World War 2 rations on the British Home Front

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Subtitles: Jose Mendoza | IG @worldagainstjose

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#tastinghistory #worldwar2

[wraithcadmus]

Rationing was so well-implemented and the recipes so effective that deaths from malnutrition went _down_ during the war.

[Steampunk_Kak]

I used your hard tack recipe a few weeks ago, than the hurricanes hit, and i made even more. I took a bunch of homemade potted meat, a bunch of boullion, and al lthe hard tack to some friends stranded out there, stayed with them for a while as there wasn't a shelter they couldn't get too.

We ate on it for days, mixing it into a oatmeal like meal. Just wanted to say thanks for the recipe Max! It helped some people out!

[mylifewithmarmalade]

Took care of an elderly British expat lady who was a young child growing up in London during WWII. She said the national loaves as she remembered them were not only quite dense but also far saltier than most bread including some of the later post war recipes she’d tried for nostalgia’s sake. She said her understanding was that the extra salt was added to help keep mold at bay so that the bread would keep longer and therefore reduce waste. It might end up quite dry and stale, but at least it would remain safe to eat. She said her mother used to make vegetable broth a couple times a week from the vegetable scraps and when the bread got very stale she would cut it into cubes and serve it in a bowl of hot vegetable broth with whatever other vegetables they had as meal. The bread would soften in the broth to be more edible and add more substance to the otherwise very meager vegetable soup.

[mileshaven]

Coming from the Philippines, we had the inverse problem. Too many bananas (prob also from limited export) but not enough tomatoes being imported. And thus, the Banana Ketchup was born during the War and continued to be love through this day

[MeMe-Moi]

I learned to cook from people who had been taught to cook during WW2 rationing, and they passed down a lot of habits that I didn't realize were related to rationing until I did research in my college years. Among these habits are the following
"Cook your vegetables in as little water as possible and as fast as possible to prevent vitamin loss."
"Use the water from cooking your vegetables to make your gravy. That way no vitamins are lost."
"A good dinner requires a potato dish, two vegetables, and a protein. For supper, one fruit and one vegetable should be served beside the main dish. And one fruit and half a glass of orange juice [always from concentrate as fresh oranges were rare and refrigeration wasnt really a thing until the 60s] should be included with breakfast."
"One pound of boneless meat serves four people if you plan your meals properly."
"Keep a garden and use it. If you can't eat it, you can trade it or can it."
"Willful waste makes woeful want."

Some of my favorite dishes as a child were later discovered to be straight out of government pamphlets from WW2 rationing, which was mildly disconcerting. I still look at modern recipes and think, "My, that uses a lot of fat/sugar/flour/etc." and often pass that recipe by in favor of one of my older cookbooks with a more economical recipe. When you learn a mindset, it can be hard to change, even 60 or 70 years after the fact.

[charlotteillustration]

My father used to recount that he and his siblings (four in all) were given a banana at the end of the war, but their nanny insisted on giving it all to the youngest, because, she said, that as he had been born in 1939, he had never tasted one. The other children were furious, as you can imagine, loudly declaring that, as their brother had never tasted a banana, then he didn’t know what he was missing, whereas they did, so would have enjoyed it far more. I don’t know why she didn’t just cut it into four pieces…

[sam_uelson]

My grandmother was still cooking out of her 1940 ration book until 2005

[StuSaville]

My dad lived in London during the Blitz as a young boy. When I asked him what was his worst memory of the war he replied "parsnips"

[deboraharmstrong]

I have a bit of parsnip trivia for you, courtesy of my British horticulture teacher.
Apparently, parsnips get sweeter when stored at very low temperatures ... They don't even mind being near frozen.
So!
Mid-November, farmers would be out in frozen fields, digging up their parsnips ... with jackhammers

[ldcraig]

I absolutely love your "newsreel" voice whenever you're reading old ads from that era. So fun to listen to!

[yodudeHQ]

I come from a family of miners, my parents being the first non miners in generations. To the day he died, my grandad loved bananas, and close to his death he would have flashbacks to the mines, which seemed to increase his banana intake. The last time I ever saw my grandad, he wasn’t in a good way and seemed to think he was in a coal mine. He snapped out of his panic for a moment and went ‘here you go son, my last banana, you have it’. I declined and let him eat it. He died 2 days later, I’m incredibly proud to be his grandson

[JPGiannaT]

I think my favorite part of this series is that WWII is close enough to living memory that theres a ton of family stories in the comments. Im learning as much from them as from the video!!

