Cold Meat Pasties.

It is hard to believe that out of pretty much nothing and some War time store cupboard essentials, meals can be created that are both filling, warming and easy to prepare. The ration foods are not ‘fashionable’, they do not contain three litres of olive oil or designer leaves strewn over the plate, garnished with pomegranate seeds. They provide wholesome meals to keep the family fed.

These little pasties below are a symbol of these principles and are so versatile that pretty much anything could go in the filling. Consequently, these are a great way to use up leftovers of, well, anything. Due to my aversion to throwing away any kind of food away, I would use them as a food vehicle to use up scraps of anything I had.

Their high flour/oatmeal content means they are filling and the limited fat content in the pastry will not make anyone pile on the pounds. They are also incredibly easy to make from everyday ingredients and luckily do not contain the words ‘mock’ or ‘reconstituted egg’ (although you could use one if you wanted to brush the surface of the pastry).

To make the pastry; mix 175g of self-raising flour and 50g of oatmeal with 50g of fat. Rub the fat into the flour to form a breadcrumb consistency and add milk instead of water to increase the fat content, to form a dough.

Roll the pastry out and cut into 4 rounds (I used a saucer) and place on a greased baking sheet.

For the filling, use 225g of cold meat, 1 one chopped onion, 2 tomatoes, 2 tablespoons of chopped vegetables, 2 tablespoons of Worcester sauce, 2 tablespoons of water. This is the war-time suggestion, however you could put anything you like in these pasties.

Fold the rounds in two and pinch the edges with a fork. You could glaze these with a reconstituted egg and bake at 200C for 20 minutes.    

Savour Scones.

I can wholly recommend these ‘savoury scones’. They are filling, satisfying and are pretty low in fat. They would be great for lunchboxes and my partner will be having them for his lunch tomorrow. They are also really quick and easy to make. This is something I will defiantly be taking with me post-rationing.

These scones are also very thrifty, consisting of flour and oatmeal, but do not have a heavy feeling like some of the other war recipes. They have a holistic feel and are probably the kind of scone you would find in a trendy coffee shop or West End food shop today.

It does seem that a lot of the recipes from the ration period are in keeping with modern nutritional advice. The principles of home produced meals which are low in fat and sugar are key messages today.

Give them a go.

Mix 4oz of national flour (normal flour), 4oz of oatmeal, 1 tea spoon of baking powder, ½ teaspoon of salt, 1oz fat, 2 oz of shredded cheese. Mix with milk or water to form a soft dough. Flatten out and cut into circles with a pastry cutter and cook for about 15 minutes at 180 C or until brown.

A couple of points, I have noticed. The cheese ration was often 2oz, so these scones would use up the whole of the cheese ration. Consequently, you could supplement the cheese with something else, dried fruits for example to make a sweet scone. They are savoury, so you could use meat fat, or fat gained through the rendering process without any problems. Similarly, a combination of water or milk would probably work best here as using both flour and oatmeal means that that they need quite a lot of liquid to get this into a dough. Wholly using milk seems a little bit frivolous, in rationing.

Fat

I really wanted to make a cake this weekend to take back to my parent’s house. However, I do not have any fat and this is a problem when surviving on rations. Not having any fat or very little is a strange scenario especially when reading this article below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14669203

I cannot imagine obesity being a problem in WW2. Although I have found the food quite heavy and flour based so far, it is mainly freshly prepared home cooking without ‘secret’ ingredients buried in it. Having to live on a limited fat ration and using up what you have also makes the food quite simple and uncomplicated. I do not really understand the trans/saturated/good/bad/ fat argument, but do believe that excessive eating must be the main cause of the obesity problem. During the war with limited calories and food available, although you may experience carbohydrate overload, I do not believe anyone would get fat on WW2 rations.

Struggling along with limited fat rations, also makes our supermarket excesses seem frightening. Fat is available so freely and cheaply to buy and is available in all forms. It also seems to be in everything and the amounts of processed foods available today, mean it is not surprising people are putting on weight and struggle to keep it down. Walking around the shops today and seeing the obesity epidemic increase, we cannot appreciate the hardships that those living through WW2 on rations endured, especially as I am going to start using the methods below, I will let you know the results:

Collecting Extra fat:

Trim of all extra fat off cooked or uncooked meats and render it down. Firm fat may be chopped or grated and an be used in place of Suet.

To render down fat Method 1.

Cut fat into small pieces and place in a pan. Cover with water and lid and boil. Skim well and boil until all of the water has nearly evaporated. Turn down heat and stir so the pieces do not stick on the bottom of the pan. Once the pieces have dried up and sunk to the bottom, leave to cool and then strain.

Method 2.

