Blog party 37: going retro

This month Stephanie from Dispensing Happiness has picked 'Retro' for the theme of her blog party. This gave me the perfect opportunity to make something from my copy of Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten. I found it in one of those remaindered bookshops several months ago and have read it quite extensively but haven't yet cooked any of the recipes. Marguerite Patten was a Home Economist at the Ministry of Food during the second world war and was responsible for coming up with and publicising new ways for families on the home front to cook cheaply and healthily. The cookbook covers the war years and after, since rationing didn't end in Britain until 1954, and includes lots of recipes, advice and cartoons published by the Ministry as well as notes from Marguerite on how rationing worked and changed. It's really interesting social history as well as a cookbook, so of course I find it fascinating. I'm particularly drawn to this period of history, and especially the experience of life in Britain. It's so easy to forget what our grandparents' generation went though, or to downplay it, and yet it was so utterly life-changing even for those at home. I find the famous war epitaph almost unbearably moving: 'When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today'. The Scientist's grandpa served in Burma during the war and when he died a few years ago, some elderly gentlemen from the Burma Star Association came to his funeral and recited that verse over the coffin as they stood to attention with the association's flag. It was very touching.


Anyway, this is all just to say that although I made my party offering in fun, it's something that makes me quite thoughtful. Since the party is a happy occasion though, I thought I would follow some of the suggestions for a children's victory party. VE and VJ day were celebrated with lots of street parties, and some of them were especially for children. Marguerite notes that some children tasted ice cream for the first time at those parties - it was rare in a time when most people didn't have a fridge. I didn't try the wartime ice cream recipe, but followed some of the suggestions for other tasty morsels - sandwiches and tarts.

I wanted to get really into the spirit of things, so I followed a bread recipe in the same book for my sandwiches. Bread wasn't rationed during the war itself, although it was afterwards, but it was scarce and expensive, as was flour. People were recommended to eke their flour out with oatmeal, so I used that to make up a quarter of the total amount of flour. Wartime flour was much coarser than modern flour, but I did use plain rather than bread flour since that wasn't on sale in the 1940s. I was expecting a bit of a brick of a loaf, but it was actually quite nice and fluffy and just tasted a little more wholemeal-like from the oatmeal.


So, bread made and sliced, I turned to the list of suggested sandwich fillings. A lot were potted meats and fish, so I chose a mixture of grated cheese and carrot, with a little bit of milk to moisten, and mock banana, which was mashed parsnip with banana essence and a little sugar (bananas weren't available at all during the war because of the shipping blockades). I didn't have banana essence so I used a bit of the liquid that frozen bananas leave behind when they defrost. It was sweet enough with that not to need extra sugar. I quite liked it, though I'm impressed with 1940s children if they were happy to have it on their sandwiches. Perhaps it just needed mashing a bit more, or maybe they all went for the potted shrimp and jam ones instead. I hope they also got sandwiches with tops - I ate mine open and the carrot and cheese filling kept falling off. I suspect this is my fault not the sandwich topping, and if you can't make a bit of mess with your tea party when war's over, when can you?


My book suggested a selection of cakes, tarts and biscuits to go with the sandwiches and I selected some tarts as I was interested to see how wartime pastry turned out. Fats and sugar were in short supply - as were eggs - only 1 per week at the most, and many of the recipes call for reconstituted dried eggs instead. My pastry didn't need eggs though I think the proportion of fat is a bit lower than usual. I filled some with jam and turned the others into Maids of Honour - another recipe in the book which I hadn't heard of before, and which consist of a little jam topped with a margarine, sugar and breadcrumb mix. They were quick and easy and were perfect child-sized finger food. The Scientist is a jam tart fan and he liked them very much and thought that the Maids of Honour had a certain treacle-tart quality to them.

Of course I need a drink to send to Stephanie's party as well, and the book was pretty clear on what to serve: lemon or orange squash. I can't really even imagine what the end of the war must have meant to people who'd lived through it but making my party entry has definitely made me think a lot about cooking with wartime restrictions. I plan to try out a few more recipes in the future, so expect to see Pete Potato and his friends featuring a few more times!



