Today, we’re going to talk some more about what we can learn from World War Two about food and nutrition. One of the biggest takeaways for me is realizing how resourceful people became when they had to be. They grew the victory gardens. They substituted certain foods for other foods. When things were rationed or not available, they made their meals simpler. They cooked more from scratch. If ingredients weren’t available, they learned how to adapt and edit recipes. For example, they made cakes without eggs if eggs weren’t available. They were really rising to the challenge, and I admire that.
Often today, we have many challenges with our shopping and our cooking, and having time to do those things in our families. It’s amazing if we can figure out how to be adaptable; how to edit recipes when needed, how to be able to cook on a cheaper budget, and how to be able to use certain ingredients when others aren’t available. We can learn not to have to pop to the grocery store for the smallest thing, but learn how to do without it, and to change and be adaptable in our cooking.
It’s also good to learn how to eat more simply, in ways that cost us money and time, like having a meal of simple meat with a side vegetable, and not always needing the fancy. We should balance the fancy with the simple and wholesome food.
I’m going to talk a bit about rationing, and about what people did if a food was rationed, or it was not available. Then I’m going to talk about the kind of things that the soldiers and the people ate during that time.
They ate a variety of foods at that time; meat, bread, potatoes, and vegetables. They also ate canned goods. These were originally intended for soldiers and travelers. I’ll just mention quickly that soldiers ate meat like beef or mutton, as well as potatoes and bread and jam, and they drank tea. On the home front, they ate processed and canned foods, and grains like flour substitutes that were available. Grocery stores sold processed and canned foods. Speciality stores sold meat, produce, and baked goods.
During World War II, soldiers ate mostly stews or soups, meat and spaghetti, chopped ham, eggs, potatoes, et cetera. Then on the home front, they ate rationed foods like meats, canned fish, cheese, and other processed foods. There was canned milk, and some form of fats. There was also sugar and coffee available. The Americans grew their own fruits and vegetables to help feed soldiers and to stretch the ration coupons.
Animal lard was a common source of fat, but was soon replaced by vegetable shortening, crisco, due to rationing. That was a time when some bad fats came into use – before that, it was a lot healthier, and after that, seed oils were produced. Wheat cereals were replaced by oatmeal, and sometimes sugar was replaced with honey. People turned to potato flour or cornstarch as alternatives for wheat based baking.
Rationing and shortages affected a lot of people, and there were a lot of efforts to support the soldiers at home and abroad. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the government promoted a diet to conserve resources while keeping soldiers strong and healthy and boosting morale.
So, what exactly was rationed? You had your ration cards and you could only buy a certain amount of a food item each week. Meat was heavily rationed – particularly beef, pork and lamb. People ate smaller portions, and used less expensive meats like chicken and fish or canned meats. Butter was limited, and people started using margarine and cooking oils. Sugar was rationed. Canned goods were rationed – the vegetables, fruits and meats. They were an easy way to store food, but as I said, they were rationed.
Coffee was rationed, and people tried to stretch it using grains like barley or rye as substitutes. Common crops in victory gardens included tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beans, which were basic ingredients for stews, soups, and sauces. Then people started to substitute with SPAM or other canned meats because of the scarcity of fresh meats. Eggs and dairy were sometimes replaced by powdered eggs and dried milk, which had a long shelf life. Meatloaf became popular, and roast chicken, as they could stretch smaller amounts of meat further. At that time, things like mac and cheese, or potato based dishes were comfort foods, and were made with inexpensive ingredients that were not rationed.
It’s fascinating learning about the soldiers’ rations, what they ate, and how they were planned to give maximum nutrition, but still be shelf stable. There’s an interesting website from the Keep Military Museum, which is said to have the last surviving D-Day ration pack. You can see pictures of it here: https://www.keepmilitarymuseum.org/the-last-surviving-d-day-ration-pack/. The rations are packed in a waxed cardboard box, which is sealed to keep the contents water and gas proofed. It was small in size, which allowed them to be carried in a mess tin. They were light, but they provided the soldier with the 400 calories that he needed in a day. They had to use an x-ray to see what the contents of this pack were, while still keeping it intact.
