The shocking truth about rationing

So, what happened in the interregnum? Well, as I said in the last post, the project continues, and there's not much I can add to that. The rhythm of rationing is something you start to feel as well as think after a few months, so coming up with recipes gets ever easier. In fact, I don't think I've opened a Marguerite Patten in months - I've become very adept at just making food on the fly with what's available, and even planning the future of the leftovers in advance.

What I have done is taken Tanya's excellent advice (not on Yorkshire puddings yet, though) and headed off to the Imperial War Museum to see their exhibition on rationing in World War II.

I've always liked the IWM, both in London and the newer one in Salford in the north of England. The Salford one is the more educational-feeling of the two, sort of like being in a university lecture but with objects to look at.

The original one in London, operating from the old infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum in Lambeth, is much more for the kids - here's a spitfire, there's a V1, here's a tank, there's a cruise missile and so forth. This is in the "free" part of the museum. All state museums in the UK are free (although for how long with the current shower in charge, who knows) with special exhibitions being the only place they can charge for entry. The rationing exhibition was a chargeable thing, but that didn't stop me.

Of course, first I had to find it. Now, the worse museum in the entire world for finding things is the Victoria and Albert in Kensington. When we went there to see a Modernism exhibition, we managed to get hopelessly lost within 10 yards of the front door. The person in charge of the signage was either drunk or a psychopath (or both). We followed the signs, where provided, for the Modernism part for three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time, the signs had taken us back to the front of the museum without actually passing the exhibition at all. Later, we went to the famous V&A cafe. Or we tried to. Following the signs again, we got completely stumped at one that said:

<---  CAFE   --->

Still, it was good to have options. Eventually, we followed enough arrows to get us to the cafe. Well, to the exit to the cafe, so we had to push backwards down the tight queue of people, most of whom weren't buying food but were actually just wanting to ask the lady on the till where the promised toilets and exit were (answer: follow the signs for the cafe but don't actually go to the cafe. Helpful!)

At the IWM, some text on a beam in the roof said "Rationing exhibition - BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE". Underneath was a tank. It did not contain tickets. Upstairs was a clearly marked doorway that said "Rationing exhibition - TICKETS MUST BE SHOWN BEFORE ENTRY". Finally, there was a cafe, with a sign saying "Rationing exhibition - TICKETS HERE". Into the cafe we barrelled. Up to the till. Attempt made to buy tickets. Not sold here. Okay, but where? Follow the signs. Uh huh - that's why we're here.

Now, if they're so precious about their tickets, the easiest way to be told where they can be bought from would be to march in without them - a security guard can be relied upon to guide you smartly to the right place. So in we went, and a security guard guided us smartly to the gift shop at the exit to the exhibition.

Right. So we have two signs telling you to buy tickets here which actually mean buy them anywhere else but here; we have a sign saying that you cannot pass the sign without tickets which you must walk past to get the tickets; and we have tickets actually on sale at the exit to the exhibition you haven't yet seen. Is this just me, or is someone at the IWM just trying to play with my mind? And succeeding!

Aw, but it was worth it. An excellent, informative exhibition, well curated to be in a logical order, with everything well-spaced and given room to express itself. Nobody in costume to engage you in stilted conversation; quiet but appropriate music and the multimedia not surround by hundreds of ill-bred and unwashed children with their sticky fingers pressing every button in an attempt to get away from the sheer boredom of it all. Perfect.

Did I learn anything? Well, thanks to the research for this project, not really. I know how the system worked and I know the ways round it and the ways to eke out meagre supplies (shopping at Morrisons, you have to know this anyway, rationing or no rationing). It made me miss the possibility of growing my own vegetables, but with no garden and my inability to even keep a spider plant alive for longer than a month, I'm not missing out really.

I came away with two important bits of information. First: why do no wartime recipes contain mushrooms? Answer: because they weren't farmed at the time. People had to forage for mushrooms, and with so many being deadly, you didn't want to encourage people not in the know from picking up any old fungi. So mushrooms were left for those that already collected and cooked with mushrooms before the war.

The second thing I got from it was actually a recipe for making sticking to rations harder. The British palate has only really developed within my lifetime. Before the 1970s, people had a fixed idea of what "real" food was. And it was basically something boiled and green, something boiled but another colour and something burnt that once had been meat. And quite a lot of the burnt meat, if possible. For a change, they liked burnt fish instead, again with the boiled stuff. A salad ("cold collation") was inadequate as food, and it would still be inadequate as food, since a salad was, literally, a lettuce leaf, a beef tomato, some processed cheese and a dollop of watery mayonnaise.

All this I knew. But I got more of a shock than you can imagine. Try this: fish remained plentiful for the entire war. There was more of it than could be sold. Yet people queued for hours for the sporadic supplies. Why? Because the fish that was available was tuna. For the Great British Public, that was not fish. Fish was white and flaky and best served deep fried. They would not eat the pink and red stuff (well, salmon in tins, with vinegar, as a small treat). Something I've long thought seems now proved: snoek, the tinned fish introduced at the end of the war but rejected by the public, was not nasty and foul as is remembered. It's just like any other tinned fish. But it wasn't tinned salmon with vinegar, so it wasn't really tinned fish.

Likewise, the shops remained well stocked with ersatz food, like soya and tofu, that people would not eat. There was plenty of soft cheese and blue cheese available, usually not even on points - but people didn't touch soft cheese or blue cheese (clearly off and poisonous, respectively). There was yoghurt plentifully available, but nobody ate it, whilst craving something to put on their dessert... like yoghurt.

In typing this now, I've realised something else. In my research, I noted that the posh restaurants and the gentleman's clubs of London stayed open and well stocked throughout rationing. I wondered how this could be, and thought dark Socialistic thoughts about how rich people can get their hands on anything they want. The government came to believe this as well, putting a price cap on restaurant meals to try to make them look fairer.

But there actually wasn't unfairness. What there was was culture: the fine eateries of the big cities were cooking things that only the rich would eat. They were making things like mussels for starters with tuna steak and salad (real salad, not cold collation) and a dessert of fresh fruit in yoghurt followed by a cheese board with brie and gorgonzola - a standard(ish) meal now, but not what the vast majority would consider having for dinner.

