We're doing it again

Okay, okay! Quiet down, you lot.

This experiment was a great success as far as I can tell. CJBS lost weight; I lost girth whilst staying almost the same weight (but why??). I used less than every ration and invented or adapted many new recipes. Altogether, it was a success by every measure.

And then I went back to the old ways. We'd both fantasized about chips (fries) and had them on Saturday. We'd both dreamed (literally) of nachos and had them on Monday. We'd both really wanted a full-blooded chilli and had one on Tuesday.

And I paid for it. The fat of the chips came out on my skin immediately, along with a teenager-style crop of zits. The nachos disagreed with me entirely. The chilli... well, just don't ask. A month of wholesome, home cooked, slow cooked, virtually fat-free food had suited my body in every way. The opposite certainly didn't.

CJBS felt the same. We felt far, far worse on the "normal" food than we did on the ration. So we're doing it again. And this time: it's personal.

I still need to poison myself a little bit more - I'm pizza deprived - but we're going to restart the experiment. On Sunday 21 February, rationing will kick in again for a month (first class Eurostar to Brussels in the last week of March will thus be allowed for). And to make things more, er, interesting, we're not doing the 1940 rations this time. Oh no. We're doing February 1945. This isn't the lowest things got - 1942 and 1946-7 were the low points - but it's serious.

We'll each have 8oz (200g) of sugar a week (half of 1940), But the standby of jam, and we had huge amounts on 1940 rations, is down to 4oz (100g) a week - the factories had been bombed out. Fat is 8oz in total - that's butter, marg and dripping, previously 8oz, 12oz and 3oz each. Cheese is 2oz (50g) which is effectively nothing. Bacon is 4oz - half of 1940's ration again. Tea is the same at 2oz a week, and we get just under an egg a week. Our points will be the same, since I did the 1940 points on the only source I had, which was May 1945. Gone is the sweets ration, combined into the points but effectively unavailable.

Red meat dropped from 1s 2d in 1940 to around 1d a week. Allowing for inflation, that takes us from £1.68 to about £1.20. CJBS suggests declaring himself a vegetarian in order to boost cheese and fat. I'm not sure and will need to think on. But whatever I decide, the plan is back on...

Maths lesson (probably wrong)

Tonight's a leftovers night: the very nice roast tomato soup and the indifferent Woolton pie (to which I will add gravy this time, my comments yesterday notwithstanding).

But for tomorrow, I'm experimenting. I've got some sausagemeat (not rationed) and some oatmeal (on points). I've also got some of those vegan hotdogs, so the following works both ways.

Sausagemeat, like sausages, was unrationed in the war but very hard to come by. When you did get it, it was bulked out with rusk and breadcrumbs. It was also fatty. Interestingly, this didn't change much after the war, with sausages over 50% bulk still selling well into the 1980s, when Brits finally started to become foodies.

This sausagemeat is much more meaty, as fits modern standards, but I'll soon see to that, because I'm going to make oatmeal sausages. Oh yes. These Ministry of Food inventions are both clever and disgusting-sounding. You fry off an onion in a knob of dripping, then stir in 4oz of oatmeal. Make up a porridge with water and cook for 15 minutes. Then add 2oz of sausagemeat (this also works for mince or chopped bacon) and allow to cool. Make the resulting gloop into sausage shapes, roll in breadcrumbs and fry if you've the fat or grill. Two ounces of sausagemeat becomes 7oz of sausages. I suspect the trick will be in the seasoning.

To serve with this, I'm going to make what Marguerite Patten calls "pigs in clover". Basically, you hollow out the centre of a potato, fill the space with sausagemeat and bake as you would with ordinary baked potatoes. No fat is used and, theoretically, no butter or cheese is required to lubricate the potatoes. This is then served on a bed of steamed cabbage - presumably the "clover". I like cabbage, but British cooking has long had a love affair with serving pork in, on or with cabbage for reasons I can't fathom. I dare say it'll be lovely; I can't see why the two don't mix. But why always together?

By the way, I can make a rare direct comparison in price for the oatmeal. In the 1940s, oatmeal was subject to a ceiling price set by the Ministry of Food and also a subsidy to keep it below that price courtesy of the Board of Trade (despite its name, a government department, now Lord Voldemort's Mandelson's Orwellian Department for Business, Innovation and Skills). The ceiling price was 3.5d a pound. That's about 1.5p a pound in the post-1971 decimalised money (12d [pennies] to the shilling, 20s [shillings] to the £, therefore 240d to the £), or 2.5 US cents.

I got a pound (well, 500g) for 53p (86c). That's 10 shillings and sixpence ha'p'n'y (10s 6.5d; I miss the pleasure that pre-decimal people had of reducing "half a penny's worth" to "hay-puff" - and that people younger than me don't understand the true insult in "you daft ha'porth!"). Parliament helpfully publishes the snappily named "Inflation: the value of the pound (research paper)" fairly irregularly. Here comes the science bit, and on that basis, prepare for it to be wrong.

