2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Nelliegrace

I am using the average WW2 ration quantities again this year, it has become our normal way of eating. It is not difficult, shopping like Mum used to, except that we have the advantage of the freezer and can buy larger more economical quantities, portion them up, and shop our weekly amounts from home. 


Four ounces of loose leaf tea is plenty for the two of us, we top the pot up with boiling water for a second mug, or a thermos flask for later. My Denby teapot got home safely thank you @Cherryfudge. Ground coffee was available and not rationed.
The average meat ration of one shilling and two pence is now worth £3 each. Offal and sausages were not rationed, neither was rabbit or fish. Ham or bacon was a separate ration. Tinned food was rationed by points.
We have sufficient butter, cheese, lard, and British rapeseed oil and spread for margarine. A pound of sugar a week is more than enough for our cakes and jam making.
Milk would have been a problem, even with the added dried milk ration, but for my invalid’s extra ration. Cream was banned though we had “top of the milk,” and nobody had heard of yoghurt or kefir. We keep a few hens in the garden, so have eggs to spare.
There were work canteens and the new British Restaurants which provided basic dinners at set prices, and the better off could eat out regularly, though only one meat or fish course was permitted. In 1941 the National School Meals Policy was introduced, which had dietary guidelines to improve children’s health.

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm about a half-hour drive from Bridgnorth, @Nelliegrace - maybe next summer we should have a mini-meet there!  

It's always tricky trying to decide just how good rationing was for health- after all, we generally live longer nowadays by quite a long way, although that is starting to drop, they think... but when you look at almost *any* measure of health, the generation that grew up with rationing in childhood plus the NHS come out as very very healthy indeed, so I reckon there's definitely something in it! 

Have I mentioned the chap who did a serious nutritional analysis on a spreadsheet of all mentions of food and drink in the Famous Five books?! Interestingly, it all comes out as very healthy indeed- very little sugar, just an occasional jam tart or square of chocolate... but masses of bread (pre-industrial!), butter, cheese, gallons of milk, some cream, ham, chicken, pork, plenty of radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion... and only a very occasional lemonade or ginger beer, despite the quotation people always come upw ith, of "lashings of ginger beer!" which isn't actually in any of the books and I think comes from the brilliant parody by The Comic Strip in the 1980s, Five Go Mad in Dorset...  

I think we definitely like their kind of meals- we didn't plan a cooked meal last night so had plates full of 'nibbles'- slices of a ham I baked in the week, slices of cheddar, Egremont russet apples, a handful of walnuts, some cherry toms I bought on offer for my parents' visit last week, a couple of homemade jam tarts (about half the size of bought ones), and a wodge of Dorset apple cake (wholemeal flour and a ton of apples, and I halve the sugar in the recipe). Oh, and a couple of dates  

It was a real feast!

diminua

I mapped rather than rigidly stuck to the food rations for a period. To my surprise I found that for the basics - if you swap veg food and tinned fish for the meat ration and accepted going over on margarine but being under on cooking fat and ditto with confectionery and sugar - I was ok. Not too far adrift at all.  Of course in the real 1940s that wouldn't be possible, I'd have to make biscuits or a cake myself and eat that through the week, and vegetarians got extra cheese to make up for no meat (but I'm not 'really' vegetarian, and I'd have to give up fish to do that - and I could see myself getting very. very tired of constant cheddar cheese).  

Milk was only possible if I switched back to full fat, which I've actually stuck with as I realised I just use more if it's semi skimmed, so it's counterproductive. 
I was a long way down on eggs - which is bad actually, as I know I don't always get enough iron from my diet, and would be resolved by my baking cakes rather than buying pastries and calling them 'confectionery'. 

What I would have found really, really difficult though was things like marmite and pesto and bags of raisins. I ended up about 50 coupons overspent on tins and dry goods.

