Ration Style Cooking

Generally unattractive but often surprisingly tasty food. Adventures in cooking 1930s and 1940s food. Especially ration style food from WWII. Interspersed with other cool vintage/wartime stuff.

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Recipe #121 - Plum Charlotte from We'll Eat Again by Marguerite Patten

I recently ordered a fruit and veggie box and among the goodies were a bunch of plums. I'm not that keen on just eating plums as they are, and some were getting squishy, so I looked up a ration recipe for plums and found this. The recipe explains that you can really use any fruit you like. As the plums didn't make up the weight I added some apples that I'd previously cooked up with cinnamon and brown sugar.

This Charlotte is like a quick crumble. Instead of oats and/or flour with butter rubbed in, it just uses torn up bread (I used regular white bread, but I'm sure at the time you'd use your stale National Loaf). Even the fat (margarine or suet suggested in the recipe, I used Nuttelex), is optional, but I think all the sugar would just drop to the bottom instead of sticking to the bread without it.

Verdict - passable. Definitely needs the ice cream, it's a bit dry without it. I think I'll stick with more standard crumbles

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Recipe #120 - Icing from We'll Eat Again by Marguerite Patten

Seeing as the most basic icing is just sugar and water, I'm not sure why this one leans so heavily on powdered milk - maybe to take the place of some of the sugar?

The recipe suggests to add whatever colouring and flavouring you desire. I just put a bit of vanilla essence in there.

As you do, I tried the icing before putting it on the cake and I'm glad I did. Have you ever had just made up milk from powdered milk? It's like drinking sand. The icing was VERY grainy and unpalatable. Seeing as the milk improves from sitting overnight so the powder can properly absorb the water and dissolve, I decided to the same with the icing.

The next day the texture was much better, I had to add a little more water to thin it enough to ice the cake. I didn't mind the taste, but it wasn't that great.

The biggest problem was still textural. It became weird and rubbery on the cake. Not one I'll be repeating.

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Recipe #119 - Wacky Cake from Brown Eyed Baker

In times of rationing, when supplies like eggs and butter and fresh milk were scarce, a lot of interesting cake and biscuit recipes popped up. But the most interesting thing is - most of them work.

Wacky cake uses oil and vinegar in place of more standard ingredients. But I think it's called Wacky because it's a throw-it-all-in-the-pan mix. Add your dry ingredients, mix, make 3 wells, add wet ingredients, mix thoroughly, bake!

The end result is a perfectly passable chocolate cake.

Then I went and added ration style icing. That's a story for the next post...

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Recipe #118 - Hot Pot from "One-Pot" Meals - Ministry of Food Leaflet No. 35

What to do when you've thawed lamb chops and have a bunch of cabbage in the crisper that needs using up? Make a ration recipe!

I had to buy a turnip for this one as well and was worried about the flavour it would impart, but it was fine and blended in seamlessly.

The lamb chops were all eaten on the first night but I was eating leftover vegetables for a few days. Once again, it was that generic, vegetable soup, ration recipe flavour profile. Which is predictable, comforting and good with bread.

I'm a weirdo who often eats leftovers cold or lukewarm, but this one had to be HOT. The recipe calls for "dripping or cooking fat" and I used lamb fat I had collected and had in the fridge. At anything less than piping hot this fat had a really gross mouthfeel.

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Recipe #117 - Mustard Pickle from the CWA Cookbook

Now I have a permanent, well prepared veggie garden, of course I'm growing tomatoes as much as I can, because homegrown tomatoes are FAR superior to anything from the shop. I bought a pack of heirloom seedlings, but planted them too late. They grew like crazy, grew huge fruits, but then the weather got cold and they refused to ripen on the vine. So I had to harvest them and bring them inside. Some I'm allowing to slowly ripen off the vine, but I had so damn many that green tomato pickles were immediately on the agenda.

I actually didn't make green tomato pickle first (that's coming up), I was looking for an old recipe in the CWA or Golden Wattle that DIDN'T call for 10kg of tomatoes to start off with, I didn't need THAT much pickle.

In the end I found a recipe that oddly had it's veggie amounts in volume (1 litre) rather than weight, so I guesstimated. I had one last homegrown zucchini left, and a bit of cauliflower, and made up the rest with tomato and onion (okay, there was a ripening tomato or two in there).

Lucky the bowl was just big enough, these had to sit in brine overnight before being boiled the next day and strained.

