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There has been a decidedly autumnal nip in the air in the last few days. Summer is clearly drawing to a close and with it, no doubt, my happy three or four months of salads.

In the last few weeks, there's been a real choice of home-grown goodies. In spring, I was falling upon the odd limp British lettuce with joy at having something green. In August, I was choosing from 3 types of British lettuce. Slowly, this is sliding back to just the one. Soon, lettuce will go off the menu entirely.

So it's time to start planning for the limited menus and random shortages that made last winter so hard to deal with. Luckily, I've got help.

On my monthly trip into the office in Harrogate, one of my colleagues had found her mother's cookbooks in the back of a cupboard. One, entitled something like 'Eat What You Grow' didn't sound promising but was actually full of the most tempting winter recipes. The other, a wartime cookbook sponsored by Stork margarine, had some the staples I was already used to, enlivened by putting a spoonful of Stork in, on or over the food before, during or after cooking. Why are these sponsored cookbooks always so naked in their attempt to get you to heap great big piles of their wares into your cooking? Even vegetables, getting their usual British "quick boil" of 15 minutes or so, would be improved by having Stork boiling in the pan with them, as well as melting over the top of them at the end. And this awful substance, Stork, was rationed!

I took photocopies from both books of likely looking recipes. The Stork book had a chapter at the beginning that I loved: what to do with your cooking when the air raid sirens sounded (basically, turn off the gas and come back to it after the All Clear, when it will either need further cooking or reheating).

A day later and we were in that London, to have dinner with Jonathan and Kate to celebrate our up-coming first wedding anniversary. It was also a good opportunity to have an expensive shop for non-rationed goods at Fortnum and Mason's in Piccadilly - something possible even during the war, as the shop specialises in dressings and sauces and side-of-plate extras that were never rationed and rarely subject to shortages, but entirely useless with nothing to put them on. You can't make a main meal from Ginger Confit and Hungarian Paprika, try as you might.

It was also a good opportunity to nose around a museum, something we could both pass our lives doing, me at speed, CJBS as slowly as possible. So we went to the National Portrait Gallery at St Martin-in-the-Field in order to look for and at people I'd heard of. It was very interesting and I think we'll go back to look at the people I haven't heard of in the older galleries.

CJBS cannot visit any building with a cafe in it without having a cup of tea, so we stopped off in the basement cafe to be charged a small fortune for some warm water and a bag of assorted leaves. This meant - clever, clever curators - going past the NPG's bookshop. I can't resist a bookshop. Ever. So we paid an even greater fortune for a pile of books that we then had to lug back up north with us.

Still, one of the books was the Eat What You Grow book, in the form of a reprint of the 1941 edition "Food Facts for the Kitchen Front". This is a good little book, much better than the Marguerite Patten stodge I've been living with for the past year.

It starts with a useful, if not entirely accurate, chapter on how you need at least one item from each of three "food value groups" in each meal: energy foods (fat, sugar, potatoes); body-building foods (meat, fish, dairy, wholemeal grains, potatoes); and protective foods (vegetables, wholemeal grains, potatoes). Yes, there's something of a tuber-based theme here.

It then goes on to explain calories, proteins, vitamins and mineral salts - suggesting that half a pound of potatoes and a quarter of a pound of cabbage would get you your day's Vitamin C (and sod all else, I'd wager).

The good bit of the book - the rest of it, in fact - then follows. Alphabetically, with no nonsense, it runs through each vegetable and presents some ration-friendly and (surprisingly) delicious-sounding ways of cooking it. The it does the same for potatoes, salads and herbs; then on to fish (still all white fish, with a detour into trout), meat and meat-substitution and nine pages of quick soups; bread, fruit and quick sauces to disguise poor menus; and finishes with a chapter on slow cooking. And it has an index! (The number of cookbooks without a useful index is disturbing; those chefs need to stay in more.)

Artichoke soup! Hot tomato salad! Eggless mayonnaise! The latter made with icing sugar... ugh. Sheep's Head Roll! (no, no, no). Despite the odd misfire (liver dumplings, anybody?), this book will be keeping us fed as winter draws on.

