The post-war ideal home

I've been decorating. Me! All butch, up a ladder with a paintbrush and everything.

It's October and this project is starting to come to an end. British vegetables are becoming harder to get hold of as winter sets in and I really, really can't face doing what I did last winter, with a subsistence diet of cabbage and leftovers.

Also, I want to have people over for Christmas and not present them with minced 'beef' made of 1/3 mince, 1/3 finely chopped mushrooms and 1/3 porridge oats soaked in gravy. Although, it must be said, nobody has ever noticed that they're getting that instead of 100% minced beef; and people seemed to like my mashed potatoes made with milk rather than butter.

This all means that post-war life beckons, just as Britain's government starts to unpick the last parts of the Post-War Consensus of Beveridge and Keynes. And, to do it right (and skip the whole people-almost-starved, bread-and-potatoes-rationed, American Loan 1947 experience) I've taken my previously functional, whitewash-and-woodchip living room and spent a week turning it into something the householder of the 1950s would've been proud of. Very proud, actually, given the 42" plasma TV, but we'll leave that aside.

So here it is. I present the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition winning room for 1955 (with 1963 unaccountably appearing on the TV):



Meanwhile, I had a decorator in to do the front room. And because I'm contrary, that's becoming a pre-war, 1930s library-cum-dining room. It's finished, but there's nothing to show until all 10,000-or-so books have been moved into it.

Watch this space.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

One of the things that makes rationing easier (or even easy) for me is that I only eat one meal a day.

Yes, I know this is probably a huge dietary nightmare, but I've never eaten breakfast - I can't stand the thought of food first thing in the morning - and I gave up lunch, without missing it, when my thyroid died. One of the side effects of having no thyroid is the body's ability to turn any food eaten straight into fat deposits. If I ate two meals a day, I'd be gargantuan - and I was until I gave up on lunch.

This of course means that my main meals can be a bit more generous with rationed items, as they don't need to be spread over 3 meals in a day. But I'm having to reassess this policy when it comes to CJBS. His doctor is worried about Type II diabetes, and although the diet sheet he filled out for them was so good that they didn't believe it was true, they've spotted a change that must be made. He must always have breakfast and lunch.

The breakfast is easy. Porridge oats with semi-skim milk and cinnamon doesn't impact on rations. But providing a fat free, carbohydrate rich lunch is very difficult, especially when his shift work sees him rising at 4am one week, 8am the next and noon on the third. To cap that, it needs to fit in with rationing.

He came back from the unholy GP-dietician-nurse trinity clutching a big pile of leaflets, booklets and novellas given to him to help him plan a new diet. And here's where I fall out with the NHS that I otherwise love to bits.

What I need is a simple guide to what food need to go into him when. The NHS, however, has taken a more Big Brother approach. They don't supply that information. Instead, they've merged the diabetic advice with their "Healthy Eating Agenda". That would be fine, but this bit of meddlesomeness, which has included television, radio and press advertising along with leaflets through the door in an orgy of spending over the last 5 years, treats the recipient of the advice like a lard-arsed idiot.

I search in vain for a simple guide. Instead, the advice attempts to browbeat me into ceasing to be a pig. Stop eating so much chips! Eat less pies! Put down that cheeseburger, fatty! Where do you think you're going with that cake, lardo? Can you still fit through the door of Greggs, chubbs? The problem here is that CJBS, and me for that matter, would kill for chips, pies, burgers and cake. We almost never have them. The advice sheets, however, are designed to get you to reduce having them. So if I actually followed them, CJBS would be getting chips two or three times a week - a great reduction from the 7-days-a-week the leaflet assumes that diabetic Northerners are cramming down them, but a 1200% increase on what he currently gets. The same with the pies and the burgers. And as for cake, well, CJBS loves cake but I prefer to use the egg rations on something I can make that won't be be both burnt and undercooked at the same time and might possibly rise without spilling over the edges of the tin, if at all. The leaflets are throwing cake at him compared to the current level of "never".

