This week I found again my grandmother’s second World War cookbook, a compilation of recipes sent in by Daily Telegraph readers in the early 1940s. Born in Yorkshire in 1915, my grandmother’s adult life was deeply shaped by war, if not as much as that of another grandparent born in Ukraine. She spent the Blitz teaching primary school by day and serving in the fire service as bombs fell at night, which didn’t leave much time for cooking, and anyway my grandfather was away with the RAF.
I remember poring over the book in horrified fascination as a child. Had she ever eaten “corned beef and beetroot hot”, which involved making a white sauce with margarine and dried milk and stirring in chopped, tinned corned beef and pickled beetroot? (Don’t try this at home, I implore you.) Could you stomach “beef mould” or the “officially recommended” (but tragic) chocolate truffles: mashed potato, cocoa powder, almond or vanilla flavouring? How bad were the conditions in which a person might enjoy Mexican chocolate whip, made of water, semolina and (not much) cocoa power? Or there was “pear condet”: cold boiled rice, “any fruit” and “mock cream”, made of dried milk, margarine and water.
It was a cuisine of sadness. Wartime rationing greatly reduced the difference in health between rich and poor in Britain. For the first and last time, and allowing for the inevitable black market and advantages of farming and landowning, everyone had enough and everyone had more or less the same. Each citizen was issued with coupons to exchange for food. Rations were calculated to meet nutritional need, and varied according to age and occupation. Deficiency diseases diminished, dental health improved, child and infant mortality – despite the bombs – dropped. The much-derided “national loaf”, which replaced all bread previously sold, used mixed wholegrains and was far more nutritious than the industrial white bread many craved.
The difficulties displayed on the thin, wartime pages of the book are not those of absolute scarcity but lack of choice, lack of taste. The recipes show a deeply human longing for pleasure and familiarity. These women were using a limited range of ingredients to try to replicate what they and their families missed, despite official encouragement to adapt.
Give me wartime food advice over the maddening dietary diktats of today
I don’t need a smartwatch to tell me how rested I am when I wake up
For seven years, I slept four or five hours a night, rarely for longer than an hour at a time
Sarah Moss: A reader tried to needle me by scoffing at knitting - I was intrigued
[ I don’t need a smartwatch to tell me how rested I am when I wake upOpens in new window ]
I also have a book called Wise Eating in Wartime, “prepared for the Ministry of Food by the Ministry of Information”. Despite its patronising tone – “We can’t change our wives but they can change their ways” – I like Wise Eating. The book opens with the assertion that “you could live only on milk and potatoes and cheese and something green and raw, and be healthy” (yes, I see the injury in the British government commending exactly the diet of which it had deprived Irish people a century earlier). It recognises immediately that sweets and cakes “have some place in our diet” because appetite and pleasure and variety are not luxuries but necessities.
The author, Dr Charles Hill, is not interested in messing about with cocoa powder and margarine. Eat potatoes in their skins or wholegrain bread, he says, whatever protein is acceptable and all the fresh vegetables around. If you find dandelions and wild herbs – this was before the widespread use of pesticides – add them to carrots and cabbage. Meat’s a luxury, sugar is useful fuel in restrained quantities, and always, pleasure is as important as nutrition.
It all seems so sensible, so manageable, compared to the maddening dietary advice to which we are all subject today. No calories, no macros, no fasting, no counting. The Ministry of Food is interested in health, not weight, and – though they wouldn’t have put it that way – in social justice. The purpose was to maximise everyone’s access to nutritional sufficiency, not to serve the interests of shareholders in multinational corporations or avoid upsetting voters obsessed with fictions of “personal choice”, as if any choice were ever other than political. The state took responsibility for giving everyone a sufficiency of good enough food, and supporting farmers along the way.
I am generally deeply disturbed by the British tendency to nostalgia for war, and especially by the national obsession with life under aerial bombardment. I’m not advocating rationing, but I wish we could pay more attention to these lessons about possible relationships between our bodies, our kitchens and our governments. It doesn’t have to be this way.