Meanwhile, by the way, I catered for TWO dinner parties the weekend before London. It was ration-stretching (in other words, it required a fiddle, assuming that I was getting coupons and points from the guests; although in reality, that was exactly what people did when entertaining during the war) but nobody noticed that they were getting rationed fare.

The first meal, a chicken salad, was made by slow-cooking chicken fillets in mustard and honey, so took no precious fat. Dessert was Eton Mess, but I saved on sugar by buying a bottle of cherry beer and reducing it to a sauce.

The second meal was roast lamb. That really was ration-stretching, using up the best part of a month's saved meat rations from both of us for a small joint. Plenty of vegetables, gravy and mint sauce hid that the meat wasn't in huge quantities. Still, I managed to get three days of further meals out of the scraps of meat left on the bone, then made stock from the bone itself, which became two days of French onion soup. Finally, the bone went into the dogs, who are grateful even now.

Ultimately, I made my dinner party rations stretch over 17 individual meals and two dogs without feeling any shortages. Of course, I'm now meatless for the next two weeks but this is survivable, thanks to my Food Facts book and the last days of the salad.

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.

Soup n' stock, rock n' roll

I had a clash of leftovers vs tastebuds this week. In the leftovers department, I had celeriac (aka celery root) and garlic-infused olive oil from the earlier salads. In the tastebuds department, it was tomato soup I wanted. How to combine these unlikely things?

Huh, not much of a cliffhanger question, that, is it? Tomato and celeriac soup seems the obvious answer, but there was little or nothing online. Time to invent a recipe!

I started by halving my tomatoes, putting them in a baking tray and pouring the garlic olive oil (I got olive oil on points and just put half a dozen smashed-up garlic cloves in some for a few days) on top. Some sea salt and in the fan oven for an hour at 150C. Meanwhile I peeled and diced the celeriac and made a standard soup base with stock from my pot - and re-used the oil from the tomatoes to start it off, which pleased me no end.

To the soup base I added the baked tomatoes and the celeriac cubes. I also chucked in a carrot to please Lord Woolton and a diced potato. When everything was soft, I separated the lumps from the base, blended the lumps and reunited the two. The result was lovely, although I really couldn't taste the celeriac.

The leftover celeriac peelings went into my stockpot, with the ends of the carrot. My last stockpot having gone whiffy through ill-use, and the celeriac making the stock smell glorious, I've decided to use a cheat not available in the 1940s. I've taken the stock and put it into plastic tupperware and they'll go in the deep freeze for later use. Marguerite Patten is clear that a well-used stockpot can be kept almost indefinitely by making sure you boil it daily (unless you've got anything green in it - that reduces it to a week). I can get the stockpot to go for 3 weeks or so with daily boiling, but after that it starts to smell musty, and then sweet: a very bad sign.

I'll start a new stockpot the next time I've got leftover vegetable matter, but the hurry to do so is lessened by having some in the freezer. And the multiple boiling produces a lovely, flavour-heavy, golden stock that reduces the need for salt as a flavour enhancer.

Meanwhile, the craving for tomatoes has not gone away, despite spinning the soup out for three days between the two of us. I decided that I wanted pasta in a tomato sauce for tonight, so wandered around the dreaded Morrisons buying mushrooms, basil and pasta. Eventually I remembered the tomatoes. Having bought them earlier this week, I was shocked and annoyed to find that the four types of domestic tomato had been reduced to none. It was Spanish, Dutch and Moroccan all the way... and all off-limits to the project.

I had to buy - on points! - two tins of tomatoes instead. This is a terrible waste of points, especially when I've spent freely on the olive oil earlier. It also does for my bake-to-intensity plan for the tomatoes. I'll just have to carefully reduce the canned tomatoes on the stove with a stern look on my face and the occasional tutting noise.

And the rock n' roll? Well, I voted for the Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final yesterday. They didn't get through, despite having the campest entry ever ever. So tomorrow I'm either voting for Cyprus (because they're Welsh... don't ask) or Greece (on the basis that they don't know they're so homoerotic).