Then came time to make the mustardy, pickly part and I realised I'd forgotten to make sure I had enough vinegar. In the end I used a mix of white, apple cider and brown vinegar to make up the amount (and emptied the house of vinegar in the process - no matter, I bought more at work the next day). I also didn't have enough mustard powder, so I made up for it using some mustard I had made earlier.

Then I mixed it all together and jarred it up.

In retrospect, I should have chopped the onion instead of leaving it in long bits, it's a little hard to spread on things like it is. At first it was VERY vinegary and pretty much inedible, but is mellowing as time passes. A little on a ham and cheese sandwich is quite tasty!

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Recipe #116 - Steak Diane from Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten

The Victory Cookbook documents food in the UK from the start of the war through to the end of rationing in 1954. This is one of the very last recipes in the book - a recipe for steak, which finally became available to most households once again around this time.

This is a very easy to make and tasty sauce, the only thing it lacks is quantity, as you can see it just creates a sparse covering for the steak, but admittedly the flavour did manage to get into the veggies too once everything was mixed up on the plate.

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I really should start making old recipes again

An interesting thing I've noticed in old recipe books - and I couldn't find any writings on it with a cursory google search - is how recipes often seem incomplete.

Back then girls all took home economics in school and knew the basics. Recipe books didn't bother to include them - they didn't have to explain how to cream butter and sugar because you'd already know what that meant.

A lot of recipes get even more vague - like a set of 3 dumpling recipes I recently spotted which just listed the ingredients - not even in list format but in a paragraph. I guess the assumption is the cook already knows what a dumpling is and how to prepare and cook them, it just offered different sets of ingredients. (Although - I don't know how to explain why the ingredients for Apple Dumplings didn't include apple anywhere!)

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Recipe #115 - Apple Pandowdy

The other dish immortalised in the Dinah Shore tune.  Another sweet Pennsylvania Dutch recipe.  Probably marginally healthier than the Shoofly Pie due to the apples.  These apples are coated in a caramel’ish sauce (which is oddly thickened with flour) and globs of batter put over the top, finished with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar.  It has cake, it has caramel, it has cinnamon and soft apples.  Delicious!

“I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.”

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Recipe #114 - ANZAC Biscuits from The C.W.A. Cookery Book and Household Hints

I tend to make ANZAC biscuits every year around ANZAC Day - this year I was a few weeks late, because there were plenty of other snackables in the house on the day in question.

This year I decided to use an old recipe so I could feature it on this blog.  My favourite modern variation on this is a slice instead of biscuits.  My mum made some this year that used the original recipe for these biscuits - designed to be hardy so they could be mailed in care packages to troops on the front during WWI.  The original recipe did not include desiccated coconut, but the coconut is pretty commonplace in most recipes you’ll find, including CWA’s.

I think I made these a little bigger than the cookbook intends, but it was kind of deliberate on my part.  Although these are intended to be hard, crispy biscuits, I much prefer them to be soft and a bit chewy - which is the result I got from making them larger than intended.

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Recipe #113 - Shoofly Pie

I’ve known the song for a while now, and then one day it dawned on me - these are actual dishes Dinah Shore is singing about - are there recipes for them?

Well, indeed there are!  Both are old Pennsylvania Dutch recipes, so I looked for the most ‘vintage’ seeming recipe, the one I chose is linked above.

First I had to make the pastry.  Now, me and homemade pastry have never really got along, but I used the recommended recipe, which was quite simple.  I replaced the sour cream with plain yoghurt, just because, and it still worked fine.  I managed to roll it out and get it into the pie dish with very little trouble.  *shock*

The filling has two parts, the flour/sugar/butter mixture, which is a bit like breadcrumbs, and the molasses mixture, which is quite liquid.  I used treacle - but I have learned that molasses and treacle are actually just the U.S. and British names for the same thing.  I imagine this is what a treacle tart might be like.

I think I need a slightly deeper pie dish.  While this one was the correct diameter, I had some overflow of the filling.  But I persisted with the “layering” and had the presence of mind to place the dish onto a baking tray before putting it in the oven.  Lucky, because my oven is not level, and I had a small spillage right away.

The recipe says to cook this at quite a high temperature for the first 15 minutes, then turn it down for the last 20 or so minutes.  My oven thermometer was showing cooler than the recommended temperature, but after about 10 minutes I could smell the treacle burning.  When I got up to turn the temperature down I checked on it and yep, there was a lot of overflowing, burning treacle.  But I figured, I’ll let it do it’s thing.