The wartime propaganda had to start from a low base. For many, especially in the north, the prewar diet was entirely inadequate (and rickets and scurvy stalked even the lower-middle class neighbourhoods of Leeds and Manchester) and close to starvation levels. Many people actually did starve. When the war came, the previously inadequately fed were suddenly hundreds of times better fed, with all the right vitamins and minerals and price caps on the most nutritious food. But the Ministry of Food had to start from there, teaching those people how to cook such previously unheard of items like carrots and fresh peas. That job, linked to the one of getting the middle classes to replace the meat they'd always had access to with something else, had to come first. Attempting at the same time to get people to eat tuna, tofu, yoghurt and brie might have been too hard a job and was barely (whalemeat and snoek, both replacements for other foods rather than actual new ones) even tried.

And that's a shame, for British cuisine as much as anything else. It's also a shame to discover that, if you cut back on meat, eggs, cheese and fat, virtually everything else that you can still buy was available back then. That doesn't help when it comes to trying to live like it's 1943.

Royal cooking

In the last few days, it's been a fairly generic salad time here at On The Ration. Salad stuff is plentiful (still no celery, mind) so it makes sense to dive in and get as much fresh, uncooked, leafy vegetable matter into us as possible.

But that's not to say I haven't been able to be a bit chef-fy with the meals. A good mushroom soup made an on-going starter for a few days, whilst a break from salad came with a (comparatively) low fat risotto. This was a filling meal in itself, but even better for CJBS with a topping of poached smoked haddock.

For the risotto, heat some fat in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Fry off some onion, and when they're half done, chuck in some mushrooms and some crushed or powdered garlic. Once the onion is translucent and the mushrooms are softening, add your rice - two handfuls per person or thereabout, to make plenty. The rice will suck up the remaining oil. When the rice starts to stick, start adding stock.

Two ways of doing this: if you know in your bones how much water the rice will suck up, add that amount, put the lid on and walk away. If you don't, start by adding half a pint, keep stirring and add another half pint when it's gone. Keep doing this until the rice just isn't taking any more up (what's left will boil off anyway if you keep the lid off).

With the stock in, you can now add veggies that you like. Peas are always nice in risotto (cubed spam can go in at this point too). I like tomatoes, so I put quartered ones in. If you like bell peppers, put some in. You get the idea.

When the rice is done, you've got a basic risotto. For a creamy version, stir through low fat soured cream or crème fraiche. For a richer, but fattier, version, add some cubes of butter and let them melt through, assuming you've got the butter. For the traditional Italian flavour, add some hard cheese (Parmesan, ideally), assuming you have cheese. We had butter available, sort of, but no cheese.

For the poached smoked haddock, put a couple of bay leaves, some dill and some raw onion into a saucepan. Put the fish on top, then top with milk. Bring the milk up to the boil, then immediately take it off the heat. It's done, but you can leave it in longer to cook in its own heat if you want it to be flaky. Lift it out with tongs and serve it on top of the risotto.

Reserve the fishy milk: use it the next day to make fantastic (I'm told: I don't eat fish) mashed potatoes.

To explain the missing cheese earlier, I was inspired by this bit of gastropub-ism, and fortified with olive oil on points and some sausages, I decided to make something very very chef-fy for CJBS the next day. I don't have a name for it, but here it is:

Slice some halloumi cheese (the Greek, rubbery one that isn't feta) and scatter it on the bottom of a baking tray. I've got some very nice but hard-to-use bottled peppers in. These are baked or grilled, then preserved in vinegar or oil. The best bit about them is that they're surprisingly mild and beautifully brightly coloured. Lay a pepper slice on each piece of cheese. Add some garlic (powdered, flakes or fresh chopped/crushed) on top, some chopped spring onion and half a dozen thin sausages. A splash of oil, and into the oven until the sausages are cooked (15 mins at 180C, say). Serve with chopped basil leaves on top.

This was probably a waste of (almost) two people's cheese ration for a week, but CJBS ate it in seconds with a loud "nom nom nom" sound, so it was well worth it.

He also nommed his way through the quick tiramisu I made (I told you I was in chef-fy mood). I'd made some chocolate cupcakes earlier in the week, forgetting I had a rhubarb crumble on the go. The cakes went stale, despite CJBS's heroic efforts to cram them into his mouth. I made a cup of strong coffee, mixed a tablespoon of icing sugar into it and added a big glugg of cheap cooking brandy. While this cooled, I whipped 150ml of single cream and 250g of mascarpone cheese together with 3 tablespoons of icing sugar, some vanilla essence and a smaller glugg of the brandy. Then I sliced up the stale cakes and dipped each one in the coffee mixture for half a minute. These are then layered: cake slices, mascarpone, cake slices, mascarpone until everything's used up. Dust the top with cocoa powder and store in a cool place for as long as possible (it just gets better as it ages).

Now, back to the salads. There was a reason to have so much salad, an excuse that I grabbed at. Jersey Royals,¹ the best potatoes ever ever, have a season of about 25 minutes. When they come in, I buy preposterous amounts and shove them in everything I cook. As a "new" potato, they're theoretically best just boiled and served, and that works very well on the side of a salad, hot or cold. But they also make superb potato salad with soured cream or with mayonnaise, in a vinaigrette, or boiled in stock.

But my favourite is to really really make them work for their money. I boil them for 15 minutes, drain, then slice them into thick slabs. Heat some butter in a pan, add some garlic and lightly sauté them batches. I saved my butter ration for this (and the risotto - dry sandwiches and marmite on unbuttered toast are worth it). Put the sautéed Jerseys on a baking tray, then roast them for 20 minutes in a hot oven. These can be served anyway you can think of: with a salad, with grilled meat, with mayonnaise... you name it, they work.

Tonight, I'm making a big bowl of them with some crème fraiche and spring onion on top. In front of the TV, with my feet up and feeling very very relaxed.

1 Yes, I know Jersey was occupied in the war, so this is an anacronism. I don't care.

Celery, salad and soup

Whilst the flights might have resumed, the pause in air freight would seem to have temporarily paid off for local produce: I managed to get both domestic celery and spring onions for the first time this year.

The celery went straight into a cream of celery soup. I'm very fond of this soup, which Heinz seem to have stopped doing. It's a standard white soup (onion, roux, milk, stock) with roughly chopped celery in it. The longer you can leave it to simmer with the celery in it, the tastier it gets, although like all white soups, watch for it catching - especially if using household (ie dried) milk.