Partly politics

April is at an end, so we get a pause in the rationing. With the UK general election this week, the rationing is off for visitors who will be getting the full smorgasbord of fat, cheese and meat we've lacked for a month.

I'm coming back to the rations next week, as the challenge is fun and the diet is very healthy. But I have to say that this isn't as much fun as it was: I've got the cooking down to a fine art, seemingly able to make a great meal out of next to nothing, to turn leftovers into fresh meals two nights running without breaking a sweat and take a lack of fat and still make a dinner with all the trimmings.

There's a knack to rationing and once you've got the knack, you can deal with anything. It shows how, in the UK at least, when rationing petered out in the mid-1950s, people continued to cook rationed food, just with more fat and cheese in it. The British gained a reputation for stodgy, cautiously-flavoured food that we're only now starting to shake off, because the favourites of rationing (pies, bakes, one-pot stews) remained the norm. The portion sizes got bigger, and the trimmings reappeared, but the food stayed the same.

This is ideal for CJBS. Born in 1951, he grew up with no memory of rationing, but his food at home and at his private school (boo, hiss) was just what Patten and the other wartime cooks would recommend, almost always cooked too long and dripping with extra dripping. Rationing for him hasn't meant discovering new food: it has meant rediscovering the food of his childhood, only served hotter.

For me, the project has been different. I've become a smarter shopper, caring about where my food comes from. I've worried over the vitamins and protein content of ordinary dishes. I've looked for ways of making rich, satisfying food without fat. These are things we should be doing. So much of food is just refuelling, filling a space in the stomach until it's time to sleep or fill it again. We've substituted salt for flavour, hydrogenated fat for quality preparation, making ingredients hot for actual cooking. And we've done this whilst buying ever more recipe books and watching ever more television programmes about how to make good food - and watched the latter with a microwaved ready meal in front of us.

Partially, this is the fault of the politicians. In the 1980s, seeking to save money as usual (in order, it turns out, to spend it on themselves) the Department of Education decided that Domestic Science (once called "cookery") wasn't needed any more. It became optional, then it disappeared altogether. An entire generation - my generation - grew up without the basic skills that cookery lessons give you. Watch Come Dine With Me (if you must) and see people marvel over how skilled someone is because they can make a roux. We see people feeling guilty over using frozen pastry - because they can't make pastry. Pastry! And they do feel guilty, for not having been taught the basics.

To digress, the same thing happened at the same time with English. Politicians - and trendy teachers - decided that we didn't need to know the rules. Written English was going to die out, thanks to the wonder of the telephones and videophones and other such advances. Nobody predicted the internet and how we'd all be being asked to comment and review and give our two-penn'thworth on blogs and forums across all possible subjects. So people now happily type "i saw there sign that was telling us wear to vote and i fort that they was saying i should of vote's for tori'es when i wants to vote for labour's party". If you tell people they're doing it wrong, they often feel guilty... for not having been taught there (the salt shaker is over there) their (it was their salt shaker) and they're (they're concerned about your interest in the salt shaker), how to make plurals and possessives and how to spell (the latter was the biggest flaw in my education).

We've paid the price for deciding English didn't need to be taught in depth. And we've paid the price for deciding cookery didn't need to be taught at all, with obesity in our kids and basic - really, really basic - food hygiene thrown away (clues: wearing gloves doesn't help if you wear the same gloves when moving from vegetables to raw meat to cooked meat - can you hear me, Subway? - and if you need to be told that raw meat is generally poisonous until cooked thoroughly throughout, as did the guy who sued a supermarket for selling him burgers that he poisoned his kids with by not cooking them properly, then you're not ready to breathe without help, let alone cook food).

Three months on rationing and I'm as good a cook as I'll ever be. Of course, I had a good grounding in it - my mum is, after all, a top-class chef in her own right, so it shouldn't be a surprise; but my knowledge of the chemistry and physics of food has gone to a new level. I now know with certainty how ingredients combine and interact, how meat benefits from being cooked on a low heat for a long time but vegetables need a high heat and a short time, and why this should be so.

