Rachel, I’ve posted this to my journal as it’s quite long. Please feel free to copy it or link to it or whatever you find most convenient. If I need to do something, tell me what.
Mum lived in a village in the North of England. Her mother was a weaver before she married and her father was a lathe operator at the Bristol Aircraft factory at Huncoat. Their wider families were mostly weavers and miners so a solid working class background. Ginger would have fitted in perfectly. Mum’s always happy to be asked about the past so here are her answers to your questions:
What sort of food and sweets she enjoyed/hated as a child?
Food was very much limited to what was grown in this country. There were lots of vegetables, especially onions, potatoes, carrots, swedes / turnips, cabbage and more seasonally peas, beans, marrows, lettuce etc. Similarly, there was lots of home-grown fruit in season, especially apples, plums, gooseberries, currants, damsons and pears. Wild fruits, like blackberries, were gathered by the children in particular. There were a reasonable number of eggs and plenty of milk. There was very limited meat and what there was, was stretched into as many meals as possible. Many items were rationed, which meant you had to use money and a ration coupon to buy them. Some items were available off ration and could be bought if you had the money. Mostly, there was limited and sporadic availability. You might have a coupon for something but if it wasn’t available in the shop to buy you had to do without.
Everything was cooked from scratch; there were no domestic refrigerators or freezers. Seasonal vegetables and fruit had to be preserved in some way: jams, chutneys and pickles. The barter system was alive and well. Food scraps were saved for the local farmer who kept pigs, who would give every family who contributed a piece of pork when the pig was slaughtered. A similar arrangement held for scraps for hens and eggs. Neighbours would share anything they had a glut of. (This still holds true today. There are gluts of courgettes, apples and rhubarb in particular around here, seasonally. I get given a lot. In return, every so often, I hand back a jar of chutney or an apple cake as a thank you). It was very rare to have oranges in the shop and bananas were almost unheard of, as were peaches and apricots. Lemons got through more frequently.
Breakfast was porridge, sweetened with condensed milk or carnation milk (from a tin), as sugar was very limited and needed for baking.
Lunch was the main meal and potato based: potato pie, cottage pie etc. Cottage pie is minced beef (ground beef?) and onions in gravy with a mashed potato topping. Potato pie, one of Mum’s favourites to this day, has meat in it in Lancashire.
Potato pie
1lb stewing steak
At least two chopped onions
Beef stock: enough to cover ingredients in pie dish. Probably about a pint
Salt and Pepper
2 lbs potatoes
1 lb pastry
Chop the meat into cubes. Cut the potatoes in half then keep cutting small pieces off at an angle so you get misshapen pyramid shapes. The thin edges of floury potatoes will dissolve into the gravy leaving the thicker parts as spoon-sized lumps to chew. Put the potatoes, meat, seasoning and stock into a deep pie dish, cover and slow cook for a couple of hours. Remove, cover with the pastry, brush it with milk and cook until pastry is browned. Raise the oven temperature to cook the pastry.
Less meat would have been used during the war. Onions are used to bulk out meals. Potato Pie is served with onions in vinegar (slice an onion into a small dish of white vinegar a few hours before it’s wanted as a condiment), pickled beetroot, pickled red cabbage and similar. I put a slice of black pudding into mine, to make the gravy even richer. This is a dish which doesn’t really have a recipe as everyone makes it according to personal taste.
Tea was bread: bread and jam, egg and cress sandwiches, occasionally ham, lemon curd if lemons were available.
Lemon curd
Wash four lemons then grate the rind
Beat five eggs and put them in a double saucepan with the lemon rind, the lemon juice, 4oz butter and 1 lb of castor (finely ground) sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves and the mixture thickens. Don’t overcook as the mixture will separate. Strain into jars and use quickly as it doesn’t keep for long.
My grandmother used to bake a lot. Bread. Pastry. If she was making a pie, then she’d make extra pastry for a jam tart (a favourite of my mother) or sad cakes (pastry, raisins and sugar). If no raisins were available, then something similar like currants would be substituted. Egg custards, fruit pies, fruit crumbles, plain cake which was served up with custard. A degree of household management was important. My grandmother had to look at what was available that week and plan a week’s worth of meals around it. If the sugar was used in a cake, then it wasn’t available for anything else. Similarly, butter. Margarine and lard were frequently substituted for butter to the detriment of a dish. Neighbours shared their successes and failures. There was a lot of pooling of information. My grandmother was not one of the better managers but Mum says they never went hungry. They were a family of five at the start of the war: Grandma, Grandpa, Mum and her two older siblings. Another daughter was born during the war.