This was meant to last two nights, but we fell upon the saucepan and devoured it all in one sitting. So I had to quickly come up with something else to bridge the gap. This was leek and potato soup - again, just a white soup, with big lumps of potato and leek in it. Very filling, so this did go over two nights.

Sunday was a salad. This is where the spring onions come in. Now, celery is lovely in a salad, but having eaten all I could get in the soup, I'd none left and the Egyptian stuff has displaced the local stuff. Still, not having celery doesn't ruin a salad. Two salads, in fact, as I made salad niçoise for CJBS and a cottage cheese salad for me.

This salad spread well into Monday, with the addition of fish fingers (and fake fish for me) for a little change.

But now it's back to soup. I've got some potatoes and some cabbage leftover from the salad, so I'm going to make a cream of cabbage and potato soup. That should stretch to two days, too.

Eyjafjallajökull pie

The sporadic blogging continues, with my apologies. There's also less soup than you might imagine for a soup month.

Saturday was a rare, and expensive, Chinese takeaway with a marathon of TV shows I loved as a child remade to modern standards (Doctor Who: this episode okay; V: meh; The Prisoner: brain damage).

Sunday was fish for CJBS. This being sporadically available in wartime, we've made it sporadically available by requiring it being bought from the fishmongers, who have the most remarkably variable and unpredictable opening hours of any shop you could think of.

I made cod in breadcrumbs: blitz 6 slices of brown bread, add a chopped up slice of smoked bacon, a chopped tomato and a chopped onion, place the cod skin-side down on a glass baking tray, cover with the breadcrumb mix (pack it down a little) and bake in a medium low oven for 45 minutes. I served it with mashed potato and some steamed broccoli. I had fake fishfingers. No fat was used!

For Monday, I had leftover mashed potato. That suggested something pie, with a mashed potato topping. At the supermarket, I was able to get a large slice of braising steak for half the week's ration of red meat. So that's a steak and ale pie, I reckon. This type of steak is like leather, but it can be made tender with some work. First, make sure it's at room temperature. Sprinkle with some salt and a little garlic powder, then, with a rolling pin or one of those scary pointy mallets, bash the hell out of it. Turn it over and do the same. Then dice it.

I melted a tiny amount of CJBS's remaining margarine in a frying pan, getting it very hot, then added the beef cubes. When it has browned all over, add a chopped onion and let the two cook through together.

When the onion is cooked, add some gravy browning or gravy granules to soak up the fat and add a small glass of Guinness. Then add a chopped carrot and some chopped mushrooms. Stir it in and add more Guinness. A dash of Maggi or half a teaspoon of yeast extract, a stir, and some more Guinness. Eventually, just under a pint of Guinness has gone in, thickening and reducing all the time. Take it off the heat and cover.

If you've got enough fat for pastry, a shortcrust base is nice. I had pastry I'd previously frozen and I cheated by microwaving it back to being malleable. I lined a pie dish with it, poured in the steak and ale mix and then spooned the leftover mash on top. I forked the top of the mash, then brushed it with milk, then forked it again: this stops the mash being dried out, but also creates a crispy top.

Into the bottom of a low oven for an hour and a half (the meat really needs pampering) and bake.

In the meantime, I made my equivalent: a vegetable pie. I fried off an onion in a tiny knob of margarine, then made up a roux into a white sauce. To that I added a chopped leek, a chopped carrot, some chopped mushrooms and some of the leftover uncooked broccoli from Sunday. Let that simmer slowly (beware, it can catch very easily, so stirring is very much on the agenda) for 10 minutes, then put it in a pie dish and cover with mashed potato as before. Into the top of the low oven for 45 minutes and you're ready to serve both together. Which I did.

We're having this again today - there was plenty - so Wednesday will be my next soup. With the volcanic ash disrupting flights, Morrisons is starting to run short of the stuff I'm forbidden by the rules of the project from buying anyway. I'm hoping this means they'll source a bit more locally (no celery so far this year because it's all Spanish, Israeli and Egyptian) to increase my choices. Certainly I'd expect my greengrocer to go back to offering more local produce - they got sloppy over the winter with too much exotica, including stuff they could've got from just down the road.

If the ash makes for an increase in local food, I'm going to really enjoy the two weeks of soup-making. It'll be very nice to be spoiled for choice for once. Although they're talking about lifting the flight ban for freight, alas and alack, but there still might be a couple of days with fresh soup made from domestic ingredients.

Parsnips, bacon, chips, peas and chow mein

This soup lark is working really well, despite having the same meal for two days running each time. But a bit of cheat now kicks in.

Tonight I'm making a parsnip soup. Now, I loathe parsnips. They're horrible. So this is an excuse for me to have my monthly portion of chips, with mushy peas. Which CJBS thinks are horrible, so it's a fair exchange.

Since this soup isn't for a vegetarian and CJBS is due some of his meagre bacon ration, I'm going to do a bacon and parsnip soup. This just adds bacon at the frying stage of the roux, plus a carrot for the colour. A little bit of evap, on points, makes it into a cream of parsnip soup.

Tomorrow is a very special day: Doctor Who is back on and we promised to celebrate with our first Chinese takeaway this year. Britain's Chinese population have been here almost as long as our Asian population, but whilst the white British took to Indian food very quickly, they were slower to embrace Chinese (more precisely, Cantonese) cookery.

There is an exception to this: Merseyside. Here, Chinese food became a normal part of the diet early on, perhaps because the port of Liverpool, formerly being so huge, has long made the area very cosmopolitan (despite the poverty, of which there is a frighteningly large amount, Merseyside has very good 'race relations' - racism does exist, but not in the confrontational style seen in such dumps as Dagenham or Blackburn) and the people have historically been quick to adopt 'foreign' food.

The vast majority of the fish and chip shops on Merseyside are British Chinese owned and operated, a fact that surprises people from other areas (for some reason). Chinese food got in through the back door because of this: selling fish and chips, but also offering rice, then noodles, then stir fries... and soon Merseysiders were commonly buying fish and chips with chow mein and fried rice in the same way other Brits ask for fish and chips and a battered sausage.