We start with a "price index", which takes a pound in 1974 as being "100". The price index for 1940 was 20.2; the index for 2002 (the latest available) was 695.1

So, inflation 1940 to 2002 is 695.1 divided by 20.2; prices have risen by 34.5 times. Between 1940 and 2002, oatmeal went from £0.015 to £0.53; thats  35.3 times. Okay, if you're still with me, inflation since 1940 is 34.4; oatmeal in that time is up 35.3; so the price has risen in real terms by just 2.6% (that's 35.3 divided by 34.4, then minus 1, then times by 100). So despite the ceiling price and subsidy of 1940, oatmeal is barely more expensive now than then.

After doing that, I've sprained my brain. I'll have to have gin to cure it. I hope you're all happy now.

Terms of reference

Having established why we're doing this, we need to work out how this will work.

Obviously, some parts of the World War 2 "experience" are not going to be easy (or desirable) to repeat. Working out the dividing line without bankrupting the experiment is difficult.

First things first, however.

Rations

Wikipedia provides a useful ready-reckoner of rations at their highest and their lowest. Since we're starting in January, we might as well start with the January 1940 rations - tight, but positively generous by later standards.

That gives us bacon and ham at 8oz/230g a week. Sugar is 16oz/455g. Tea is 4oz/115g. Cheese is 8oz/230g a week. Jam is 1lb/450g a month, with marmalade at 2lb/900g a month. Butter is 8oz/230g a week and margarine 12oz/340g. Lard - ugh - is 3oz/85g a week. Sweets are 16oz/455g a month. Meat other than pig meat is slightly more left to the market economy to regulate, at a shilling and tuppence a week.

That meat ration provides the first hurdle: 1/2d is slightly over 5p now. The meat that buys in 2010 can barely be measured. So we need to allow for inflation. Here an invention not thought of in 1940 (except perhaps by Alan Turing) comes in handy. The internet says that, allowing for inflation, 1/2d is just £1.68. That's £6.72 a month, or enough, from our excellent but premium local butcher for about half a pound of lamb or a pound of some appalling cut of beef. And that's in a month. Hmmm.

As a vegetarian, which I am but CJBS is not, all I can find online is that I get "more" cheese to make up for the reduction in pig, "meat" and lard. This is unhelpfully vague (I'd be grateful to anyone with actual figures who got in contact) and, of course, doesn't take into account the modern ways of using Quorn and the even better Redwood vegan meat replacements.

Still, those figures are a good way of proceeding.

Off the ration

Now, how to deal with things that weren't rationed but were still difficult to get? For instance, fish was never rationed but it was very difficult to get hold of. My solution is to allow CJBS as much fish as he would want... but not from the supermarket. If he wants fish, he must go to the fishmongers, where their half-days and strange closing times make getting it difficult. Similarly with vegetables: you can have as much as you like, provide they're British. If they're Commonwealth... well, it's not a drain on Sterling but it does endanger our sailors. Vegetables from Europe are out, even thought the Nazis haven't yet (if 2010=1940) broken out into the west. Our local greengrocer has lots of local veg, amongst the non-local stuff and the air-freight stuff that makes me wince in 2010, let alone in 1940. Anything British from there is therefore fine.

Unrationable

With a faintly green side to this plan, what can we do about the other stuff that we now call "recycling" and "carbon footprint" but in 1940 called "waste not want not"? The 1890s house we live in has had all the fireplaces bricked up, mostly in a refurbishment in 1937 (the one that survived I had bricked up in a refurbishment in 2007). We have central heating - North Sea gas - rather than coal: something on both levels never thought of in 1940. The best I can offer is to be "careful" with it in 2010. We will turn off radiators we're not using and turn down the radiators we are. We'll also wrap up warmer. To a degree we already do this, of course, and fuel and power rationing didn't really kick in until much later in the war... but that's all really excuses.

I have a deep freeze and a fridge - something my Dad's mother never had, even into the 1990s. Both fridge and freezer were effectively unknown in the UK in 1940. I also have clingfilm - a development from the post-war oil boom. To do this properly, I'd need to give both up and live with food that goes off much more quickly. This is an anathema to me - wasting food just bothers me terribly - so I'll continue to treat the fridge like my grandma's pantry. But ideally I'll avoid the deep freeze for voracity.

Exceptions

CJBS points out that exceptions will need to be made three times in January. At the beginning, our best friends Jon and Kate will be visiting for Sunday lunch. Even if I take their rations into account, the roast lamb I promised a few months ago will be the entire meat ration for the month immediately. And Jon doesn't even eat meat! Shortly after, we're promised our friend Tony almost exactly the same meal - but long enough after that he'd notice that the meat had been reheated. Finally, right at the end of January, CJBS and me are in London for a play. This involves a restaurant meal; whilst these were not initially rationed, when it did happen they were limited to 5s (25p) a sitting. That's £7.18 allowing for inflation. £14.36 between the two of us? Well, not including wine and coffee (both were excluded and charged at a premium by restaurants to subsidise the main meal) that's something we could just about do. But the two guest meals will need thinking on about.