The sweet allowance of parents was almost always given to children. Mostly, there were hard boiled sweets (acid drops, sarsaparilla tablets, pear drops, etc) and lollipops. Chocolate was mostly Fry's Cream bars. Mum remembers sweets being 3d plus the coupon and weren’t bought every week. Her favourites were: barley sugar, pear drops and liquorice roots which were chewed. The latter are skinny roots which are chewed and yes, it is just like chewing a twig with a funny taste. She also liked hard spanish liquorice, Pontefract cakes and the smoking outfit children used to get for Christmas. These had pipes and so on made from black liquorice and included a packet of candy cigarettes. They were still available when I was a child and I liked them too. Very occasionally, off ration sweets were available, when she’d beg tuppence from her father and go and queue up for some. Whoever got the sweet allowance was expected to share. The sweets weren’t individually wrapped so they went sticky very quickly. A small bar of chocolate would be made to last a week and shared.
Pop was available, in a large bottle from a man who came around every fortnight with a cart. Three flavours were available: lemonade, dandelion and burdock, and sarsaparilla. The bottles were returnable.
Foods my mother hated were:
Castor oil. Poured from a bottle onto a spoon. It was good for you.
Sago and tapioca puddings. Commonly referred to as frogspawn.
Warm milk. The little bottles of school milk were put next to a radiator to unfreeze them and served warm.
Anything cooked with lard rather than butter. She didn’t mind the taste of margarine.
The end of rationing
Mum remembers the end of rationing as a gradual process in which things generally became more available. Different things came out of rationing at different times. There wasn’t a day when the shelves magically filled up. She doesn’t have any of those memory moments such as the first time she came across a banana. There were very hard times straight after the war. Money was even tighter than it had been during the war so luxuries weren’t being bought. It was more tinned meat started appearing on the shelf more often. Lemons were more often in the shops. Diet was still very much based around home grown stuff that was seasonal. She doesn’t recall anyone rushing out to buy anything. No one had enough money.
If anyone wants more information about anything I’ve mentioned or has follow on questions, just ask. My mother likes answering questions, I think it’s good for her to have something to think about, and at 87, she’s not going to be around to answer them forever. Obviously, her answers relate to her childhood in one small village in Lancashire and might be different to someone else's.
Mecurtin asked two questions:
Wentworth's stories are almost set in the South, and from 1940 through the mid-50s people are eating a LOT of fish, which was unrationed: lunches and dinners at a country house (not a stately home, but Nice) will have an egg dish for the first course and a fish dish for the main course. Did your mom's family eat fish much, either fresh or tinned?
Mum says that sardines from a tin were eaten frequently. My grandmother would cut their heads off, pull the backbone out then mash into a paste to put on bread.
Fresh sea-caught fish were very rarely eaten. They lived too far from the coast and there was a general belief that the fish weren’t fresh and so not safe to eat by the time they got to the village. We’re talking about forty miles, as the crow flies.
Kippers came in boxes and if someone got a box, they’d share the contents. They were eaten for lunch or tea.
Mum’s family were working class so no dinner parties or meals of several courses. I remember fish being a course rather than a main meal, though. I can probably find some recipes for dinner parties if you’re interested.
Tinned salmon was expensive and a treat. Mum remembers one family had a tin from before the start of the war and it wasn’t opened until they made a celebratory meal at the end of it. (In the larder from 1939 until 1945)
People caught fish in rivers (they needed a licence) but my grandfather wasn’t a fisherman and Mum doesn’t recall any fish being dropped off for her family. She points out that as a child she might not be fed fish for fear she’d choke on a bone.
Fish and chips were readily available from the local chippy. It was an occasional, as expensive, treat. It was more common to buy sausage and chips or to take a couple of portions of chips home to eat with Spam (spam fritters) or fried eggs.
Another question! In several books about the British working classes before WW2, it's said that people ate a dripping on bread, as a kind of sandwich (e.g. Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. Did her family eat dripping? If so, where did they get it from? One of the "perks" of being a cook was that you had the right to sell leftover dripping, & I wonder if that's where working class people got it from.
Dripping is simply the fat left over when joints of beef are cooked. There wasn’t a Sunday roast every week because of rationing, but if there was, the fat was put into a bowl and left outside to keep cool, and spoonfuls would be scooped out to eat on toast as an alternative to butter or margarine. Mum didn’t mind it on toast but preferred jam and bread. It can be cooked with as an alternative to butter or lard. Imagine it smeared on sliced potatoes on top of a casserole so they brown in the oven or in a tray to roast potatoes.
You used to be able to buy dripping from a butcher’s shop and I’ve just checked Tesco’s (one of our big supermarket chains) and it’s still available. A block costs £1.25. Until the 1980s, chip shops used to cook in lard or dripping rather than the vegetable oil they use now.
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