I might still not produce the best presented food in the world - it tends to sit in a heap on the plate rather than looking like something out of the Sunday supplements - but I think rationing has made me produce the best food I can and will produce. For that reason, the project is worth continuing next week.

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.

'srooms

A slightly odd meal today. I'd got a mixture of leftovers and shortages to make things challenging, so I had to think on my feet whilst shopping.

The other day I mentioned January's tomato shortage and the hell thereof. Well, the devil heard me: CJBS is craving cream of tomato soup, but the shelves were bare of tomatoes (there were bruised Israeli and Spanish tomatoes, but there's a war on, so they're out). There was also no evaporated milk, my favourite points spend. And his second crave, garlic pizza bread, failed epically due to there being no garlic and no pizza bread or dough.

Meanwhile, I had leftover mashed potato, having made about 3 pounds of the stuff yesterday. But we managed to eat about 2 and half pounds of mash, leaving not very much at all. So my thought of a doing something exciting with it faded away immediately.

But there was an upside. I'm such a fat miser, er, a miser when it comes to fat, I had stretched a week of butter to three weeks without even realising. So I've got lots and lots of butter suddenly (and my waste of dripping on failed Yorkshire pudding yesterday now feels better). Then I discovered a garlic bulb moldering in the back of the fridge: I don't usually go near the back of the fridge, preferring instead to just send the entire appliance to Porton Down every couple of years and asking them to help themselves to anything promising.

Excess butter and a stray garlic bulb plus some pitta bread equals homemade garlic bread. I melted a lot of butter in a pan, then added a lot of crushed garlic. Before the garlic browned, I took it off the heat and pressed each pitta into the fat. The result will be baked before I serve the meal: instant garlic bread.

Meanwhile, the soup plan was switched to mushroom soup. Now, mushrooms are an odd thing: you'd think them useful in rationing, given that they're savoury and bulking and easily fill in for meat. But Patten is silent on mushrooms. Did Britons of the 1940s not eat them? Or were they not farmed - did you have to gather them yourself and thus risk instant and painful death? Whatever, mushrooms are not something wartime recipes seem to consider.

Perhaps the mushroom soup is therefore an anachronism. But it's worthwhile. I've said this before: mushroom soup is lovely, but very very easily done wrong. To prevent that, it requires dried mushrooms (or mushroom ketchup) to get the flavour right. I made a stock from dried mushrooms, a pint boiling water and a teaspoon of cumin, left to stand for an hour. The soup is then an onion roux, made up with milk, vegetable stock and white wine - the latter a real treat in wartime - plus the mushroom stock.

So that leaves the mashed potato. I'm not prepared to waste cheese rations on it. I'm a cheese miser, too. But I did have cottage cheese and half an onion. Combine the lot with some butter and bake. That should be a useful "champ" type thing, but with cottage cheese. I'll see how that turns out.

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.

Use yer loaf

Still no green vegetables in the shops, but Marguerite Patten rushes to the rescue with an interesting-sounding cheese, tomato and potato loaf. Yes, there's cheese in there, but I've saved the ration and my (and CJBS's) 2oz each will go into this.

I've had the deep satisfaction of making the breadcrumbs for this (two slices into the food processor, ten seconds later: breadcrumbs. It never fails to brutally please) which are then toasted and put round a greased 2lb loaf tin.

I'm boiling some new potatoes and when they're done I'll let them cool and slice them up. I'm also making a cheese sauce at the same time. Next to slice some tomatoes.

Then it's layering: potatoes, tomatoes, cheese sauce. Potatoes, tomatoes, cheese sauce. And so on until the tin is full. Then 30 minutes in a medium oven. In theory, this should turn out onto a plate. In practice, it will be welded to the inside of the tin. Of course it will. These things always are. They only turn out neatly on to a plate on television, and that's because the food is plastic or otherwise faked (yes it is).