Cut up the fat into small pieces. Place in an oven dish in a low oven and cook until the fat has melted. Drain off the fat and place into a container.

In either case do not thrown the remnants away. They are excellent in pies, stews and soups.

My attempt at this to follow soon.

　

Sausage Roll

Ration special tonight is sausage roll. This is not sausage roll as we think of today, with heavily seasoned sausage meat encased in puff pastry. This is sausage meat with a selection of available ingredients and steamed. The recipe is 8oz of sausage meat, mixed with 3oz breadcrumbs, 1 chopped onion, 1 tablespoon of pickle, 1 tablespoon of mixed herbs and salt and pepper. Effectively, (without the pickle) this is pretty much the recipe for a sausage stuffing recipe.

The recipe calls for this to be steamed for 1 ½ hours. Firstly, I live in a one bedroom flat and do not own, have the space or the inclination to own a steamer. Secondly, the thought of steamed sausage meat made me feel a bit ill. I do not like the thought of paled sausage meat with steamed onion in it. Instead, I slapped this into a loaf tin and baked for an hour and fifteen minutes. The results, stuffing! Or, a kind of meatloaf. To be honest, this is Yum! This recipe also makes quite a lot, and quite a nice recipe for a family meal. For me, I think I will be carving big slabs of this off and putting it in sandwiches.

Might have one now…… 

Mocha Whip

I have waved goodbye the egg leaflet issued by the Ministry of Food and have moved on to some other wonderful WW2 meal suggestions.

For dinner tonight we had salad, made largely from vegetables I have grown on our balcony (when rationing, any small amount of in house food production counts). This left a vacant window for desert and I was tempted by mocha whip. Coffee flavoured deserts or cakes would never be my first option off the menu but they do have a 1970s feel which is slightly endearing. However, I do like coffee and although not as popular in the 1940s as it is today, coffee was incredibly hard to come by and rarely available at the shop. Luckily, I have plenty of coffee in the cupboard and embarked on the mocha whip.

Mix 8oz of flour with 3oz of sugar and a table spoon of cocoa. Meanwhile make a pint of hot coffee and slowly combine with the dry ingredients until it forms a paste. Then add the rest of the coffee and bring to the boil in a saucepan for 5 minutes until it thickens and the raw flour taste has been removed. Whip up and place in glasses, serves 4.

This is quite an odd creation. Firstly, it has a coffee taste, but due to the flour has a very heavy, gelatinous consistency that makes eating more than two mouthfuls quite difficult. It has quite a strong flavour, so again not sure it would really be popular with children. Yet, if you like coffee deserts, maybe give it a go. I doubt you will need seconds.  

Powdered Egg I respect you.

Few foods evoke the wartime feel than powdered eggs and I have just completed the War Cookery Leaflet Number 11 with its optimistic statement that ‘dried eggs are just as good as fresh eggs.’ After cooking with the powdered egg, I can from experience confirm that this statement is not true. The recipes are inventive, but they are not a substitute for the ‘real thing.’ However, in the war, eggs were rationed to one a week, and the ration allowance of powdered egg was the equivalent of a dozen. I can see that these were essential and powdered egg is better than no egg at all.

Eggs became scarce during 1940 following massive cuts in imports and the culling of chickens to save on feed. You cannot imagine the shelves in the supermarket without eggs, the ingenious and precious food item is taken for granted and so are the chickens that lay them. Most eggs are produced in a factory like manner and I have seen a dozen for £1. This does not seem right to me and living without real eggs makes you really appreciate how ‘special’ they are. The cook in WW2 must have really missed a real egg and would have done anything to get hold of them. The government encouraged people to breed their own chickens as they were in such short supply and I can understand why my great grandmother stored them in isinglass. She wanted to do everything she could just so they would go that little bit further. The egg is versatile as a meal and almost critical in most baking. This is why, with a shortage of shell eggs, powdered egg became invaluable when living on rations.

Powdered eggs do not taste or look great, they rarely resemble what they are meant to and when using them in cakes, Yorkshire pudding and anything else that needs to rise they refuse to. Once my little project is finished I doubt I would stick to powdered egg, as I do not believe anyone would use them out of choice, (they are also virtually impossible to get hold of and expensive), but I do find their rubbery, ‘egg flavour’ endearing. In the darkest moments of rationing, with the store cupboard empty, there they were providing meal options for the family. Let us, for now, thank the powdered egg for providing emergency meals and helping to feed Britain through the War.

Sponge Cake

A miracle has occurred in ration kitchen. Something has come out relatively normal and does not have any deformities, powdered egg flavour or look so inedible that you have to close your eyes to eat it, (this did occur with the egg cutlet, yuck).