From there, it's a short journey to Chinese sit-down restaurants without the fish and chips, of which Liverpool has a number worth visiting (and it always pleases me no end to see people making their way from Argos and Primark, laden with cheap shopping, stopping for a quick lunch of sweet and sour chicken and some prawn toast before getting a bus back to their terraced house).

All of this is a long way of saying that tomorrow's dinner is not anachronistic to World War II eating habits, at least locally. But normal service will be resumed on Sunday, where it's that old standby bubble and squeak, with a week of soups to start again on Monday. I'm thinking Minestrone, made in my slow cooker...

Bread, cheese and whine

As the rationing month comes to a close, so I slow to a stop with the blogging. Partially it's being busy, partially it's being fed up of rationing and partially it's because of Talk Talk.

Let's start with Talk Talk. On Friday, as we're eating dinner (fish and chip for CJBS, the last remaining vegeburgers from the ration for me), the doorbell rings. Hello, says the visitor. I'm from BT. We've just upgraded our exchange and I want to make sure that you're getting the benefit. Can you sign here to say I've been?

No, I can't, says I. You're not from BT at all, are you? You're a con artist. Go away, now, or I'll summon a policeman (I get frighteningly British when flustered).

Yeah, sure, he says, and saunters off to the next house along and rings their doorbell. So I call the police. The police are in the area, watching over the 15 year olds spewing, fighting and getting chlamydia in the town centre, it being a Friday. They come out immediately and stop him.

No guv', he says to them, I'm from Talk Talk. Look, here's my ID (which sprang from nowhere). I'm telling everyone I'm from Talk Talk. The police then call me back: he says you've made a false call. We've left him to get on with it.

Oh, for crying out loud, says I. Of course he's telling you the truth that he's from Talk Talk. It's just us he's lying to. Oh, says the controller, we'll move him on, shall we? Well, duh.

At that point, I spot that our useless communications "regulator", OfCom, have a big press release about how they've stamped out mis-selling like this. It's leading the BBC news. It's on their website. It's a big story. What's not on their website is anywhere to complain about mis-selling. I email them, pointing this out. They email back today: no, because we can't actually do anything about it (I paraphrase). First, you must read Talk Talk's full terms and conditions and its full licence. Then you must write to Talk Talk, giving the details they ask for in the licence in the correct order. Then, if they won't help, you can contact Talk Talk's in-house ombudsman. If she won't help, then you can contact OfGums. But they will only help if you've been caught by the mis-selling.

So the police and the regulator were both unwilling to do anything about the suave conman from Talk Talk at my door that night. This did not set my mood very high.

Additionally, the burgers set out to avenge themselves on me as well by making me very ill. I spent the night and much of Saturday calling god on the great white telephone. That night, from points, we had tinned soup and some bread, about all I could keep down. On the plus side, the rationing plus all the vomiting means I'm now down to a 32" waist (30" if I concentrate).

Sunday I felt brighter, but my body wasn't done yet: the kneeling in the bathroom didn't suit my arthritic hips (it's okay, it's "juvenile arthritis", and it'll be gone by the time I'm 15, I was told...) and I'm now on the second day of hobbling around with a walking stick and a pained countenance. Sunday dinner was therefore a simple one: baked potatoes with a tomato soup starter. Oh, but the tomato soup was good! The best I've done yet (it helped that I was starving by this point). The main good point was that I used so much garlic - oh, so very much - that it was actually garlic soup with tomato. And it was lovely, but you don't want me to breathe on you today, believe me.

So, what for tonight? Well, it's French Onion Soup. Some adaptations are required to get this within wartime restrictions, but it should still be good. The key to French Onion Soup is getting the onions to caramelize without burning them. Many recipes get round this by having you boil them, then add brown sugar. There's no need for this, especially if, like me, you've got used to the endless bloody stirring of rationed food. Keep them on a medium heat and keep them moving and they'll not burn.

Ideally, I'd put brandy and red wine in it, but I'm out of brandy. So I'm going to try adding some dark rum instead. Also ideally, I'd put a thick slice of bread on top, a huge heap of cheese and then grill the whole thing, soup and all, before serving (unideally, burning my fingers, usually). But I've no cheese.

However, what I do have is powdered cheese sauce. This was available in the 1940s and was, just like now, a poor, third-rate ersatz excuse for cheese sauce. But made thickly, with some extra mustard powder, then poured onto the bread and toasted and I'll have a passible imitation of what I'm seeking.

Just one more day to go with this rationing lark, then off to rainy Belgium to sit damply in various cafes for a few days. And, yes, we will be back on rations when we get back. Only this time, I must find a period of history with just a little bit more cheese available!

Subject is fatless. Repeat: fatless

Ennui again. Or more a bankruptcy of ideas. Tuesday was salad, served with riveta. Wednesday was only last night but I'm groping for what it was. I wandered around Morrisons in a greater daze than usual. Ah yes! I made CJBS burgers from cheap mince and some onion pushed together and dry-fried. I had cheap vegeburgers. And I made a version of hash browns, that in the end were more rosti because they were baked. Fairly tasty, but all my fat was used up in the preparation.

Yes, I'm completely out of fat. For lunch, CJBS had bread soaked in the dripping from the burgers (he was thrilled but failed to notice that the amount of dripping left in the pan indicated that the burgers won't've been the healthiest thing in the world), and that's that for fat until the end of this month's go at the project, although I'll stare hard at my coupons just in case I've missed anything.

Fortunately, CJBS bought fish for him to have tonight. That doesn't need fat, but I had to turn to Madame La Patten for a recipe that didn't want some.

Fish roast was the answer. Take the pound of cod I've got, push tomato slices and bits of onion into it and bake it for 20 minutes. Then put more tomato slices and bit of onion on top and bake for ten minutes more, all in a medium hot oven. I'll serve it with mashed potato made with milk rather than butter.

For me, it's sandwiches. Basic salad ones, because I'm making them to take to Harrogate tomorrow at 5am (if I don't turn up at the office once a month, they'd have no evidence I was actually working for them; and I still haven't paid off Christmas, so my paycheck later this month will be useful lest I give up rationing and start busking). The bread is unbuttered, so it'll be a bit of a chew.