This is a meat-free, pasta-free lasagne in all but name. Have you ever cooked a lasagne and had it come out looking like the photo in a book or on a frozen food packet? Of course not. So I'm ready for this and will have Eduardo, our dishwasher, primed for his "Intensiv Care" setting (that missing "e" riles me) to scrape the remainder off.

Ring a ring o' potatoes

The leek and potato soup continues to provide, now into its third day. It was a chunky soup, but in a desperate search for variety I've now blended it to provide a new texture, if not a new flavour.

For a main course I'm doing a Marguerite Patten dish, prosaically called "potato ring". Her recipe takes three large potatoes, some flour, some seasoning and a little dripping, has you grate the potato, mix in the flour and seasoning, form into a ring and brush with the dripping. Then you bake it in a medium oven for 45 minutes.

As ever with La Patten's stuff, the recipe seems plainer than it needs to be. My version therefore adds a grated carrot and a grated onion into the mix. Because I'm using the grater attachment of the blender rather than doing it by hand, I don't need the flour to bind the ring: the potato is still wet and that does the job. Instead of the seasoning, I've gone with a dusting of the Hungarian paprika I got from Fortnum and Mason's a month ago and some salt. Other than that, it remains the same process: form into a ring, brush with melted marg (not dripping, ugh) and bake in a medium oven for 45 minutes. The result is basically a rosti, but in a ring.

Patten suggests steaming some fresh green vegetables to serve in the centre of the ring, and I really like that idea. But I can't get fresh green vegetables other than cabbage and leek, since I won't buy imported food. I've been craving broccoli (no, honestly) but it's Spanish only in Morrisons and the greengrocer. That forces me into using meat for the middle: sausage for me, but Spam for CJBS, which I'll fry. Onion gravy for both completes the meal.

In other news, whilst booze was not rationed, it was hard to get in 1945, so I'm playing along with that insane idea for some reason. Having had nothing this week so far, I'm allowing myself a pint of milk stout tonight. So, here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

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.

Everyone stops for soup

Having filled up on baked potatoes last night - and stayed full - tonight I'm having another bulked-out wartime staple: soup. I made parsnip soup yesterday, but with bacon rinds, so I don't know how it tastes (I'll find out tonight when CJBS eats it at work).

With tomatoes now back in the shops after a week of shortages, I fancied tomato soup. Marguerite Patten gives the WVS's recipe, which contains bacon yet again; but as I almost always change her recipes, this one was freely adaptable to take that out.

I melted a large knob of butter in a pan, then added a finely sliced onion. When the onion was cooked, I used flour to make my roux, with a small tin of evaporated milk as the liquid. To this I added some of my vegetable stock from the on-going pot, then put in a diced carrot and a diced potato - the bulking agents that will turn a starter into a main course. Then I added more stock, and finally six tomatoes, halved.

Now, outside of wartime, I'd've scooped out the seeds and only cooked the flesh; and, if I could be bothered, deskinned the tomatoes as well. But the waste is terrible, since the skins and seeds really can't be used elsewhere and the WVS (now WRVS) recipe leaves them in. So there will likely be seeds still floating in the soup after I've run it through the blender. I'll cope, as will the tomato seeds.

Normally I'd bring the soup to the boil, then simmer. But the evap could easily "catch", so I'm back on the endless stirring until it gets close to boiling; then, as with the parsnip soup yesterday, I've taken it off the heat and left it covered for the potatoes and carrot to cook through in the hot liquid. This takes longer - literally "slow food" - but uses no gas, so it's worth the time taken. When the potato is done, I'll run the lot through the blender, return to the heat briefly and serve with croutons.

Meanwhile CJBS takes his parsnip soup to work, with some spam sandwiches to have on the side and some extra bread for toasting, whilst I think I've got the preposterous rubbish of "Survivors" to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

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.

Coping with shortages of... everything

The bad weather continues. Although no new snow has fallen, the 3" from yesterday remains on pavements (compacted to ice) and on roads further inland. This has given me a lovely taste of World War II conditions: shortages.

