WWII Rations

carol_a_3

thriftlady wrote:

An interest in rationing is not the only thing we have in common filigree,we have the same birthday too.
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Oooh can I join your WW2 obsessives group too please. I'm sure I'm a reincarnation of someone who died in the Blitz or something and have always been fascinated with "The home front" "Making do and mending", escapes from prisoner of war camps etc etc. As a little girl I loved hearing my Mum's tales of going down the shelters in London and loved programmes like Colditz, Secret army and so on. My copy of "The ration book diet" came from Amazon yesterday and I can't wait to get stuck into it after Christmas.

thriftlady_2

carol_a wrote:

Oooh can I join your WW2 obsessives group too please.

Its nice to know I'm not alone.It was the quest for egg-free cake recipes for dd which led me to We'll Eat Again et al.Btw what about Foyle's War starring the gorgeous Michael Kitchen -love it. :santa2:

tootles_2

I was a child during the war and we raised chcikens for eggs which went to the local egg marketing board. Cracked eggs were not accepted, so we did have eggs, and of course chickens die, mother made the best use of what were really boiling fowl.

We had a barn in which we kept two pigs, one went for food to the meat board, the other was cut up and parts bartered for cuts of beef or laid down as pork or smoked for bacon.

We also had a huge garden with fruit trees, apples plums, pears raspberries etc... so really we were well off as far as food was concerned. My grand mother queued for an orange for me and I would not eat it, neither did I like the fresh eggs....preferred the dried egg made up as scrambled egg.

My grandmother on the other hand lived in the town, she had an allotment on the local park where she grew vegetables......meat etc was rationed although Mother did manage to keep her supplied with some extra meat.

calleyw

I have read the ration diet book very interesting.

For people in rural areas they where not so badly off as they had more room to grow veggies have chickens and go and shoot some rabbits. So they had meat.

It was a case of not wasting and I am sure some of the people who lived through the war would be turning in there graves when they see how much waste in food production there is.

Think of tonnes of fruit/veggies being chucked out because they are not the right shape etc to be grade 1.

To me that is a shocking and disgusting waste. And not something to be proud of.

And having watched Martins make me rich programme and seen people going shopping 3/4 times a week because they are totally disorganised. And then throwing food away. I hate throwing food away but do have a couple of bunnies to eat some of it if it gets left behind.

Yours

Calley

carol_a_3

thriftlady wrote:

Its nice to know I'm not alone.It was the quest for egg-free cake recipes for dd which led me to We'll Eat Again et al.Btw what about Foyle's War starring the gorgeous Michael Kitchen -love it. :santa2:

You can have Michael Kitchen if I can have the lovely Anthony Howell! I love Foyles War.

[Deleted User]

Eliza252 wrote:

hee hee! Has anyone read Roald Dahl's 'The Twits'? There are some fantastic illustrations of bird pie, with all the beaks sticking out of the pastry - that's the image I get for some reason!

Also, I think that the poor sparrow population is in serious decline at the moment so baking them would definately be a no, no!

Anyone who wants to come and cart away the greasy London pidgeons that are constantly trying to sneak in my flat windows are very welcome!

I remember war time rationing, and it is not something that I would ever want to return to no matter how skint I was.
Rationing meant going to bed never feeling as though your tummy was full. Always looking out for food of some description, and bringing it home to Mum to make something out of .I remember eating crab-apples and feeling extremely poorly with a bad tummy ache. My Mother's sister who lived in America used to send food-parcels over after the war had finished, and I remember seeing a tin of pineapple and wondering what it was.She also used to fill every spare corner of the parcel with odd things that we couldn't buy. To this day I can see my Mum sitting in the kitchen and crying ,she was so pleased to have some proper stockings .Aunt Edie also once sent some little Heinz baby tins of apple pudding. It was like a thick purreed apple sauce. I was very indignant that I wasn't a baby and no way was I going to eat this baby food. A sharp clip around the ear, and my Mum saying
"It's food ,so you will eat it or go hungry"
We had it spread on toast and it was like a thick apple jam ,revolting stuff.
When my daughters were small it was the one Heinz thing that they never ever had
My brother lives in rural France, and over there if you can shoot it you can eat it. The french are far less fussy than we are, and seem to be able to eat almost any bird that flies.
Last year when I was there we had a heavy thunderstorms and afterwards in the village, the old men were out scouring the hedgerows and walls for snails
I will eat almost anything but I'm afraid that anything like that is a no-no for me.
My late husband used to pinch his mother's onions from her large garden during the war on the isle of wight, and sell them to the local French-Canadians who were stationed there. They would eat them like apples he said. He also remembered finding an orange floating at the water's edge at Cowes.This was taken home and my Ma-in-law used it in her cooking.
Rationing wasn't a healthy way of living as most people ate what ever they could get hold of, and spuds were more readily available, so you filled up on them.
The jams that were available were awful, and had very little sugar in it. Mixed friut jam could be almost anything ,there was very little fruit in it.It was just a red stuff to stick on bread to take away the taste of margarine.
I think today's families live far healthier lifestyles, with the choice of vegatable and food in the shops you can live fairly well without subjecting yourself to the horrors of war-time rationing.
The people that do try to follow a war-time diet today have a choice if they get fed-up they can go and buy something nice to eat,in those days it was eat it up or go hungry.Sometimes the latter alternative was preferable
Mind you I still have a soft spot for spam fritters

