As children we always had a pudding usually a "milk" one- rice, sago, tapioca.  Cheap and filling. Even in the war my family didn't go short of milk. My great grandfather had a dairy herd. My mother could remember making butter by putting cream into a jam jar and the children having to take turns shaking it until it turned into butter. She and my grandmother always saved every little bit of fat . They had dripping jars. My DD was vegetarian in the 1990s and she remembers Granny making her a toad in the hole using vegetarian sausages but putting a lump of dripping in the pan before she cooked them.

QueenJess

London_1 said:

I was always led to believe that the portion of meat on the plate should be around the size of the palm of your hand. It certainly was a lot less when I was growing up with rationingand austerity in the 1940s/50s.

That’s right. This site does portion sizes for protein and if you scroll to the bottom it has portion sizes for carbs, fruit and veg etc. It should be related to the size of your hands because a tiny person shouldn’t be expected to eat the same as a huge person: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/support/healthy-living/healthy-eating/healthy-eating-toolkit/food-portions/beans-pulses-fish-eggs-meat

I find portion sizes far too big when I eat out and I’d actually have a smaller portion of both dinner and dessert. If I eat out at lunch, I’m not hungry for dinner.  I’m not sure when someone decided that bigger was better?

YorksLass

Our dinner plates and soup/cereal bowls are huge but they very rarely come out of the cupboard - instead we use our old ones that are much smaller and more portion friendly.  I was always told to leave the table feeling as if you could eat a little more and wait for 20 mins - if you were still hungry then you could have more, but more often than not you felt full.  Snacks between meals just didn't happen and biscuits were limited.  Sweets were a weekend treat sometimes but again, limited.

I never have sugar in tea (personal preference) and can actually tell if there's sugar in it just by smelling it.  How weird is that?  It brings back memories of an uncle who would put 3 teaspoons of sugar in a cup (a small teacup not a mug) but didn't stir it properly so there was always a sugary sludge in the bottom of the cup.  DM eventually sugared his tea for him - one teaspoon - and he never noticed the difference!

DM would bake on a Sunday - loaves, oven cakes and rice pudding in the range oven next to the coal fire and fruit pies, custard or jam tarts etc in the gas oven in the kitchen.  Once the pies and tarts were gone, that was it for the week.  We also had dripping jars for fat - one of my favourites was (and still is) pork dripping on an oven cake.  And buttered crumpets that we toasted in front of the coal fire.

Zero food waste here - I begrudge feeding the bin, better inside us and better for the purse too.