I went out to get something - I wasn't sure what - for dinner. But most of the local shops are closed, and those that are open have bare shelves. I managed to get 2lb of potatoes in poor condition, two sad-looking carrots, two apples, 5 frost-burnt tomatoes, two tiny onions and a loaf of bread (thereby beating my Cheshire-based friend David who can't even get that). I had had ideas of doing a lavish soup followed by a small "cold collation" (as they used to call salad). This is clearly out of the question.

What to do with those ingredients and whatever rations I've already got in? I'm thinking that I can cobble together a carrot soup, eke out a rarebit and even make baked apple for afters. The rarebit will require quite some eking, with only 2oz of cheese available and only Household milk to make it. But, with some oats to thicken it (Marguerite Patten even suggests some mashed potato will make it go even further) and a slice of tomato on top, I think I'll've beaten both the weather and the panic buyers. I'll get back to you on whether it works.

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.

Halfway through a Woolton Pie

The potato pastry was excellent to work with. A great consistency, although not all that good at sticking together where there were gaps. Still, it's a hit with me and better than the pre-made stuff, so I'll do it again.

The boiled vegetable mass was drained and put into a pie dish, where it sat looking unappetising, as you'd expect.

The stock, now, I suppose, on its third use,was returned to the pan with some gravy powder (which is cornflour and onion powder) rather than the rolled oats that Patten recommends. Brought back to heat, it thickened and I mixed it into the veg mix.

Then I put the pastry over the dish, used the leftover bits to make a stereotypical leaf design, punched a hole in the top and brushed the result with a very small (1fl oz) amount of fresh milk.

 

And now into a moderate oven until CJBS gets back from work. I'll report back.

Starting a Woolton Pie

As a fairly ordinary lazy person, I tend to buy ready-made pastry. There, I've said it and my Mum will now break down in tears. So making pastry is a fun new thing. Making potato pastry is even newer.

There are two types, one using mashed and then sieved cooked potatoes, but Patten warns subtly that this method uses less fat and has a bland flavour. The second version replaces 2oz of fat with grated raw potato, and is apparently much more robust in taste.

I took six ounces of self-raising flour and a pinch of salt, and rubbed in 3oz of cooking margarine - now somewhat forgotten but you'll remember it from your childhood childhood hood hood od od (no brand names, no pack drill). This took forever. Then I grated in 2oz of raw potato. This was then also rubbed in. With a little bit of water, a dough was made.

Then it was time for the pie filling. This was just £3 of seasonal vegetables - a small turnip, a small swede, two potatoes, a carrot, a leek and three very large mushrooms. Diced up, these were put in my stock pot, then I added the left over stock from Friday's meal, which was enriched by cooking (faux) bacon with the vegetables.

This has now boiled on the stove for 10 minutes, covered, and all the veg has softened. Next, the oven stage...

Eating well the Frederick Marquis way

With time ticking on this experiment beginning (2 January), I'm going to have to tackle a proper Woolton Pie.

I already do a modern version that CJBS loves, but that version isn't as economical on rationed and short-supply items. My version uses no discrete fat but does use too much cheese and too much fat in the pastry.

For my usual version, I take seasonal root vegetables peeled and chopped and put them in a heavy-bottomed pan. Cook, covered, on a medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally so they don't stick to the bottom. This causes the vegetables to sweat. When the pan has liquid in the bottom, I add mushroom essence (bottled or from the liquid dried mushrooms have soaked in for a few hours), stir well again, and then add grated cheese - about two handfuls. Keep stirring until the cheese has melted around the vegetables and take off the heat.

Make (or buy, I'm not proud) shortcrust pastry, line a pie dish with it, then tip the vegetable mix in without the liquid. Cover with more pastry and bake in a moderate oven until the pastry browns. Serve with gravy. You can also top with mashed potato instead.

Now, Woolton Pie is designed to use almost no fat. The basics are the same, but without the cheese and without the shortcrust pastry. For the former, gravy browning takes the liquid and stiffens it. For the latter, it uses potato pastry, basically made from rubbing the potatoes with other ingredients forever, or a similar version that also uses grated carrot. Either way, the pastry doesn't keep. Make and use immediately, else it goes an unappealing grey, warns Marguerite Patten.