[han]

I worked for a retired economics professor, who is now 101 years old. She was in her 20s in London during the Blitz, and worked on a project researching the health and body weight of factory workers during rationing. Both her study and others confirmed that for working class Londoners, they were significantly better nourished under rationing than before. She always emphasized that however tough the war was, being poor in early 20th century London was worse.

[margueritejohnson]

My mother, who was pregnant with me in 1944, was continually hungry, but the smell of Woolton Pie made her feel so nauseated that she couldn’t eat. During the war there was always the depressing bread, but bread was rationed AFTER the end of the war. Life was really tough. Incidentally, I remember the day that sweets finally came off ration. Wonderful day, I was 9 years old. Mind you practically everything else was still rationed.

[angeltt]

22:51 😂 Out of *all* of the online/tv cooks, chefs and foodies I've watched over the years, I have to say *hands down* that Max has THE MOST expressive face when trying foods. No fake effects or moans n groans, completely natural reaction to whatever he is trying. And for that it makes you all the more loveable Max!

[luketfer]

One thing that always made me chuckle is when I was in primary school, our class were doing world war 2 history and one of the teachers wanted us to perform some of the 'old songs' for a group of elderly folk (we were going to talk to them after about their experiences during the war, this was some 32 years ago), one of the songs was "lets all go down the Strand" which a lot of the kids had learned the refrain of "have a Banana" just after the first line of the chorus from their own grandparents which wasn't officially part of the song. The teacher must have spent a couple of hours drilling us kids to not sing that refrain.

So the day comes, we go down, we perform the songs and of course the old folks all do the "have a Banana" at which point we just start cracking up, at first the old folks looked a little offended but one kid was like "SEE, I told you that was in the song!" and the teacher just kind of sighed and facepalmed, after we'd finished she explained to the old folks that because it wasn't originally in the lyrics she thought it was a modern invention at which point the old folks just chuckle and shake their heads.

[turbogerbil]

My grandmother was a wartime housewife. Not only did she use all these recipes all through her life (and I use some of them today), but she was a ferocious recycler of food and household items. E.g. if you ate an orange, you had to peel it with a knife, so that the rind could be turned into marmalade, etc. Old socks and sweaters were unpicked, and the wool reused for knitting. Newspapers, jars, bottles, everything was reused. Her neighbours were all the same; the dustbinmen had little to collect, as the ladies threw almost nothing away.

[artonthecreek]

My mom was born in ‘24 in Missouri. She grew up rationing in the Depression and continued to do so through her young adulthood in the 1940s. So many of these themes permeated my childhood in the 1960s. Mom still had leg makeup (thank you, Avon) and she told me how during the war she and her sisters & girlfriends would use eyeliner on the backs of their legs. Seamed stockings were still in her dresser drawer, and to me, they were luxurious and fascinating. The leg makeup left much to be desired!
I grew up learning that everything was reused or repurposed and nothing went to waste. Washing tin foil to re-use, diligently clipping coupons, saving green stamps, counting coins & always knowing exactly how much money you had, always darning socks and mending clothing…these were things I regularly did until the 1990s when ziploc bags just were so much more practical! (Yes, I washed and re-used those, too, until the ziploc wouldn’t work anymore!)

Fast forward to today, when I feel horrendous guilt over throwing away a recyclable can or not eating the last drop of applesauce in the jar.
I don’t have a victory garden because where we live now the deer would eat it all, but Mom and Dad did and there is nothing better than a homegrown tomato, warmed by the sun and eaten like an apple. Yum! Thanks for a fun episode, Max❤

[peeledapples]

Sir William Beveridge, the minister of food, was a great man. One of the world’s foremost economists and experts on unemployment, he prepared a comprehensive report on poverty, employment and the economy that became the basis for the postwar welfare state and full employment. He improved millions of lives through his social reformism. Without Beveridge, we would never have our NHS, our unemployment benefits, our pensions...

[AnneGinders]

Hi Max
Long time watcher, first time comment.
I was born in 1960.
I'm old enough to have parents and grandparents who went through both wars.
My family is 4th, 5th, 6th generation kiwis (New Zealand).
I just had to comment when I saw you slicing the bread a talking about thin slices. What you cut was what my Mum and Gran would have termed a 'doorstep' 😂. When Granny cut bread, it was millimeters thin, 3-5mm! And all through my school lunch years I got sandwiches a third the thickness of what you cut.
As I got into my teens, we came to think of it as 'seige' mentality, stretching the least amount of food as far as possible and hoarding everything that would 'keep' as long as possible before using it.
I also think it's where my passion for razor sharp kitchen knives came from. Thin slicing is a lifelong habit. And I never liked banana sandwiches 🤫
Great episode, thanks