The contents are: 10 biscuits, 2 oatmeal blocks, that would be very dense oatmeal, tea, sugar and milk blocks, 1 meat block, 2 slabs of raisin chocolate, 1 slab of plain chocolate, some boiled sweets, 2 packs of chewing gum, a packet of salt, meat extract tablets, 4 tablets of sugar and some toilet paper. Very interesting.
The 14-man ration, or compo ration came in a wooden crate that contained canned and packaged food like bully beef, SPAM, steak and kidney pudding, beans, cheese, jam, biscuits, soup, sausages, and margarine. Those would be for people at the bases, and not on the home front. Tinned army rations after the war were still provided, but they were supplemented with packets of freeze dried foods, or products in vacuum sealed plastic.
The soldiers were supposed to be issued different menus each day, but often ended up with the same over and over again. As I mentioned, the 24-hour ration pack would contain enough calories to sustain the soldier in the field for one day. It would contain breakfast, a main meal, the ingredients to make a hot drink, and then a variety of snacks including chocolate bars.
Nutella definitely deserves its own section here; the heavenly spread. Apparently in a year, Nutella sells enough jars to cover the Great Wall of China eight times, though I’m not sure how thick it would be. During the Napoleonic Wars, chocolate was scarce in France and other European countries. Napoleon forbade French allies from trading with the British when he was trying to destroy the British economy, so the price of chocolate went way up. Then some resourceful Italian chocolatiers had the idea of adding chopped hazelnuts to their chocolate to stretch it. This was a tasty paste known as Gianduja. It faded into obscurity once cocoa imports came back in full swing.
Then again, during World War II, cocoa was scarce. Pietro Ferrero created a recipe using hazelnuts, sugar, and the tiny bit of cocoa that he could get his hands on. This was a thick, sweet loaf named Gianduja. You might be having trouble imagining cutting Nutella, and that wasn’t really a hit. Then, in 1951, after the Second World War, he came up with a spreadable version, calling it Super Crema. It was amazing. A tiny bit went a long way, and chocolate lovers loved it. In 1964, the recipe was adjusted for mass production and rebranded as Nutella. By the way, Ferrero created his own chocolate company, and that was the first product. Nowadays, it’s very popular – we even have World Nutella Day on the 5th of Feb!
Here are a couple more replacements that people used if something wasn’t freely available during the war. The carob bean was used as a chocolate substitute in baking or candy making. It has a sweet flavour. Bacon drippings were also used sometimes as fats, as was olive oil, which was less affected by rationing. Some people even made flour from dried potatoes – today we can still get potato flour. Also, in baking people used mashed bananas, applesauce, or gelatin if they couldn’t get eggs or other items. Canned fish like sardines and salmon were used more often than usual. Things like peanut butter and tofu were used for extra protein, as well as lentils and beans. Less expensive cuts of meat, and organ meats like liver were popular.
All those substitutes are good things that we can use as well today, especially to cut down on budget. These days, there are many recipes on the internet using those substitutes if you prefer to use them instead of another ingredient. Wheat intolerance or even gluten intolerance wasn’t really a thing back then, because the grains, especially the wheat, was not so hybridized or messed with, so people were not allergic to it. It was less sprayed, and there wasn’t glyphosate in the wheat, which is usually what we’re allergic to, but there was a shortage of wheat during that time, so they used substitutes.
So, overall, what I like to take away from this is having simpler meals, being creative and innovative in figuring out how to make up for the shortages or the low budget that we may have, and figuring out how to get fresh food over processed food, which actually came from a lot of what they developed for the soldiers in the war. The shelf stable foods are now snack foods. Trying to cook fresh, simple, whole foods as much as possible is the best practice, and then enjoy the abundance of fruits, vegetables and meat that we have today.