Wartime bread (from Victory cookbook)
450g plan flour (you can sub in a quarter of this with oatmeal
heaping 1/4 tsp salt
300ml water
2 tsp dried yeast

Sift flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Heat the water until just warm. Add yeast and sugar to the water, top with a sprinkling of the flour and leave until frothy (12-15 mins)

Make a well in the centre of the flour, pour in the yeast liquid and mix well. Turn out on to a floured board and knead until the dough fills in a hole made by your finger. Shape into a ball and return to the oiled bowl. Leave in a warm place to prove until doubled in size [I did this in the fridge overnight]. Turn the dough out and knock back. Form into a round loaf or place in a loaf tin and leave to prove again until it's almost doubled in size. Cover it very lightly with a cloth. This stage will take 45-60 mins at room temperature.

Meanwhile preheat the oven to 22C/425F. Bake for 35-40 mins until the base sounds hollow when tapped.

Maids of Honour (from Victory Cookbook)
Pastry: [I halved this quantity but still made 12 little tarts]
6 oz self raising flour
pinch salt
1 1/2 - 2 oz margarine
water, to mix

Sift flour and salt into a bowl. Rub in the marge, add enough water to make a firm rolling consistency. Roll out and cut into circles. Place one circle in each indentation in a fairy cake tin.

Filling [for 12-15 tarts]:
A little jam
1 oz margarine
1-2 oz sugar
1/2 tsp almond essence
3 oz fine breadcrumbs
2 tbsp milk

Top the pastry with a little jam. Cream the margarine, sugar and almond essence together, add the breadcrumbs and milk. Spoon the top over the jam and bake in the centre of a moderately hot oven 15-20 minutes until firm and golden

A meal for the Puritans: intercontinental blog challenge #3

Firstly: happy birthday, Junior Bro! I'd like to think that you're reading this on your new laptop, but I suspect that 14-year-old boys have more interesting things to look at on the web. Ah well, this square older sister wouldn't have it any other way.

Anyway, this post is another installment in my fun challenge with Lisa from Unique Little Bits. We each cook a dish from the other one’s cuisine after a particular theme. This time I suggested bread, although since Lisa has written about some really professional-looking breads on her blog I am a little worried about how my efforts will pass muster!

The two American breads that sprang to mind when I was deciding what to make were cornbread, and steamed Boston brown bread. I’ve made a nice pumpkin cornbread before, but it comes under the heading of ‘savoury scone’ for The Scientist, so I always end up eating it on my own. I thought that the brown bread – which looked quite sweet from the recipes I found – might suffer the same fate, so I decided not to tell him what was in it beforehand and go for it anyway!

When I looked up the history of brown bread I discovered that it’s based on the ingredients available to early Puritan New Englanders – rye and cornmeal flours, which eked out the more precious wheat flour. Also, since ovens weren’t that common, the bread was steamed, usually in a cylindrical jar or mould. I found a recipe which baked the bread in the oven but I wanted to stay true to the spirit of its origins, so I steamed mine. I didn’t have a big coffee can, which is what’s usually used to make it in nowadays – in fact I didn’t have any tin cans at all as we’d only just done our recycling. So I improvised with an empty glass jar (the one which had held the applesauce which has already featured as prompting several other baking endeavours – this sauce keeps on giving even after its demise!). I steamed it by standing the jar on top of an improvised trivet in a saucepan, inverted the matching steamer basket over the top to accommodate the height of the jar, and then covering the holes in the steamer with a lid. I love it when science meets pragmatism! Anyway, despite the making do, the bread steamed fine, although I had been a bit worried about how thin the dough was – really more of a batter than a dough. I suppose it’s supposed to be like that.