The solution is to do the following: buy the cheapest bottle of wine that the supermarket do (£2.99), pick the toenails out of it, and knock it back like medicine. With this plan, I'm sure to (a) not notice that the sandwiches are dry; (b) sleep well since I need to go to bed after The Archers; and (c) regret it horribly at 4am when the alarm goes off.

Pity me.

Failing flat

Yesterday was a salad day. CJBS had a single remaining tin of fish left from his points, so that seemed to make for a good excuse to fill up on raw vegetables. I had the leftover curried rice, which was excellent cold.

Today has been cold, with an uncomfortable wind blowing in from the Irish Sea, so something warming and filling seems to work. I'm making sausages and mash, with onion gravy and steamed broccoli.

I was going to make sausages in gravy in a big Yorkshire pudding. This was the plan, but as I've said before, I simply can't make Yorkshire puddings. They never, no matter what I do, rise. I've made the batter with real egg and dried egg and vegan dried egg. I've added bicarb and not added it. I've made the batter slowly by hand and quickly by handbeater. I've made it with extra liquid and less liquid. I've made it from scratch and out of a packet.

So here's the flat, burnt, unrisen waste of an ounce of fat. And, if you've got a tip for making Yorkshire pudding (US: "popovers", in a piece of information I've just discovered), please let me know! (Especially Tanya who never fails at puddings and also writes the hysterical Gypsy Creams blog).

Meanwhile I've peeled the potatoes, boiled them and will shortly run them through my ricer, so all is not lost!

Polypeptides

Michelle's comment on yesterday's curry has got me worrying that I've made a bit of a mistake in my lack of planning for each rationed meal.

By the middle of the war, surveys by Mass Observation for the Ministry of Food showed that more housewives knew the pyramid of nutrition than knew who Lord Woolton was and that the majority planned their meals to include what was needed for a balanced diet.

I've not paid any attention to nutrition, working on the basis that it's hard to get it too wrong when you're cooking everything from scratch. But I suspect I'm almost starving us of protein. I looked it up and I'm not serving much protein at all.

Of course, this is a genuine wartime problem: when egg, cheese and red meat have declined to so little as to be almost unmeasurable, protein becomes hard to get. I've done little to boost the amount, perhaps because, as a vegetarian, I'm probably usually short of protein even outside of rations. But for CJBS, it might make a big difference. At the very least, this has highlighted a question that Chris Neill and I wondered about on his lovely Dirty Kitchen blog: what is it with mid-century recipes putting egg into or on stuff you don't expect to be enhanced by an egg? The answer, perhaps, is: where else are we to get the protein?

Wikipedia suggests that we need 2oz/56g a day of protein. From their list, we might be getting our share from bread. But I checked the bread: 4g a slice; we're not eating 14 slices a day. So, from tomorrow, I'm going to start making a point of adding protein.

Perhaps we'll get it from today's meal, but tempered by extreme fat intake: yes, we had fish and chips (well, I had chips and mushy peas) from a takeaway. Entirely possible in wartime but expensive and often in short supply. Still, once in 3 months is probably fitting with that. And I defy you to argue with me!

Ruby Murray

I wrote about this in December and January, but it's still true: I'm a big fan of the British Empire.

Obviously, not the whole raping, pillaging, stealing of land, genocide and other bits they didn't used to teach in school. No, my love of Empire is simply that British culture is thousands of times better for our contact with other cultures and the vibrancy of our immigrant populations, the vast majority of which have been here for so many generations as to be far more British than I am (it's all cousins marrying cousins in the Valleys and my family is no exception; but we think we have Bermudan and Sinhalese in there; on my Dad's side, there's sketchy evidence that we're Russian-Jewish: a nice healthy mix leading to me).

So it's a purely selfish love of Empire, because it puts lovely food in my belly, especially in wartime when the standard Patten is for stodge with too much carrot. Tonight I made a classic Anglo-Indian curried rice that we both scoffed down far too quickly to really get the most from it.

Anglo-Indian food is nothing but a parody of the real street food of India, brought back by the sons of Raj in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 19th and 20th, when the British Indian population arrived, they brought more realistic versions, but these then changed out of recognition as white Brits rushed to eat at the tables of the new Brits.

Curried rice is firmly the earlier Anglo-Indian rather than the later Indo-European variety. It starts with a chopped onion fried off in a little fat. Then some chopped mushrooms go in. Then curry powder to make a sort-of roux. As a reminder, adding extra mild curry powder doesn't make the meal hotter; putting less hot curry powder in doesn't make it milder; similar, as you learned in basic quantum mechanics in primary school, to how an anti-up-quark is not the same as a down-quark.

A tablespoon of soured cream works well at this point. Then add your rice; 3oz/75g per person is always said, but add more than that. Stir it up and start spooning in stock. Add a couple of chopped tomatoes and some more stock. Some raisins or sultanas and more stock. Alternatively, you can just add all the dry ingredients, cover with stock and walk away. But I'm used to the endless stirring by now. Keep the heat high and add more stock if the rice sticks before it's done.

When the rice is sticky, it's read to serve. A further blob of soured cream is good on top. Naan or chapati on the side makes the meal. And it did. We go to bed happy, full and rotund. And the only rations used were the knob of fat and the points (not too onerous) for the rice.

Fat

I finally had the much-craved pizza. With four cheeses. And olives. And jalapeño peppers. Oh, but it was nice.

But now it's back to versions of rationed foods before rationing kicks back in in a week and a half. So today it's fish (and faux fish for me) made using the recipe from last month - baked white fish in bacon breadcrumbs.

This recipe won't be possible under the 1945 rations: 8oz of bacon a week becomes 4oz, effectively 4 slices. These 4 slices will feel slightly wasted if two are used just as a breadcrumb flavouring. However, if I ate meat (or fish, for that matter) it'd make more sense: this recipe produces a huge helping, enough for two if you ratchet up the vegetable sides a bit.

This recipe does make very good use of the fat in it - a knob of marg and that in the bacon - by soaking it into the bread and then releasing it into the fish as it bakes. Rationed food often tries to make a lot from a little when it comes to fat. The majority of people in the Western world are either carefully watching their fat intake or should be. Manufacturers also watch fat carefully, trying to get as much in as possible into most foods, often in hidden (and dangerous) ways.