This is the plain cake mixture, which is really simple and has spongy outcome. Cream 2ozs of sugar with 2ozs of margarine, beat in a reconstituted egg and then slowly add 4ozs of national flour with 1 tablespoon of baking powder. Thin out the mixture with milk so you have a cake like consistency. Place in a tin, I used a 20cm cake tin and bake for 20 minutes at 180.

The cake does turn out flatter than a normal sponge as there is no self-raising flour, but it tastes like a cake and is not at all solid like the Madeira cake. What I am finding with the ration recipes is their simplicity. The processes are not difficult and although the results are mixed, this cake along with the potato pastry would be great to make with children.  

Omelette

In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child writes that ‘a good French Omelette is a smooth, gently swelling, golden oval that is tender and creamy in side.’ She then goes on for a few pages, explaining extensive techniques. The Ministry of Food had their own ideas and suggest the following: Beat two reconstituted eggs with salt and pepper, melt some butter in a pan, pour in the egg and work it with a fork. Fold and serve immediately. I like a nice omelette and used to eat a lot of them, however cooking with reconstituted eggs throws out all normal rules of cooking.

Firstly, they do not react the same as shell eggs. They cement and stick to the bottom of the pan. I do not use a fork in omelette making and didn’t here as they are so granular that they would scramble instantly. I persisted while they bubbled away and attempted to gradually fold over, they would not. I had to use a spatula to prize the omelette (pancake) away from the bottom of the pan. There was no way this was going to be tender and creamy in side. Once I had managed to transfer this to a plate it did almost resemble an omelette, but did taste of the dreaded egg flavour again. My ration leaflet on eggs also recommends a Spanish Omelette, which suggest browning some vegetables in a pan and adding two reconstituted eggs until it sets into the shape of a Spanish Omelette.  

Egg & Bacon Pie

Egg & Bacon pie does sound really retro and what throws this into the realm of rationing is the potato pastry topping and cooking with a pie plate. Unfortunately, I do not own a classic enamel pie plate, but to feel like I want one now.

Not only is this pie easy to make on rations, it is super economy gastronomy and really frugal cooking, consisting mainly of potatoes, flour and a bit of bacon. The revelation to us, after eating Egg & Bacon pie for our dinner this evening, is that potato pastry is quite good. It is solid and almost biscuit like, but as an easy to make pastry, I would really recommend this. It would probably be more suited to a rich meat pie as you would have more of a contrast in flavours and textures. The filling of this pie is also quite solid and plane which makes the whole dish quite dull. This could easily be rectified, as any old left-overs could be thrown into the filling and would enhance this massively.

To make the potato pastry, mix 8oz of flour with ½ teaspoon of salt and add 2oz of fat to 4oz mashed potato and combine all of the ingredients together to form dough. I did add some water to slacken this slightly and you really need to make sure that the fat is combined into the potato first, otherwise you will get lumps. Yet, this makes a good ball of pastry dough and for anyone learning basic cooking or baking with children this would be a great idea.

For the filling, which I would adapt, mix two reconstituted eggs with 2oz of mashed potato, salt, pepper and two rations of chopped bacon. Smear out the mixture into a pie plate or oven dish and layer with the pastry.

This does go quite a long way as it is very filling. I am not used to really flour heavy food and after the Yorkshire pudding yesterday I am feeling rather stuffed.

Yorkshire Pudding

Yorkshire pudding feels about as British as a queue at the Post Office. I love Yorkshire pudding and although there is nothing remotely Yorkshire about me I think I am pretty good at making them, that is with shell eggs. I would quite happily eat it on its own, with gravy or with cream. Yet, this is rationing and cream on Yorkshire pudding would definitely be a major, major luxury which the WW2 housewife would never have been able to indulge.

One complaint that I have read about repeatedly regarding Yorkshire Pudding with powdered eggs was that they came out as flat as they went in. I don’t usually follow a recipe for Yorkshire pudding and instead go by consistency, so this recipe did strike me as being a little thicker than I would usually make. Here Goes…

Mix 4oz flour with a pinch of salt. Add one tablespoon of powdered egg and add ¼ Pt of milk, whisking to a thick consistency. Then add another ¼ Pt of milk and beat well. I left mine to stand for a while. Heat a knob of dripping or fat to smoking hot. Pour in batter and cook for 30 minutes.

This is the foundation recipe to which chopped cooked meat or vegetables can be added to create something completely new.