Ready for steaming (top), and posing an intractable problem (bottom)

More perceptive readers may already have noticed a problem with my loaf, however: the neck of the jar was narrower than the base, making it almost impossible to get it out! I thought about ships in bottles; I thought about those clever science experiments you do with children to get an egg inside a bottle with a narrower opening. But my thoughts didn’t get me any further to getting my loaf out, and The Scientist informed me that the egg in bottle principle worked on the basis that there was spare air in the egg which could be sucked out. My loaf looked pretty dense and I wasn’t confident about any spare pockets. In the end I abandoned the scientific principles and cut it up inside the jar. This is why there is no picture of it beautifully sliced – it was more of a rustic carving.

It may not have passed the science (or the common sense) test, but I’m happy to say that it did pass The Scientist test. He thought that it tasted a lot like malt loaf, which he really likes - dark yet sweet, and with a soft, slightly chewy texture. We both enjoyed it served with Boston baked beans and apple sauce, which are its traditional accompaniments, and some grilled corn on the cob.

Update: go and take a look at Lisa's lovely looking Bara Brith speckled bread here

Boston brown bread (from Martha Day Complete Baking)
Makes 1 loaf

45g cornmeal
45g plain white flour or wholemeal flour [I used half and half]
45g rye flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/s tsp bicarb of soda
45g seedless raisins
60ml milk
60 ml water
60ml molasses or black treacle

1. Line the base of one 1 pint cylindrical metal or glass container - a tin, jar or heatproof glass coffee jug, with greaseproof paper.

2. Mix together the cornmeal, plain or wholemeal flour, rye flour, salt bicarb of soda and raisins in a large bowl. Warm the milk and water in a small saucepan [I did it in the microwave] and stir in the molasses or treacle.

3. Add the molasses mixture to the dry ingredients and mix together until it just forms a moist dough. Do not overmix.

4. Fill the jug or tins with the dough to about 2/3 full. Cover with foil or greased greaseproof paper and tie securely.

5. Bring water to a depth of 2inches to the boil in a deep, heavy-based saucepan large enough to accommodate the jug or tin. Place a trivet in the pan, stand the jug or tin on top, cover the pan and steam for 1 1/2 hours, adding more boiling water to maintain the required level as necessary.

6. Cool the loaf for a few minutes in the jug or tin, then turn it on its side and the loaf should slip out [ha!]. Serve warm, as a teabread or with savoury dishes.

Old desk, new thoughts

Israel Grandpa's family left Frankfurt for England in 1936. He was 17, the youngest of three siblings, and had been working as a junior banking clerk since he left school. Life had become increasingly restricted since the Nazis came to power in 1933, and the family business (selling flour and sugar to bakers and catering establishments) had been losing custom. His father had lived in London between 1900 and 1906, working in his uncles' art dealing business, and he naturally looked to England as the place to resettle his family.

My great-grandparents (Putzi, of the cinnamon matzah), and their three grown-up children made the crossing from Hook van Holland to Dover on 7 October 1936. My great-grandfather set up an agency importing canned food from Palestine in his new home (I know all this from Israel Grandpa's memoirs, written before he died two years ago). Since they had not had to leave Germany in the rush that later emigrants (including Israel Grandma's family) felt, they were able to ship much of their furniture over. Within this shipment was a big wooden desk with drawers on either side of it, and a 'secret compartment' which slid underneath.

I remember that desk sitting in the window of Putzi's sitting room in London. She also had a massive, solid display cabinet where she kept the decorated playing cards we used to play with when we visited, and a similarly impressive mirrored wardrobe in the bedroom. When she died, aged nearly 101, Munchkin Granny inherited the desk and the wardrobe. The desk became Munchkin Gramps', and later on, sat in the bay window of Munchkin Granny's own house. When she moved to London about six years ago, it was just too big to fit in her new flat, and she had to face selling it. I was still a student at the time with no room to take it, but I couldn't bear the thought that such an old piece of furniture with so much family history could be lost, and so I asked Munchkin Gramps if he could store it for me until such as time as I had a house I could fit it in. He's kept it for me all that time, and this weekend we hired a van and moved it down here.