Rationing has had me look at fat from the opposite direction: instead of fearing it, counting its calories or failing to notice it, I have (and this metaphor doesn't work) embraced it. With a need for some fat, if only to start off most recipes, but almost none available, I use it carefully, wisely even, and get pleasure from using the least possible and reusing it whenever I can.

I'm now carefully watching my fat intake, but in order to eke it out or even increase it where possible. This is actually a luxury; but anyone wanting to lose weight should consider such a different view. It'd make a change from the sight of larger people filling a trolley to bursting with "diet" and "low fat" foods: if you buy and eat 5 "low fat" cup soups in one go, you don't lose weight - you still get a lot of fat and don't get filled up. So you snack, getting a still greater fat intake; and next week you buy even more "low fat" food and eat more of it... all without losing weight.

I suppose this is really an argument for cooking from fresh rather than buying ready meals. I know not everyone can cook; and not everyone has time to cook. But food isn't just a refueling exercise. Learn to cook just one meal well and you've learned to cook anything. 90% of cooking is confidence (and the other 10% is presentation).

If only we in Britain hadn't got rid of home economics lessons to save money. It has cost us so much more.

All good things...

And so the experiment starts to draw to a close. Tonight's meal - leftover oatmeal sausages from yesterday, served as hot dogs - is the last proper cooking I'll do on the ration.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to that London, to see Enron and then have a meat-free meal (at a fish restaurant that does vegetarian options) with our friend peezedtee. We'll be back late on Sunday, and I've got toast (well, bagels, anachronistic as that may be) for our snack supper. Sunday breakfast will be mostly bread - the joy of Le Pain Quotidien on the Southbank - and I'll be full until late night.

I'll do a totting-up post on Sunday or early next week, but I can say already that I made it to the end of the month with spare points for butter, margarine, cheese, bacon, sweets and sugar. I've only used a third of my cooking fat. There's still a week's worth of tea left. Let me say that again: there's still a week's worth of tea left.

Weightwise, and this is probably due to my thyroid rather than the cooking, I've lost less than a pound. However, my 38" waist is a svelt 34" (32" if I concentrate).

I've learned some useful cooking tricks - I'll add oats and pearl barley to all soups and stews in future and probably keep up putting a potato into soups too - that are worth keeping up in general. I've also become a smarter shopper, and I hope to keep that up too.

How shortages are made

Michelle of Rational Living asked me about the shortages I mention frequently on this blog, so I thought I'd expand on my answer here.

First, some geography.


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This is the tip of the Wirral peninsular where I live - specifically West Kirby, the end of Merseyrail's Wirral line. I've asked Google to highlight the supermarkets nearby, to which it has added a couple of off licences (alcohol shops) for reasons I can't begin to fathom unless Google knows far too much about me. From this, you can see that Morrisons (formerly Safeway) have a monopoly on walking-distance supermarkets. For train-ride distance supermarkets, the Sommerfield (formerly Gateway) in Hoylake is actually an (in)convenience store rather than a supermarket per se, while the Sainsbury is half the size of the Morrisons. So I'd have to drive if I wanted a supermarket of any real size. If I drove, of course (I gave up driving for environmental reasons a year ago; I live opposite a station with a 15min service into England's 4th city and I work from home; what use would a car be?). But if I did have a car, I'd have to drive off the right of this map, all the way to Bidston (for a Tesco) or Upton (for a Sainsbury) to reach a large supermarket.

So, I think I've proved that Morrisons have a monopoly here. This monopoly they (take a deep breath, the UK's libel laws are harsh and fickle) might be alleged to be abusing. Some of the staff are breathtakingly unhelpful (some are wonderful, though, so go figure). They advertise themselves as being Britain's premiere supplier of cheap fresh food, then sell old mouldy crap for ridiculously high prices. This is partially true of all branches of Morrisons, but particularly true of this one.

Fortunately, the monopoly-of-crappiness that Morrisons have means that they haven't driven our independent shops out of business. We still have two butchers - one ordinary, one very upmarket - a fishmonger, a greengrocer and four pharmacies (one in Morrisons, and five if you include the Superdrug, but it doesn't dispense prescriptions; the people of West Kirby must be in a bad way).

The greengrocer is excellent - and cheaper than Morrisons - but doesn't have the muscle to hedge against supply problems. If the potatoes are frozen in the ground, Morrisons will, eventually, fly potatoes in from somewhere warmer (making it warmer still, ultimately). The greengrocer will go without potatoes. And so will I.

The posh butcher is much more expensive than Morrisons, but thousands of times better. Their meat is locally reared, locally cured and, for sausages, locally turned into sausages (in the back, where they've got a sausage-making machine, I'd assume). I don't eat meat, for moral reasons, but I believe you draw your own moral boundaries and don't impose them on others. CJBS does eat meat, the murderous swine, and I cook it for him. I'm very good at it, I'm told. Cooking with steak that has been hung for 28 days is a pleasure compared to cooking with the scrunched-up, bright red, nitrogen-bathed, shrink-wrapped, "processed in the UK" rubbish from the supermarkets. It just costs 5 times the price.

But using local stores requires planning. They open 9-to-5ish Monday to Saturday, with a half-day in the week; the greengrocer staff have usually packed everything away by 4:30, while the fishmonger has such strange opening hours you can't really predict when they'll open or close (at the first approximation, they're always closed). Morrisons is open from about 7am to about 9pm so is more convenient; they're also open on Sundays, unlike everything else.

So today, being a Sunday, it was Morrisons or nothing (perhaps Morrisons or better-planning-earlier-in-the-week would be more true). And at Morrisons, it was nothing. No carrots (they ran out on Friday, I think, but this could be weather related as the carrots they don't have are British), no non-air freight broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (except red cabbage) or tomatoes. They did have some courgettes. Here they are, in case you wonder why I went without.

Environmental impact assessment

Despite the (fully justified) nay-sayers, the cabbage colcannon soup was delicious and the Environment Agency didn't have to sue me for breaking emissions targets, even after two bowlfuls. That's useful, because I have another two bowls of it to have tonight.

What this soup didn't have was any suggestion of cabbage. I don't know whether I overwhelmed it with the potato - it seems unlikely - but it tasted of cream of some green vegetable rather than being specifically cabbagey (hey, no red underline! Cabbagey is a word!)