I was a bit worried when I pulled this out of the oven.  Scorched top, burnt crust.  I looked at some alternative recipes and some of them recommend covering the crust with foil to avoid the burning - although I’m not sure how I’d achieve just covering the crust anyway.  I let it cool as instructed - the top sank down a bit - and waited until after dinner for the final verdict.

I served it up with a dollop of whipped cream.  The first slice was a mess, but the second was a lot nicer and made for good photos.

And the verdict?  It’s actually really, really nice.  The treacle is sweet without being too sweet, it has that... bitterness? to it.  The texture is lovely.  The crust behaved like a crust, the burnt bits weren’t that noticeable and the cream helped even everything out.

I think I’d definitely make this again, maybe trying a different recipe and cooking for longer rather than hotter.  I went back for a second slice.

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It will all make sense very soon...

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Recipe #112 - Apple & Rhubarb Crumble from The 1940s Experiment

I made this for dessert the night we had the Hunt Pie.  I had pilfered some rhubarb from my parent’s garden (they were away so I was encouraged to help myself), and had apples languishing in the salad bowl.  I didn’t have as much rhubarb as the recipe called for and should have made the weight up with apples, but for some reason I didn’t.

The biggest problem came when I ran out of butter as well.  The crumble contained an alarmingly high flour to oats ratio, but I think with more butter it would all have worked better, even if there was about two thirds crumble to one third fruit.

I also whipped up some custard - the kind you make with custard powder, it just seemed right for this recipe.  Drowned in the custard this was actually pretty nice.

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Recipe #111 - Hunt Pie from The 1940s Experiment (taken from We’ll Eat Again by Marguerite Patten)

The Covid-19 crisis has awakened various WWII rationing websites that I love.  The Ration Project have begun podcasting again (after a 4 year hiatus) and The 1940s Experiment is posting with particular attention to our current world situation, which in many ways resembles that of the British homefront during WWII.  These days we are able to easily socialise, even if we can’t be physically together, and getting hold of food is much easier too.  But with panic buying, and an encouragement to go out as little as possible, I’m keen to get into some experimental cooking AND resurrect Rationblogging!

So last night I made Hunt Pie.  On The 1940s Experiment, she puts the filling into a pie dish and bakes the crust - like you’d expect to do with a pie.  But the original recipe says to place the pastry over in the saucepan and let it cook in there.  So in the name of science that’s what I did, much to my boyfriend’s consternation (he was imagining a pie with lovely light puff pastry).

The result is honestly something that tastes like 100 other wartime dinner recipes.  I used cabbage, onion, pumpkin and cauliflower in my pie and the filling tasted kinda like vegetable soup does - tasty and comforting, but nothing exciting.  The pastry was rather stodgy and chewy, as I expected it might be.

Verdict?  Perfectly edible, but not great.  I think it would be greatly improved by baking the pastry instead of steaming it... or maybe using frozen puff pastry, because no way am I making  that stuff from scratch.

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20 awkward vintage ads of skinless frankfurters and wieners from the 1940s.

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1945 GE General Electric refrigerator advertisement

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1940

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I wonder if Coke actually tasted better back then.

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Tomato Paste time

It's that time of year again, when you can get a big box of lovely sun-ripened tomatoes for about $10 at your local fruit and veg store.  And the best thing to make with a glut of tomatoes is tomato paste!  

This is really easy to make, but it will take a few hours of your time, so put on some good music, or a podcast, or just set up the laptop at the kitchen table and do some work - whatever, you just need to tend to the tomatoes every so often.

To start grab a pot, any pot really - I use my Le Crueset dutch oven - remove the stem bits from the tomatoes and roughly chop them and throw them in your pot until it's almost full.

At this stage I like to add to glug of olive oil and some salt, but it's not essential.  Put the pot on the stove and let it simmer away.

First the tomatoes will go mushy and release all their juice and you'll have a tomatoey soup in your pot.  Stir it every 10-20 minutes, just make sure it doesn't burn to the bottom (you can use a simmer mat here if you like).  Adjust the heat so it bubbles away happily.

After a while (honestly, this does take 2-3 hours) the water will mostly boil off and your tomatoes will thicken up.  You'll need to stir it more often now (every few minutes) and scrape down the sides.

Keep simmering and stirring until it's the consistency of tomato paste.  Yep, that's all that's left of all those tomatoes, now just super duper concentrated.

Some folks like to peel their tomatoes and strain the seeds out before starting the simmer, but honestly that feels like way too much work.  With the skins and seeds still in there, this is still a damn fine tomato paste.  Great in various recipes and even just spread on toast.  Yumm.

You can divvy it up into ice cube trays and freeze it for wintertime too.