The result could be truly boring and even fat-free mash would be better, but I fancy the challenge of making something interesting out of it. So that's tomorrow evening's plan.

Savoury meat roll

As previously mentioned I'm trying a variation of the savoury meat roll recommended by La Patten, re-reusing the bubble and squeak. And it's looking good.

I'm using faux sausages, which I tried - and failed - to pass through the potato ricer. So I mashed them with a fork. I used sage rather than thyme, on the basis that I like sage, and that I didn't have any thyme. I also made up my own mustard using mustard powder.

Since this is just for me, and despite my blood pressure, I added the outrageous amounts of salt and pepper Patten requires. The result, formed into a loaf, covered with foil, is now in the oven gently steaming itself.

The breadcrumbs - also homemade - bit follows in about half an hour. In the meantime, CJBS has had his bubble and squeak (his first go), his cottage pie (his third go) and two cumberland sausages bought today from the local butcher.

Please excuse his trousers. If the savoury faux-meat roll works, I'll cook CJBS an actual meat version, using the internals of the remaining sausages tonight.

Edit: Whilst it doesn't look all that appetising, here's the savoury faux-meat roll straight out of the oven but before it gets the breadcrumbs:

Leftover leftovers

Having previously written about making bubble and squeak, I then went and made some bubble and squeak. Actually, I made lots of bubble and squeak.

So now I have leftover leftovers. This is a good thing, because, if nothing else, it forces a bit of creativity from me.

I've also got some Redwood vegan sausages in. So the bubble, plus the sausages, must equal something tasty - if only just serving the sausages with the bubble and covering it in gravy. 

Marguerite Patten suggests a savoury meat roll. This is made with sausage meat (which appears to have been unrationed but almost impossible to get hold of and, by the end of the war, was only about 2% meat when you could get it), soaked stale bread and pinto beans. This sounds foul, on two counts: wet bread makes me retch, for reasons I've never worked out, and pinto beans are pinto beans. 

Adapting the recipe tonight to swap the bread and the beans for the bubble would seem the thing to do. I'll have to improvise, but I'd suggest mashing the faux sausages, mix them into the bubble with some mustard and some thyme and finally add gravy browning for colour and for the binding properties of the cornflour. The original, because of the bread I'd assume, wanted steaming for two hours. That would prevent it drying out, but cooking it covered in the oven might also work. The end result is then sliced, rolled into breadcrumbs and served hot with gravy. 

I'll have fun trying this, then inflict a meat version on CJBS if it works.

Making a start

In October of this year, my boyfriend and I realised that the combination of my being a good cook, him being a good eater, Christmas, me working from home and our generally relaxed lifestyle meant that we're, for want of a better way of putting it, getting fat.

Christmas, with its chocolate and booze and fried stuff, wouldn't help this. By January, we'd be blobs (and comfort eating caused by the forthcoming death of the Tenth Doctor will only make things worse). So what could we do?

A few years ago we were given a book by the sainted chef Marguerite Patten with her famous Ministry of Food recipes from wartime (there have since been other books on what is clearly a popular subject). This set the idea in our heads that we could create a way of losing weight, protecting the environment and furthering our consuming interest in the 1933-1951 period, all without the actual bother of dieting or going hungry.

Not going hungry? Why yes. Because the rationing system of World War II was designed to not cause hunger. The food might be boring and might require quite some skill to make something of it, but the person of 1940 would get exactly the calories they needed, exactly the protein, exactly the carbs but almost no fat. They would lose weight, but not muscle. They would, at the end, be healthier than before the War. But much thinner (except in the many slums of the inner cities, where they would be just as thin, but wholly better fed).

CJBS (the boyfriend, otherwise known as @kiffr, Kif or Chris, and not strictly speaking my boyfriend either since, reader, I married him recently) was keen to live with what his parents lived with in the years immediately before his birth and to experience the circumstances that his paternal grandmother never stopped banging on about. So together this is our January 2010 project, the planning for which starts now.