And inevitably a lot of the things I wasn't counting - like fresh tomatoes and citrus and olives and all the delicious breads that liven up my diet - simply wouldn't be available.  I also drink a lot of coffee, which saves the tea - but again would it really have been available in those quantities or would I be doing unnecessary trips up to Soho to get the good stuff? 

Edit: confectionery, - e not a

PipneyJane

@Laura_Elsewhere that sock is beautiful.  Good luck making its twin.  I’m not certain I could from reading your note, although I do feel your pain.  Recently I partially frogged a sock started a decade ago and never completed, because the 50g skein ran out of yarn three quarters of the way down the foot and I only had 2 skeins of that yarn.  (I’d tried to buy extra from the manufacturer’s website, and failed.). Now that I have a recipe for afterthought heel socks and know how economical they can be, I decided that, if I frogged back to the start of the heel, there should be enough yarn to do a pair of those, possibly with short-row heels (since they’re very similar).  Took me quite a while to find the chart I’d made of the lace pattern, since I’d cobbled it together based on a sweater I’d knitted.  This is what they look like now:



Sadly, I didn’t take a photograph prior to the frogging, but I’ve now added a photo of the chart to my Ravelry page, in case it goes walkies again.

@Nelliegrace, at £3/person/week, your meat ration is actually very similar to the amount DH and I set aside for shopping at the Butcher’s, i.e. £40/month.  It’s the 1lb of sugar a week that gobsmacks me because, even with my baking, I’m not sure I could get close to using that up regularly.

@PollyWollyDoodle  I completely agree re UPF’s, because they’re designed to never make you feel full.  Sugar can be as bad, because it causes an insulin cascade/vicious cycle where you eat a sweet, which rapidly raises your blood sugar, simulating your body to produce a lot of insulin, which causes your blood sugar to collapse, which makes you very hungry very rapidly, which triggers you to overeat/eat more sweets.   

(I was the fat kid, who became a plump adult, who went through the diet cycle a couple of times - hence the multiple sizes in my wardrobe - and, having lost weight because of my illness, I do not want to get any larger, because it is so lovely that my clothes now fit well.)

- Pip

Sarahspangles

I looked at the sugar ration and assumed that was for biscuits or cakes. But then, do you get enough eggs and fat to bake those?

You could make fatless sponge if you had eggs, or scones if you had fat. Buttermilk would be useful for scones. Apart from those and putting three spoonsful in your tea, I suppose you could make some sweets and home made preserves to eke out your ration.

Nelliegrace

An interesting challenge @diminua. I think that the 1940s vegetarian society offered a lot of support and advice to members.
Carolyn at https://the1940sexperiment.com/ uses vegetarian recipes.
Vegetarians and those who didn't eat dairy foods or eggs had to register with their local Food Office in order to be issued with a special ration book. So whenever they went to collect their rations, they were allowed to buy more eggs, cheese and nuts, instead of meat.
Ration points would have bought dried beans, lentils and split peas for protein. Fresh and salted fish was not rationed but tinned fish used a lot of ration points.
Grated carrot was used to replace some of dried fruit in a cake recipe. Children were given raw carrot as a treat to replace lollies and ice creams.



Bottling tomatoes would have saved using points to buy tins. 
Marmite would have been available readily, a byproduct of Burton on Trent’s brewing industry.
W H Whittards and Co were in the small ads in The Times, and would deliver coffee by post. They moved to Chelsea after the blitz destroyed the Victoria Warehouse in Mansell Street. 
Pesto would have to be home made. Olive oil was sold in little bottles at the chemist, so not under food rations.

3rd September 1940, The Times, page 1.

Laura_Elsewhere

diminua said:

And inevitably a lot of the things I wasn't counting - like fresh tomatoes and citrus and olives and all the delicious breads that liven up my diet - simply wouldn't be available.  

That's really interesting to read, diminua- I know we would be horribly over on sugar if we simply started recording what we eat, and we get through enormous quantities of butter and cheese compared to the rationing amounts... 