Tonight, therefore, is the same again; something that rationing forces upon you quite often. I dare say that the leftovers could be turned into something else, perhaps thickened into a sauce for cauliflower cheese or broccoli mornay (red underline: apparently not a word), but that would be asking a lot of Morrisons and their supply chain. Their cauliflower today was from Africa and their broccoli was from Spain, whilst Colin Lunt (fnar fnar) couldn't offer cauliflower at all and the broccoli was from Israel.

[By the way, I'm a very pro-EU Welsh lefty, not some Little Englander; I just normally watch my food miles anyway and during this project have specific rules about not eating stuff I couldn't get in 1940... in this case because Israel didn't exist and Spain, although neutral, was fascist and if I wasn't a wuss I'd've been in the International Brigades. I've even run away in faintly-absurd horror from condensed milk from Germany]

So, leftover colcannon soup it is, backed with some lettuce, tomato, onion and (yet more) cabbage in sandwiches. Tomorrow, CJBS isn't at work in the evening so for the first time in two weeks I get to actually cook for two (he's had 4 days off in that time, but I think I've fed him leftovers of my previous meals each time) and I've actually managed to get fish for him. Fish fingers, but fish all the same.

So tomorrow is fish fingers, both real and Redwood, a mound of mashed potato and some creamed leek. CJBS will also have baked beans, but cotton buds in vivid orange sauce are not how I'm spending my points.

Pasta, potatoes, parsnips... and hay

Yesterday's meal - an anachronistic pasta-in-sauce made to wartime standards - was lovely. But, despite eating my fill, I was hungry again after about an hour. I'm not used to this: the wartime bulking-out fills you and leaves you full.

So today I'm back on a wartime staple: baked potato with soured cream.

That'd be severely boring to blog about, but luckily I'm also making a soup for CJBS to have tomorrow (he's on late shifts for the next two weeks so he gets a packed lunch - sandwiches made from the leftover lamb today, with the bone going into the stock pot and thus meaning we had zero waste from the Sunday lunch).

The soup is a cream of parsnip. For the starting fat, I used two bacon rinds, chopped up. To this I added a finely-sliced small onion and let the two heat through. I added some flour to start the roux then used a quarter of a pint of milk (cream of, see?) to get the roux paste. Then I added two chopped parsnips and two chopped potatoes, all scrubbed but not peeled.

Then I added some of the meat stock to make the soup up to about three portions. I brought the whole lot to the boil, then, in a wartime measure of economy, took it off the gas and have left it covered; the parsnips and potato will cook in the liquid and cool enough to go into the blender (if I wasn't blending, I'd've grated the veg first and left the bacon rinds whole to fish out at the end).

I'll portion it off to go into the freezer - a non-wartime cheat - for CJBS to microwave at work for three evenings. The wartime equivalent of this was to warm a ceramic pot, fill it with soup, cover, then put it in a "hay box", a gas mask box full of hay. The soup would keep edibly, if not superbly, warm until he needed it. Of course, as a railwayman, CJBS would've been able to warm the soup on the coal fire in the waiting rooms (the railway in question was electrified in 1937, so there was never the option to heat it on the footplate, even if he had worked on the trains themselves).

Meanwhile, I'm off to have my baked potatoes and catch up with "Being Human" on the BBC iPlayer in peace.

Fish dish

CJBS bought a side of haddock. Since I needed the oven on to cook my pretend fish, baking the (real) fish was money-saving and eco-friendly. But the best way to bake?

Patten has various ways of baking "fresh salted cod", the preserved-in-salt, then-washed-in-bicarb version of fresh fish that appeared after we invaded Iceland and slaved their economy to ours (a plan we also had for the then-Irish Free State should the U-Boats drive us into starvation) . But fresh salted cod is quite different, and Patten is bulking it out to a degree not needed when we could buy such a large piece (admittedly at a terrifyingly high price - £2.77 for just under half a pound).

My choice was to make something of an occasion of it. I took two tomatoes and scooped out the pulp; I chopped the flesh and half an onion. I melted a knob of our fat ration (vegetable lard) and put two diced slices of smoked bacon in to cook. When this started to sizzle, I added the onion. When the onion was soft, I added the tomato chunks.

When everything was heated through, I put two slices worth of breadcrumbs into the mixture, soaking up the fat, then took it off the heat. I put the fish into a baking tray and spread the bacon-tomato-breadcrumb mixture over the top. I dotted half an ounce of butter over the top, then put it in a medium oven. Half an hour later, I served the now crusty, crisp-topped haddock with some mashed potato (made with both an ounce of butter and a quarter pint of milk because there was no gravy on offer) and some steamed broccoli.

Now I'll see if the resulting large meal was enough or whether CJBS wants the baked apple I've offered but not made yet.

Back to the future

Tonight's meal is timeless: modern but classic, within rations but not rationed. It's a simple grilled (or baked, CJBS will decide) fish with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli.

Fish was never rationed, but the supply was erratic due to U-Boat activity and disruption on the railways (fresh fish inland was unknown until the railways came in the 1830s and made the fast transfer of fish from coast to city possible, so fish and chips is a relatively modern British tradition). To simulate this, we banned fish from the supermarket and said that we could only buy it from the fishmonger. Our fishmonger has erratic opening hours, so the erratic supply is covered; indeed this is the first time that we've been able to get fish from him this year.

For me, I have some Redwood fishless fingers, which are almost exactly but not quite entirely unlike fish, so I'm covered in the vegetarianism bit.

For the first time, I'm not planning on a starter today. Instead I'm going to do the baked apple desert I mentioned yesterday. I've got mincemeat leftover from Christmas. Core out the apples and stuff the centre with the mincemeat. Wrap in foil and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Serve with custard or condensed milk, assuming you have the points for either.

Food flash

At the greengrocer's, CJBS was warned that potatoes are likely to be in short supply in the next few weeks due to supply problems from the poor weather (the potatoes are frozen into the ground). That'll make this experiment much more challenging... and also more authentic.

Stock answers

I've done well today, having not snacked on anything and coped with shortages already (no tomatoes, no sausagemeat, no quality tinned fruit, no leeks) and I've sent CJBS off to work with a packed lunch of (unrationed) fishpaste sandwiches and (leftover) soup.