thriftlady_2

:santa2: You are absolutely right jackieO,I do have a rose-tinted view of the home front.There are certain aspects that really appeal;home-produced food,seasonal food,less choice(I think too much choice can be a bad thing),and the lack of overprocessed junk.But we don't need to go back to rationing and deprivation to put these principles into practice for our families.

Thanks for bringing me back to reality,my MIL and mum think my WW2 obsession is a bit odd

[Deleted User]

Thriftlady, It is good that children learn how that we survived during the war,Filigree had a good point about the fish and chips. An awful lot of people, even without rationing would have struggled, as the available income was very low. The allotment that was allowed by the servicemen to keep their wives and children at home whilst they were away fighting was very low, so a lot of the time people didn't have the money to buy fish and chips with.
My Father was a chemist and was in the Royal Medical Corps, and his allotment for my Mum and three children was no where near what he would have earned in 'civvy street'.
It is interesting now to look back and count ones blessing that those days are over,but also to see that Britain really did 'pull together' for the good of the country. I wonder how we would fare today. A few years ago there was an 'I'm backing Britain 'campaign, I wonder what happened to that.
If we were to go back to W.W.2 rationing, then also go back to single glazing,with ice on the insides of the windows. Coal fires that warmed the front of your legs and left the rest of you cold .Or cold Lino in the bedrooms, and one bath a week in only several inches of water. Or outside loos and newspapers on a string instead of that nice soft Andrex.No fitted carpets, and smog that was yellow and made it hard to breathe. No T.V. and radios that were the size of a pony that took up all of the space in the sitting room.
The good things were the feeling that there was more friendliness around,old folk were valued, and not shoved into homes to be abandoned. Families tried harder to stay together though thick and thin.There seemed to be more loyalty around in those days. O.K. so some folk strayed ,it's human nature ,but the family unit seemed to be stronger.Easier living should have made things better,but I don't think it did.
Perhaps a bit of belt tightening would do us all the world of good.
I always find it surreal that when walking around the big supermarkets at this time of year, where families have groaning trollys of food ,most of which will be thrown away but next Tuesday,the most popular song on the tannoy is about Famine in Africa.i.e.Do they know it's Christmas'When you think about it I'm sure that we could all manage on a little less to eat and it wouldn't hurt too much
Interesting thread this .
P.S. I HATED Woolton Pie it was disgusting,he should have been hung along with Lord Haw Haw

thriftlady_2

You have certainly put things into perspective for me JackieO,and you are so right aboutDo They Know Its Christmas.I have made a very deliberate decision to eat very frugal,simple meals around Christmas day this year in order to make the Christmas meal stand out as a feast.I think we tend to feast non-stop and we need more and more extras to make Christmas lunch special.Merry Christmas

maryb

JackieO, every journalist who writes about wartime living trots out the old cliche that the country was never healthier than on a wartime diet. If that's true, I suspect it's because the war eliminated poverty by eliminating unemployment and just because the diet for a lot of families was better that doesn't mean it was ideal. I remember my mother, who taught in Dagenham and Ilford all through the 1940s, saying that just after the war doctors were concerned about how rundown the population was because the diet wasn't actually all that good and how long minor things like styes and boils took to heal - and how every one had things like that (as well as great bleeding chilblains) almost constantly - do you remember if it was the way my mother said? She never had a good word to say about 'the good old days' - she'd seen too much real poverty teaching just before the war when 7 out of every 10 children in London County Council elementary schools was malnourished, 3 of them severely.