Tomatoes, though- I have my grandfather's hand-written notebook which he started in the 1930s when they married and continued til he died in the early 1980s, just in the one little notebook, every single payment for rates, electricity, gas and coal/coke, telephone bills once they acquired one, and doctor's bills too... anyway, mostly they are intact lists from 1930s to 1980s, but there's just two pages where he recorded the tomato, marrow and runner bean yields throughout one summer in the early 1940s, and it was a LOT...! 
Copying from where I mentioned it in @Cherryfudge's 'Moving On' thread back in August:

" on Aug 21st 1943 they picked 4lb 8oz of runner beans… 
Tomatoes were only yielding c.4-6oz a week until Sept when they went up to 1lb 7oz on the 2nd, another 1lb on the 3rd, 1lb 15oz on the 5th and 4lb on the 7th and it carried on like that, until 11lb picked on the 25th with note ‘cleared garden of tomatoes’!
they had 43 tomato plants (yielding 42lb 2oz in all!)- also the runner beans ( 26lb 15oz in all) and marrows (10 in all)"

And Gran would have bottled some of the tomatoes and runner beans, and made jam of the marrows, I suspect. So they would have enjoyed them all freshly-picked, but also had them until well into the winter. 

If you have less than 43 tomato plants, obviously you're just not trying!  

Laura_Elsewhere

Olive oil was still sold in tiny bottle at chemists in the 1980s, I have a little bottle I bought in the 1990s and kept because it amused me that I had bought it at a chemist's!

The sugar ration wouldn't have gone far once you remember that coffee was mostly drunk only with or after meals, quite often bought at coffee stalls or in restaurants rather than made at home, and an awful lot of people didn't drink it at all- but very nearly everyone drank strong tea, all day and every day, throughout the day and typically with a good hefty couple of spoons of sugar in it, like "builders' tea" still does. 

And it was for baking, and to have with cereal, and for making jam and jellies, and for baked apples, and for sprinkling over bread and milk, and for everything, all through the year. I suspect the tea-drinkers accounted for a huge amount of it nationally, though. 

When you look at archaeological remains in Britain, you can tell from the dental health when the Sugar Tax is lifted in the 19th century, because they all suddenly start having decay on the chewing surface which is typically to do with very high levels of sugar in the diet... the bread&marge/ potatoes&marge diet didn't provide much energy so everyone propped themselves up with endless sweet strong tea, all through the day, between meals and with meals... and their teeth show the results!!

Not much had changed by the 1940s, although coffee was becoming more widely-drunk, but nowhere near the same levels as coffee drinking. 

Nelliegrace

Much of the sugar ration went in tea. Mum’s old Bero recipe book uses margarine, fewer eggs and more breadcrumbs. A fruit crumble uses less fat than fruit pie. My old Bara brith recipe uses cold tea to soak the fruit, no fat, and one egg eked out with a bit of milk. 

The grey, stodgy, wholemeal, National Loaf was so unpopular that it was nicknamed Hitler’s secret weapon. It was made using the Chorleywood Process to use the softer British wheat, to reduce imports of strong wheat, and had added calcium and vitamins. Even worse, it was sold a day old because stale bread cuts into thinner slices, and was supposed to use less. The Waste of Food Order, 12th, August 1940, made wasting food was a criminal offence. 

Taking in an evacuee would increase the amount of rationed milk and eggs for the household and there would be a few oranges, but no extra tea ration. The 10 shillings for the first evacuee and 8 shillings and sixpence for others would have helped too, and children were expected to help with the chores. Wives of those called up got a very small allowance to keep the family, from his low pay.

skogar

For years I thought that the war time sugar ration was quite high and I wouldn't have needed that much sugar, as I don't have it in tea. Since I started jam making, preserving etc. I no longer think that is the case as it would have been needed to make jams, chutneys etc to preserve fruit and veg and of course extra sugar is also needed for fruit wines I'm aware on 1 side of my family noone has sugar in tea as when they were children sugar was rationed and it was the easiest thing to cut out.