Now I need to think on about my dinner for tonight. I'm wanting soup and have plenty of vegetables to make a good one, plus some pearl barley and oats to make it filling and thick, respectively. But to create said soup, I first need a good stock.

I've got a lovely large stockpot, bought a couple of years ago, but I've only ever used it to make soup. So I'm starting my soup-making today by making a stock that I'll add to over the coming days and weeks. As long as it is brought to the (vigorous) boil once a day, it won't go off... and I'll try to avoid my grandma's world-famous attempt at stock, where she left the pot for over a week on a low heat. Once taken off the heat, it continued to bubble to itself, before making a grab for power in an audacious coup d'etat and rampaging across much of Europe and Hessle foreshore.

I've roughly chopped an onion, a carrot and a parsnip to get it going, then covered them in water with a pinch of salt and brought the whole lot to the boil. Now to leave them for an hour or so on a gentle heat, then swipe some of the liquid for the soup-to-be. Later in the week I'll probably start adding stuff like mushrooms (meaty flavour) and onion skins (for the colour) before dividing into one vegetarian stock and one meaty stock, for which I'll swipe CJBS's bacon rinds.

As for tonight's soup, I'm undecided between cream of parsnip, cheese or potato and cabbage soup. CJBS fancies the parsnip, I fancy using some of my cheese ration on something a bit creamier still. Splitting the difference would mean I end up making the potato and cabbage soup...

Edit: I ended up making cheese soup, adapting Marguerite Patten's recipe, but not enough (although the soup itself was very nice).

The Patten recipe takes a chopped onion, 1.5oz marg, and a pint of household (reconstituted) milk and brings them to the boil together. Then you make a paste with 2tbsp of flour and a little milk, and add this to the now-simmering soup. This thickens the soup; then you add a cup of grated cheese, let it melt, season and serve.

The flaw here is that the flour paste didn't soak up the globs of fat on the surface - why would it? - and thus what I served was slightly unappetising. The recipe would've made more sense by starting with a roux (fry the onion gently, then add flour until the oil is all bound up, then slowly add milk until the thickened soup appears). I doubted that a creamy soup not made with a roux would work; I was right, although the taste was fine, especially when I added two ladles of my new stock and increased the seasoning (code for salt) slightly.

And what do points make?

So, we've begun! Tomorrow I'll buy some bathroom scales so CJBS and I can chart just how rationing reduces our overstuffed frames. Today, I'll be shopping for fruit and vegetables at our local greengrocer (Colin Lunt - not joking, and, yes, I intentionally spoonerise that name normally, but won't here else Blogspot will throw me off) and also get our fat ration.

Having looked everywhere, I failed dismally to find the value of "points" - the 16 free coupons a month everyone got that could be used (with money) to buy treats and store cupboard items. However, seeking to put off planning my menu for the week and enjoying three cups made from one teaspoon of loose tea, I picked up one of my favourite books: Peter Hennessy's masterful Never Again: Britain 1945-1951. And it fell open at page 49 - a table of points-values from May 1945. This wasn't quite the high point of values that we're using (January 1940), nor the lowest (early 1942 and late 1946, I believe) but it's all I've got.

So, these are our "points". We have 16 to last a month, and the quantity is a pound (450g) - although that's a maximum, not a minimum (so if 16pts gets a pound of something, we can use 8pts to get half a pound):

Meat products: 16
Tinned soup: 4
Tinned fish: 16
Tinned fruit: 4
Tinned vegetables: 4
Dried fruit: 16
Nuts: 12
Biscuits: 4
Cereal: 8
Oatmeal: 4
Dried peas and beans: 4
Rice, sago, tapioca and semolina: 2
Pasta: 4
Jelly, custard powder, blancmange, table cream: 8
Tinned peas and beans: 3
Tinned stewed steak: 20

Additionally, 2 points gets a pint of condensed milk, and 1 point gets a fluid ounce (30ml) of olive oil, salad oil or salad cream.

And, yes, the British had heard of pasta in 1940, although it was known as macaroni if it was shaped and spaghetti if it wasn't. They'd also heard of olive oil, but you usually bought it from Boot's or Timothy White's, not from the grocer (although this in itself has become a lazy journalist's shorthand, as you could buy it for cooking purposes from delis and specialist food shops).

So, with those values set, I can now try to plan the first week's food.

Keeping Christmas merry

With the rationing experiment fast approaching, I'm cooking the usual huge Christmas dinner you'd expect in the early 21st Century.

I'm interested to spot what I could and couldn't make of this meal during wartime. Starting at the top, the turkey is out, as is all poultry. Poultry wasn't rationed, but it became impossible to buy, and although the government encouraged people to keep hens, how many people could (a) find space and (b) wring the neck of a bird you've been caring for all year? Woman's Hour this morning had an all-too-brief clip of a 1940s "Murkey" recipe - mock Turkey made using mutton. I dread to think.

The bread sauce is out too. It's just too wasteful of the onion you put in the milk and then throw away; later in the war, milk would be rationed and a pint for a sauce is even more wasteful. Ironically, the cloves (nutmeg in this case, CJBS not liking cloves either) and the bay leaves would remain in plentiful supply, but of little utility with nothing for them to flavour.

The roast potatoes would still be plentiful, and Lord Woolton would like us to eat more. But there would be little fat to make that crispy, almost-burnt, outside. With no fat, you're getting baked potatoes rather than roast - still good, but not the same thing at all.

Stuffing, carrots, cabbage and broccoli are all fine, although the stuffing would be by hand from scratch rather than from Paxo. Carrots remained in good supply, but cabbage and broccoli are regional products and rely on the railways supplying a useful quantity, so sudden shortages are not unknown.

At the worst level, this Christmas dinner could have been stuffing made from stale bread and sage, carrots, baked potatoes and whatever meat or fish was to hand; if not available, then it would be Woolton Pie or some form of ersatz "savoury loaf" - filling, but uninspired by modern tastes.

At the best, then a small joint with plenty of vegetables would be on offer - this providing the fat to make the potatoes truly roast rather than baked. With few toys in the shops, perennial shortages of hard liquor and the beer watered down, virtually no fresh fruit in December, and supplies of foreign-grown nuts reduced drastically, Christmases 1940 through 1953 (rationing ran January 1940 to mid-1954) would've been very hard by modern standards.