The result is that this tastes like Yorkshire pudding however, I like mine light, fluffy and crispy and this is one of the most solid Yorkshire puddings I have ever eaten. If you decided to use this recipe for Toad in the Hole, this would fill you up for a few days. Moreover, as feared it did come out pretty much as flat as it went in… 

Coquet Pudding

Luckily the riots have ceased in London for the time being, but this week has been a strange week and today quite an odd day. I took the day off after working excessively over the previous two weeks and so far have been questioned by the police regarding ‘a disturbance’ at another flat, been asked if I wanted a ‘stolen’ plasma T.V and rescued a check out worker who was being abused by a customer. I called the police regarding the Plasma screen incident and as an officious bystander took down their number plate and reported them. In the back of my mind, this was probably stolen from an innocent shop owner on Sunday/Monday night during the riots and if my little but of civic duty results in prosecution I will be elated. Rescuing the supermarket worker from verbal abuse also secured £3 off of my shopping bill so I feel I have triumphed twice already today.

With a bit of spare time, I decided to get dinner done early and prepared for this evening. For dessert I have made Coquet Pudding. This is mashed potatoes, cooked with powdered egg, sugar, milk and jam.

I could not imagine in anyway how this would look, taste or smell. Potatoes in a dessert are beyond anything I would ever contemplate. I cooked and mashed the poatoes with butter using a potato ricer. I thought any kind of lumps in this would really make it feel like potatoes and lumps in mashed potatoes can never be forgiven. I mixed in sugar, two reconstituted eggs and milk. I did not follow an exact recipe for this one, as I find converting imperial to metric measurements all the time slightly annoying. I also only had one large baking potato so pretty much threw in what I thought was best.

Despite low expectations, this is really quite nice. It has quite a granular consistency, and reminds me almost of a thick semolina pudding. Yet, you cannot taste the powdered egg which is a massive bonus for me and I would quite happily eat it again. 

War-Time Cookery to Save Fuel and Food Value

My blog is all about eating and cooking using the rations of World War 2, hopefully learning a few things along the way. However, this week what has really been on mind is the appalling behaviour of the rioters. Did Britain endure 10 years of rationing and a World War against fascism to be lumbered with a generation of vandalising thieves? I understand people get disenchanted, I get like that myself most weeks in a thankless job, but to go out and burn down people’s businesses and homes is really shameful.

Where did it go wrong, that caused this to happen? I may have a rose coloured, tinted glasses view of World War 2, but I thought people were meant to pull together in times of trouble and that we all had the Blitz Spirit. Unfortunately, this seems to have disappeared in the current climate, I just hope that these events do not become normalised and that we as a nation shun their thuggish actions and unite against them.

Moving onto the topic of this blog, I found this great little leaflet over the weekend, issued by the National Food Campaign Exhibition in 1940 held in Manchester, titled: War-Time Cookery to save fuel and food value. Here are some of its top tips, some of which I hadn’t thought of and really shows how all food can be stretched that little bit further.

1. Keep a vegetable stock-pot with water from celery, leeks, onions, carrots, potatoes, greens and other vegetables. Never throw these liquids away; they contain valuable minerals and vitamins, and partly help to make up deficiency in rationed foods.
2. Use the liquid from boiled vegetables to dilute tinned soups.
3. When serving soup and vegetables at the same meal, cook the vegetables in the soup.
4. Steam root vegetables
5. Cook potatoes in their jackets.
6. Save all fat from cooking meat; refine it and use it for other cooking purposes.
7. Cook meals as far as possible with one unit of heat e.g. in one large steamer on a low fire or single gas-ring you may cook: a meat roll, steamed jacket potatoes, boiled or steamed suet pudding; or in one over you may cook: baked meat, casserole of mixed vegetables, fruit pie or pastry, scones.

The leaflet has some really interesting recipes, which are of interest. Powdered egg will resume shortly….

Baked Egg Custard and a Tomato

So far this week, America nearly went bust potentially ruining what little economic progress we have made over the past two years, my colleague at work fell off a banana boat which has left me working twelve hour days and I think I have a chest infection. However, on a brighter note the balcony garden has been in major tomato producing mode this week and I will be subjecting them to my new ‘preserving’ book. I am really excited about the idea of preserving and making my balcony produce last throughout the winter. I know this is August, but I will start giving them a go soon.

I was quite tempted by the latest government recipe, ‘baked egg custard.’ I have never been a fan of custardy deserts as a rule but for some reason, really fancied this one.

Beat one reconstituted egg with sugar, add 1 ½ Pt of milk and some flavouring, pour into a greased dish and bake until set.

Unfortunately, the recipe is a little bit vague in relation to cooking temperatures and quantities and that is probably why this did not work. I baked and baked for two hours and nothing, not even a skin formed on top of the milky bath.

I decided to revert to tried and tested cooking methods and bake in a Bain Marie, reconstituted another egg and poured that in and cook for half an hour which seemed to do the trick.  

I liked it, although it did seem to have that powdered egg taste which seems to tarnish everything that powdered egg goes into. If I gave this a go again, I might add more sugar or flavouring of some kind to erode this.