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.

Let him stew

A lot to do today - I need to tidy away Christmas, clean up, wash clothes and buy an electric blanket, new telephones and a bathroom scale... so that calls for a slow-cooked stew.

I bought £3 of veg yesterday (a bag almost too heavy to carry) and used about half of it to start my stock pot. The rest I've roughly chopped, covered in the new stock, added dried herbs, a bay leaf, mustard powder (CJBS can't have pepper so mustard stands in for it) and a good helping of pearl barley. Into the slow cooker on medium, and I'll come back to it at about 7pm to add oats to thicken it if it needs it and decide on either flour dumplings or mashed potato to bulk it out.

Now to get busy with the other stuff.

Edit: It didn't need thickening, the pearl barley did that job excellently and gave it much needed bulk - a bowl was enough for me when usually with stew I'd have more than one (CJBS had some of yesterday's cheese soup and finished with some mince pies and custard, seemingly aiming to blow through his points as soon as possible). I also managed to get all my shopping except for the telephones and, on topic, got as close as I could to half a pound of sausagemeat for CJBS, with 3 cumberland sausages. I've got a couple of tofu sausages, my powdered (not-)egg and an onion and I've saved up some fat through not using any at all in the stew. So I think we're having toad in the hole and mashed potatoes for tomorrow's dinner.

Christmas curry

Christmas dinner leftovers gives me an excuse to make a traditional British curry. And, yes, you would've got one in the 1940s. In fact, you could get one in the 1840s, such is Britain's love affair with Indian-style food.

And Indian-style is accurate here: British curries are unknown in the Indian subcontinent; even our modern favourites were designed and made in Birmingham and Bradford and other cities, by British people whose connections with the subcontinent are now distant. Our vibrant British Asian population has been part of Britain for more than 200 years, with Queen Victoria settling down to a (pre-turkey) Christmas dinner of curried rabbit.

A classic mid-century British curry's ingredients list is more like that of a fruit cake than a savoury main meal, but its all the better for that. Heat some oil or butter in a heavy-bottomed pan and chuck in a diced large onion. When the onion starts to go translucent, chuck in some crushed garlic and start adding curry powder. A note about curry powder: adding extra mild curry powder won't make a curry hot; adding less hot curry powder won't make a curry mild; the temperature is set by the powder's temperature and adding more or less simply increases or reduces the intensity of the flavour, not the heat.

Keep adding curry powder and stirring until all of the oil is soaked into the powder and stuck to the onion, like making a roux. Then add a tin of tomatoes and stir well. Bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer. This is your curry sauce. You can at this point stir in a glob or two of stuff to round the flavour out: HP or Daddies sauce, ketchup, worcester sauce, anything savoury that you've got in the cupboard will all help. Now for what you're currying: diced turkey for Boxing day, I suppose.

A large handful of raisins or sultana is essential; sliced apple is a good thing too. Left over roast potatoes can go in, plus other leftover veg - almost anything can be curried. Give it all a good stir, cover and leave on a low heat to bubble away to itself. The longer you leave it, the better it tastes, so if you're prepared to cook it for 5 hours, do so! If not, try to give it at least an hour. Stir occasionally to ensure it isn't catching on the bottom. Remove the lid if it's too watery for you to allow it to reduce.

The classic way to serve is by making a pile of cooked rice in the centre of the plate, then spreading the rice around to the edges with the back of a ladle; spoon the curry into the middle. The modern way of serving this would be to cover two thirds of the plate with curry and pile the rice into the remaining space. You can supply your own breads and pappadums.

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.

Christmas Under Fire

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.