I've therefore effectively got to guess what I should be feeding him and when. With official advice recommending that he eats vastly more fat and sugar to cut down on fat and sugar and with their idea of stopping the snacking he doesn't do by feeding his face with biscuits - biscuits! - at every opportunity, the NHS's help has been no help at all.

One thing I can do is go by instinct and by what Nella Last was making for her boorish husband during the second war. If you've never read Nella Last's War (now usually sold under the name of the TV drama it became, "Housewife, 49") then buy a copy now. Nella was a fascinating lady who took to World War II as something of a release from her dull, depression-ravaged existence until then. Tucked away in its pages are examples of how she eked out the rations to make wonderful lunches and dinners, all the time hiding from her husband that she was scraping by (like many men of the time, he both had no clue whatsoever of how shopping and cooking under rations worked and also sought to direct her shopping and cooking because he was A Man).

From her, and her kitchen garden, I see that she did a lot with roast vegetables, served hot, warm and cold. Small amounts of meat and fish could be made to go further by mixing them into the roast tomatoes and celery and other such things. The husband never noticed that he was basically eating lots of veg and pasta and very little meat. She was also very good at making stuff in a batch at the start of the week and creating smaller lunches from it over the next few days.

If she could do that, then, with my fridge and deep freeze, both things she never owned, I could do a lot more. So I've been making cold pasta salad and a version of potato bravas, locking them in tupperware and decanting a bowlful, complete with the fabrication of choice, whenever CJBS declares that it's lunchtime in his body clock zone. The pasta salad is easy: roast mixed seasonal vegetables in a medium oven for under an hour with a sprinkling of herbs, garlic and Maggi. Boil some wholewheat pasta, drain, stir the veg through the pasta and refrigerate. Make it something new with diced spam or tinned fish to keep it fresh-feeling. It keeps for about a week in the fridge.

The potato bravas is nothing like the real version. Boil new potatoes in stock. Chop an onion and some pepper. Fry those off in a tiny bit of butter or oil. Add passata, chopped tomatoes or tinned tomatoes depending on availability and points (passata is best), bring to the boil and then simmer until reduced by about 10%. Add the potatoes to the tomato mixture (or, if you've got the fat, fry off the cooked potatoes in a little butter, allow to cool and then add them) and store in the fridge. Again, it keeps about a week.

By alternating between the two and supplying bread on the side, I'm keeping up his carbs, keeping down his fat intake and not particularly bumping up my workload. He'll be sick of both after a month, I'd imagine, but until then I've think I've beaten the system. And beaten the NHS at its own game.

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.

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!

A question of waste

Earlier this week I reposted this Food Flash from the Ministry of Food. As usual with these pithy 20-second cinema shorts, it was informative without lecturing. And it occurs to me that we should be seeing similar stuff on TV and online now.

The modern recycling campaigns, aimed at young people, are all very well. But recycling is the final option, not the first one. When my mum cooks, she uses virtually everything for something (and online I've discovered that onion skins can be used for stock making; and even potato skins can be fried for crisps if you're desperate enough, although this idea came from someone writing about their experiences of Berlin in the winter of 1945 where things were indeed desperate; the same site appears to have a recipe that requires you to throw away the potato and keep only the skins, which makes me weep). I'm always much more slapdash. The top third of a leek is often mud-filled; it's so much easier to cut it off, throw it away and cook the tight white part alone. Onion skins are easiest to remove if you allow the top layer(s) of onion to be sacrificed with them. Virtually everything fresh has a part that could be used and I throw it away for convenience.

With luck, this experiment will purge me of such foolish notions. I'm supposed to be an environmentalist, yet with no garden and "no time" (made available), I happily throw away tremendous amounts of off-cuts.

Now, that's not as bad as throwing away edible food, or the slightly greater sin of throwing away food that has been over-bought and allowed to go off. But it's still waste and it's still foolish.

So even if this experiment doesn't work, or stops on January 31 with a trite post about how hard it was, what I really want is to walk away with a sense that every scrap has some value somewhere.