I am now sitting at a desk which my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents had in their houses, in Leeds, London, and Frankfurt. I don't even know how old it is, but it's weathered a sea-crossing, a change of nationality, and years of family and domestic business. I can hardly even describe how emotional I feel to have it here. Its smell reminds me of Israel Grandpa, although it never lived in my grandparents' house. He and Israel Grandma ran their family business until they were well into their 80s though (his memoirs are called 'Retiring at 85'!), so I saw him working at his own desk often. It's by far the most solid piece of furniture I own - it took Munchkin Gramps and The Scientist considerable effort to get it down two flights of stairs in Leeds, and quite some huffing and puffing and logistical planning at this end, too. But now it's here, and I plan to write my next academic book at it. I dare say there will be some blog posts written here too, and I am pleased to say that there is just enough room for Mausel to fit under it on my lap.

I think that Putzi would be happy that her desk had found a new place to live with one of her many great-grandchildren. I know it was in her spirit to look forwards, as Israel Grandpa says so in his memoirs, of their farewell to their Frankfurt life: 'I remember Mutti quoting a fashionable German song “Ein neues Leben faengt an, ein neuer Tag bricht heran …..man muss vergessen was war” (A new life starts, a new day commences…..One must forget what was )...'

Learning is sweet

One of the big parts of my job over the last few months has been working towards having a new undergraduate course validated. We’ve consulted, planned, aligned our learning pedagogy with our learning outcomes, created courses, and written reams of paper to support it all. Last Friday, we faced a University panel plus external advisers, to see whether we had convinced them of our case.

Luckily: we had! We were asked to make some relatively small changes, but on the whole they were pleased with what we’d done, and we can now start advertising and recruiting. What a relief.

I hadn’t wanted to jump the gun on what the outcome would be, but I did make a cake (I know, any excuse) as a sort of good luck motif. I chose a honey cake called a Lekach from my book of Jewish cooking as it was traditionally made for children on their first day at school to make their learning sweet. What better way to send our new course off into the world? Besides, in the year before he died, Israel Grandpa wrote up his memoirs, and asked me to help him edit them. I was very touched, and spent quite a bit of time with him talking about his memories. He grew up in Frankfurt, and one of the things he’d written was that he was sent off to school on his first day with a cone of sweets. When I asked him more about it, he said that it was a tradition to wish that your learning would be a sweet experience!

The cake was very easy, but make sure you stock up on honey before you start – a cup is really quite a lot! It was nicely moist and gingery, especially in the middle, and everyone who ate it really liked it. I should really have offered it to the panel to make them sweet, but hadn’t liked to risk being accused of bribery before we knew their feelings on the course!

Lekach (honey cake), from Jewish Traditions Cookbook, by Marlena Spieler

Serves about 8 (I cut it into about 16 quite chunky squares)

175g/ 1 ½ cups plain flour
75g/ 1/3 cup caster sugar
½ tsp ground ginger
½ - 1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
225g/ 1 cup clear honey
60ml/ 4 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
Grated rind of 1 orange
2 eggs
75ml/5 tbsps orange juice
2 tsp chopped fresh root ginger, or to taste [I used stem ginger in syrup from a jar]

Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line a rectangular baking tin measuring 25 x 20 x 5 cm with baking parchment [I used a square brownie pan which was a bit less than this. It cooked in about the same time]. In a large bowl mix together the flour, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, mixed spice and bicarbonate of soda

Make a well in the centre of the flour mixture and pour in the clear honey, oil, orange rind and eggs. Using a wooden spoon or electric whisk, beat until smooth, then add the orange juice. Stir in the chopped ginger.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, then bake for about 50 mins or until firm to the touch [I covered it for the last 15 mins or so so it wouldn’t get too dark on top] or until firm to the touch

Leave the cake to cool in the tin, then turn out and wrap tightly in foil. Store at room temperature for 2-3 days before serving to allow the flavours of the cake to mature.

Pease pudding hot

The theme of Retro Recipe Challenge this month is ‘Your Mother should know: recipes that were popular before your Mother was born’, and it’s hosted by Stephanie from Dispensing Happiness. I had to give it a go, really, especially since I failed to enter Stephanie’s cocktail event this month (I planned to; I even had something in mind, but it never managed to happen. I’m sorry). Food and history is a dangerous combination for me though because I take it too seriously. This should have been quite a straightforward idea, but no, I had to exercise my poor brain to distraction over it. Did it mean something Munchkin Granny would never have eaten at all? Something we don’t eat any more? Something her parents would have eaten (complicated, because they were originally German, then English, now Israeli)? In the end I decided to avoid the whole issue, and also thereby spare disclosing a lady’s age, and dive further back in time to my alter era: the eighteenth century.

I settled on pease pudding. I’ve never eaten it, and only recently found out what it actually is – boiled split peas (sounds attractive, doesn’t it??). It’s a very old recipe and a very English one, so I thought it fitted the ‘before your mother’ theme pretty well. It dates much further back than that though, and was originally called a pease pottage or porridge, which was just something made in a pot. It was also a food very commonly served in eighteenth-century workhouses, which is one of my research specialisms, so I was keen to find out what the people I study were eating The blog event instructions said that the actual recipe had to be from before your mother’s birth, so I (ab)used my access to eighteenth-century documents online and went right back to the source.

I found a wonderful book published in 1798 by one Eliza Melroe called An economical and new method of cookery describing upwards of eighty cheap, wholesome and nourishing dishes…with new and useful observations on rice, barley, pease, oatmeal and milk, and the numerous dishes they afford, adapted to the necessity of the times, equally in all ranks of society. What a promise! Unfortunately her pease puddings had meat in them (it was often served with bacon, apparently), so I plumped for one in Elizabeth Cleland’s A new and easy method of cookery of 1759 instead, which was very simple and included a few extra vegetables I’ve given her recipe below but I did adapt it a little. I scaled it back considerably for one thing (I used about a cup of peas and probably ended up with more like 2 ½ cups of water as I added more as it simmered), and I added a chopped carrot with the peas at the start (I didn’t have a leek). I also didn’t bother with the flour or the butter as it was quite a satisfyingly thick and wholesome panful already, but I did flavour it a bit more – I nixed the mint although it’s traditional, as it’s not a herb I like very much, and added marjoram, thyme and caraway seeds as they all seemed like very auldy English seasonings. Don't you love Mrs Cleland's instructions though: 'boil til they are enough'!

The product: good hearty wholesome English stodge. With the extra flavourings it was very nice, though I imagine that the butter would also have enriched it in its own particular way. A lot of the other recipes I’ve found do use meat, so I don’t really know what taste my workhouse people would have experienced. It would have been cheaper without meat, of course, but if you’re cooking for a lot of people, I suppose that adding just a bit of meat is a good way to add flavour. Workhouses weren’t the punitive places of Oliver Twist yet in the eighteenth century, although I’d hardly argue that they were nice places to stay, but they certainly did buy meat for their inmates, and often grew vegetables as well. Workhouse officials were very keen on publicising their dietaries so we know a lot about what inmates ate. Pease pudding was something that featured at least once a week in many places, and of course it’s also memorialised in that old nursery rhyme: ‘Pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold, pease pudding in the pot nine days old.’ Well, I had it hot the night I made it; I kept the rest to have cold for lunch; but I’m not so keen on the nine days old part. I think that’s a tradition I’ll leave in the eighteenth century.

Pease pudding (from Elizabeth Cleland’s A new and easy method of cookery, 1759)

To make Pease Pottage

Take two Quarts of Pease, put them into three Quarts of Water, season it pretty high with Pepper and Salt, boil them till they are enough, mix a Spoonful of Flour with Water, and put in a little Mint, a Leek, two Handfuls of Spinage, all cut small; put in Half a Pound of Butter, boil it and dish it

NB, As far as I can make out, an imperial quart is 2 (British) pints

Gingerbread: a lesson in history

As I said last time, I have been revving myself up into a frenzy of excitement over an event which combines two of my main loves: history and baking (not The Scientist this time, though he was around when it all took place : )). This is all in aid of Chocolate Moosey and her Vintage Cookbooks theme for Weekend Cookbook Challenge. The recipe has to be from a book published before 1980. This might cause most people problems because our shelves are all full of your Jamies and your Nigellas, and there might perhaps be an elderly Delia lurking somewhere from when you were a student. Even Eco Sis wasn’t alive in 1980, though Kiwi Sis and I were tottering about (definitely not baking yet). In my case, however, the dilemma was how far back to go? The eighteenth century (my favourite century) and their steamed puddings; the seventeenth and their seed cakes; the 1930s and their valiant attempts at making do in rationing….

In the end I settled on a lovely book which my friend Roz saw in a second hand bookshop in Saffron Waldon years ago, and bought for me. It’s called the Home Lovers Encyclopedia, and although it doesn’t have a publication date on it, I found it on an antiquarian book site dated to the mid-1930s. It’s full of tips of all kinds ‘for handyman & housewife’. I love dipping into it and discovering what skills and information were thought to be useful: ‘How the amateur apiarian [that’s bee keeper to you and me] may secure profitable results’;’Gate-leg tables and their making’; ‘Piano: how to clean’. Every one’s a gem, albeit one of dubious use in today's world. There aren’t too many recipes in it, and I finally found a section on baking almost crowded out by a perhaps excessively long consideration of how to play billiards (all illustrations featuring men only, naturally). There were some basic guidelines for simple cakes (‘points to remember about materials and methods’), but the one which caught my eye was the variation for gingerbread.

Gingerbread. Isn’t that a wonderful word? To me, it brings images of Novemberish evenings and Bonfire night (I have no idea why; the only ginger cake I remember from my youth was the Jamaican sort you get in an orange and brown wrapper from the supermarket, and we didn’t particularly eat it in November). In my imagination though, gingerbread is home-made, thick and moist and smells wonderful. Gingerbread is in fact a tricksy thing though. It can be all of those wonderful things, but it can also be a crispy ginger biscuit, preferably cut in the shape of a person. In fact it’s those that we did have more often as children, although our gingerbread man cutter wasn’t very well engineered, and their heads had a terrible propensity to come off as you moved them to the baking tray. I am always alert to this problem when selecting cookie cutters now, and have yet to find a gingerbread man cutter which meets my exacting criteria. This is also because I feel bad at buying a man, and feel I should also get a lady in the interests of gingerbread sexual equality, and for some reason that has just never happened.

This recipe was definitely for the cakey sort of gingerbread, although it was very sketchy on details. I had no idea how big a cake I was making, and the quantities were delightfully imprecise. Pounds I can cope with, but what is ¾ of a teacupful? We aren’t sufficiently genteel to own proper teacups, but I’m pretty sure it’s significantly less than ¾ of an American cup. I sort of guesstimated in the end, using a cup measurer but not filling it all the way. Then I was told to melt stuff over the fire. I revelled in the anachronism briefly and then turned on the hob. I was doing ok until I got to the bit that directed you to mix bicarbonate of soda in ½ a gill of milk. I have no idea what a gill is – is it big or is it small? I was woefully far from my computer, and The Scientist operates in metric. I guessed that it would be small and used a splash. It was with some interest, therefore, that I put my mixture in the oven, and even more with which I removed it about an hour and a quarter later. I’m pleased to say that my estimating and lack of forewarning on size worked out fine. I’d used a square brownie pan and was a bit worried the cake would be very flat, but it was ok. I cut it up as I was going to take it as a present to Rose’s mum when I saw her for lunch the next day, and the bit I tried was lovely. It wasn’t gooey, but was pleasantly moist, and very nicely flavoured. I may not have been a model 1930s cook with a white pinny and an army of under scullery maids – or even a person with a proper grasp of imperial measures, but I love the idea that I was making a cake which has served nurseries, tea tables, and no doubt cricket teas and school boy tuck boxes for centuries.

Oh, and it turns out that a gill is 5 fluid ounces, which also makes it 40 fluid drachms, and 2400 minims. And almost certainly more than my splash. Now I must go and read about gramophones: their choice and care.

Gingerbread (from The Home-Lovers Encyclopedia, c.1930)

‘A good plain gingerbread is prepared as follows: Melt ¼ lb sugar, ½ lb margarine, and ¾ teacupful of golden syrup in a saucepan over the fire. Beat up 2 eggs, and when the melted syrup is cool, add them to it and beat all together. Sieve together 1 lb flour and 2 teaspoonfuls of ground ginger, make a well in the centre, and into it pour the syrup, etc., mixing and beating the whole thoroughly.

Dissolve ½ flat teaspoonful bicarbonate of soda in ½ gill of milk, mix it with the other ingredients, and turn the mixture into a greased cake tin. Bake the cake in a moderately hot oven for 1 to 1 ½ hours, then turn it onto a sieve and leave until cold.

A mere trifle

I gave a lecture on the history of food in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries last week, and it was very interesting doing the preparation. I talked quite a bit about government control of food which obviously has a lot of modern relevance with our current concerns on traffic light labelling, obesity, diabetes, and costs to the health service. In past times in England there was generally a preference for market freedom, and a mistrust of government intervention (except for when food supplies were threatened when suddenly a lot of expectations on protection came to the fore!). Although the British government’s intervention in maintaining food supplies during World War Two was extremely successful – across the civilian population standards of nutrition actually improved during rationing – other attempts to change people’s diets in the first half of the last century were quite clumsy and full of middle-class assumptions on tastes and behaviour. School meals, for example, were seen as a way to educate working-class children in how to be civilised, as well as improving their health. Working-class women were criticised for failing to feed their families a nutritious diet, with little regard for poverty, or the food preferences of their husbands and children. It was really a very interesting topic to research, and I think that the students found it quite engaging too (I didn’t catch anyone actually asleep, anyway).

One little thing which struck me was a reference in one of the books I read to a Gallup/Daily Telegraph survey which asked a representative sample of people what their perfect meal would be if money was no object (referenced in John Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day (London, 3^rd ed, 1989). Here’s what they said in 1947:

Sherry
Tomato soup
Sole or roast chicken, with roast potatoes, peas and sprouts
Red or white wine
Trifle and cream
Cheese and biscuits and coffee.

And this is what they said in 1973:
Sherry
Tomato soup or prawn cocktail
Steak, roast/chipped potatoes, peas, sprouts and mushrooms
Red or white wine
Trifle or apple pie and cream
Cheese and biscuits, coffee, liqueurs or brandy.

I was amused, and perhaps surprised at how similar the two lists were, and also how familiar they still look (I couldn’t find an equivalent survey for today, unfortunately). I think that sherry would be probably have fallen off the list by now, and prawn cocktail is fashionable in a bit of a retro way, but I’m pretty sure that a roast meal, potatoes and veggies would still be very popular. Apparently our favourite dish as a nation is now chicken tikka masala, which certainly reflects a change in cuisine and immigration since the 1970s, but cheese and biscuits, wine, trifle, apple pie…I bet most Brits still have a soft spot for them. The Scientist would certainly be very happy with the 1940s meal (his absolute favourite meal ever is Christmas dinner, closely followed by a Sunday roast). I’m always really intrigued about national cuisines, and food preferences so this list really tickled my interest. Of course it wouldn’t make me very happy, but I actually couldn’t decide what I would choose. I didn’t have a traditional British foodie upbringing – I had never heard of pigs in blankets until I met The Scientist, nor had I ever had mushy peas or trifle, and I’ve never in my life eaten a steak or a bacon sandwich. There’s so much choice around now that we’re spoiled in a way we’ve never been before. While I pondered the question though, I made a treat for my retro foodie Scientist: