Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Second World War to the 1980s E-Book

Jacqui Wood

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Serie: Tasting the Past
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 134

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The many influences of the past on our diet today make the concept of 'British food' very hard to define. The Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans all brought ingredients to the table, and the country was introduced to all manner of spices after the Crusades. The Georgians enjoyed a new level of excess and then, of course, the world wars forced us into the challenge of making meals from very little. The history of cooking in Britain is as tumultuous as the times its people have lived through. Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Second World War to the 1980s documents the rich history of our food, its fads and its fashions to be combined with a practical cookbook of over 120 recipes from the Second World War onwards. Jacqui Wood guides us through the nutritious and pragmatic recipes of wartime Britain, which juggled rationing and shortages to produce delicious food and keep morale high; through the era of convenience food and television chefs in the 1960s; and finally the yuppies and stacked food of the 1980s.

Leseprobe

Tastingthe Past

Tastingthe Past

Recipes fromthe SecondWorld War tothe 1980s

JACQUI WOOD

Cover Illustration: Utro_na_more/iStockphoto

First published 2009, as part of Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Stone Age to the Present.

This edition published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Jacqui Wood, 2009, 2020

The right of Jacqui Wood to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9648 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

Second World War

The Post War Years

The 1980s

So What is British Food?

Conversion Charts

Bibliography

About the Author

BRITISH FOOD HAS been hard to categorise in the past compared to the very distinctive cuisines of countries such as Italy, France and Germany. This is because it is an amalgamation of all of them, in the same way that the English language (the only truly European language, by the way) is a combination of five European languages: Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Viking and Norman. Our cuisine, too, is a combination of the typical foods of those that once conquered Britain over a thousand years ago.

But Britain’s assimilation of the foods of other cultures did not stop after the Norman Conquest. During the Medieval period, the spices brought from the Crusades by the Normans were used in almost every dish by those who could afford them. When Britain itself began to have colonies, the culinary embellishments to our diet began again. During the Elizabethan period, strange produce coming from the New World was also adopted with relish by our forbears.

The Civil War period introduced Puritan restrictions to our daily fare, making it against the law to eat a mince pie on Christmas Day because it was thought a decadent Papist tradition. The Georgians took on chocolate and coffee with gusto and even moulded their business transactions around the partaking of such beverages. But it was really not until the Victorian period – when it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire – that our diet became truly global in nature.

This book will attempt to trace the roots of these influences on our traditional British cuisine. We should be very proud that we have adopted so much of the world’s tastes into our traditional diet, rather than being ashamed of a seemingly patchwork and non-descript culinary heritage, as some people have described it.

This book will also look at the recipes we commonly use today and see if they are as modern as we think they are, or whether they have very ancient roots. I hope to show – as we cover the different periods from prehistory to the post-war years right up until the 1970s – that our love affair with exotic foods is not as new a trend as some of us seem to think. I have also included some recipes that, although well used and loved throughout history, have now been completely abandoned, in the hope that a few may be revived.

This book will hopefully become a manual for those readers who want to put on a themed dinner party, providing a wide selection of recipes from each period in history. I have not included those recipes that I feel you would never want to make, as some historical cookbooks have done in the past. Instead, I want you to taste these dishes and experience what it was really like to eat during those particular periods. No one, apart from the truly adventurous among you, is going to acquire a cow’s udder from the butcher and stuff it as they did in the Medieval period, or stuff a fish’s stomach with chopped cod’s liver!

I will begin this book by describing how our metabolism changed during the Stone Age, when we began to consume one of the most common food groups today: dairy products. Each chapter will begin with a brief introduction to the foods of the period that I found particularly fascinating during my research, and each chapter will end with the traditional Christmas food of the period (Solstice Feast food for the Celts). If you want to celebrate your Christmas in a completely different way, why not try some homely 1940s recipes or some 1980s-style party vol-au-vents?

The origins of some of our modern dietary problems

One modern phenomenon of our diet-obsessed society is the Low Carbohydrate Diet. These particular diets are thought to stem from mankind’s Hunter Gatherer period, and are now designed to help those of us who have overindulged to lose weight. If one looks at any ‘primitive’ culture today, like the Bushmen of the Kalahari, you never see anyone overweight. The Hunter Gatherer diet comprised primarily lots of meat and fish. This type of food, once caught or hunted, would satisfy a person’s hunger for longer than a cereal- or vegetable-based diet. We have all indulged in those huge Chinese takeaway meals, packed full of all sorts of vegetables that leave us feeling stuffed initially, but an hour or two later we start to feel hungry again.

As the name signifies, the hunter also gathered to supplement his protein-rich diet and to add variety, although fruits and nuts would have been seasonal and most of the leaves and stems they ate were only available in the spring and summer months. To summarise, the first Stone Age diet was predominantly meat and fish with seasonal banquets of nuts, berries and vegetation. One of the few vegetables available all year round would have been seaweed, which was probably gathered at the same time that shellfish were collected from the mid shoreline. It is also true that the tastiest wild vegetables can still only be found on the shorelines of northern Europe, where most Hunter Gatherer camps are found in the archaeological digs. These tasty vegetables include such delights as Rock Samphire, Sea Beet and Sea Holly, all of which are mentioned in my previous book, Prehistoric Cooking.

There are, however, serious consequences today for a large percentage of the population due to the ingenuity of the first farmers. Today’s generation of allergic or food intolerant people can trace the origins of their dietary problems to the culinary practices of a group of Stone Age farmers.

It has been suggested that these problems are a result of modern agricultural businessmen overproducing chemically distorted products in their desire to make it all look the same and have a long shelf life in the supermarkets. Yet one of the most common food intolerances today is wheat: a hybridised wild grass plant. To find the origins of our first attempts at hybridising plants, we have to go back to the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East 11,000 years ago, to a people known as the Natufians who gathered wild grains to make into bread. The Fertile Crescent derives its name from the abundance of not just edible wild grains and pulses, but also the ancestors of our modern domestic livestock. It was almost inevitable, therefore, that the first settlements and agricultural experiments would have begun in this particular region. The city of Jericho, which is thought to be one of the only places on the planet that has been continually occupied for 11,000 years, is where these early plant experiments started as they cross-pollinated the wild grasses of the region.

Once mankind went down the road of cultivating the land, rather than wandering over it and gathering from it, we had entered ourselves into a lifetime of drudgery tilling the earth. The term ‘the daily grind’ is usually associated with boring and repetitive jobs. This comes from a time when people in each settlement would have had to grind grain into flour between two stones for an hour or more each day just to produce their daily bread. Lots of bread was needed too to feed the people that had to work hard on the land to grow the grain, and so we began a cycle that has no end. So those of us that cannot tolerate the gluten-rich hybridised bread wheat of today can blame those people 11,000 years ago who started our first manipulation of what was natural.

The Low Carb Diet – which is predominantly meat, fish, cheese and cream – is called the ‘Hunter Gatherer Diet’, as mentioned previously. This description is not really accurate, though, as the hunter-gatherers did not eat any dairy products until they settled down and became farmers.

The first cultivation of cereal crops was co-dependent on the domestication of the wild bull (the auroch). These were needed to pull the primitive ploughs to cultivate the land in order to grow the crops in the first place. Large numbers of female animals were needed, and so there was always a good and constant working stock of these beasts of burden. As a consequence, there would have always been suckling calves in those settlements. It would only have taken one person to drink some of the gallons of milk those beasts produced for their calves every day to get us on the road to lactose intolerance today.

Milk is primarily designed by nature as a food for young creatures, not for adults. This group of farmers therefore began the modification of the human body to tolerate milk and milk products well into adulthood – so much so that it has became a very normal part of our northern European diet today. Those early agricultural pioneers also discovered how to make hard cheese, which was a good way to store milk protein during the winter months. ‘How on earth did they discover that?’ you might think.

As usual with most discoveries, it was all about circumstance and chance. The early farmers had not perfected making large ceramic pots, and so a lot of the equipment they used when they were wanderers was also used in their new settled homesteads. One piece of equipment was the calf’s stomach, used to carry water and to store it in their homes. When people decided to drink milk, it was natural that they would store it in the same containers that they used for water. The calf’s stomach, however, contains the enzyme rennet, with which we make our modern cheeses today. If milk was put into the calf’s stomach and hung in a warm place, it would therefore turn into curds and whey, and here we have the beginnings of our worldwide cheese production.

By 4,000 bc, most of northern Europe was growing wheat and enjoying dairy products in some way or another. However, for some unknown reason this love of dairy products was only popular in northern Europe. If you draw a line across the top of present-day Italy and include Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Britain, you can see those ancient ‘butter border lands’ today. These are the countries that still love butter with their daily bread, whereas Spain, southern Italy and a large percentage of the world’s countries do not really have this tradition. The colonies, of course, took this fashion with them around the world, so there are butter-loving outposts everywhere on the globe, most notably in America. But vast areas of the planet are still lactose intolerant because they did not adapt their metabolism as the northern Europeans did so effectively during the Stone Age.

We tend to think today that the lactose intolerant person is someone whose body has rejected a good and wholesome foodstuff. It is, however, the other way round. The lactose intolerant person’s body has reacquired the original human metabolism, and so it is actually those of us who still consume them with relish who are the ones with the real dietary problems, with our love of butter and cheese on our daily bread resulting in excessive weight gains.

WARTIME SHORTAGES LED to the creation of the Ministry of Food, the Dig for Victory campaign and powdered eggs. Marguerite Patten was instructed to invent interesting and tasty recipes for British housewives with very restricted larders. The interesting thing was that, because it was a very restricted diet, some of the poorer people in Britain had never eaten so well! The state took control of their diets, rationing sugar (which was very hard to get) and fat, and forcing people to eat wholegrain bread – for many, this would have been a healthier diet than the one they were used to. To supplement their diets, people dug up their lawns and grew potatoes and cabbages in their flowerbeds, providing their own, very locally sourced vegetables.

Just to highlight the difference between the British and the Americans during the war, I will relate a fascinating story. The American troops stationed in Britain brought with them their favourite chocolate bar – the Hershey bar – as part of their rations. Chocolate bars were so important to the American soldiers that the American government had their food technicians adapt the bar so that it did not melt too easily when the troops went into the tropics during the war. Having government food scientists spend their time developing a chocolate bar that does not melt seems worlds apart from what was happening in Britain, as the Ministry of Food was trying its best to get the nation enthusiastic about dried eggs!

The Ministry of Food, with its seemingly endless leaflets on cooking for the Home Front, was designed to do three important things. Firstly, to keep the morale of the British people high by giving them a challenge in the kitchen, the challenge being to make relatively normal meals while handicapped by rationing. Secondly, it was to make the housewife feel as if she was in some way contributing to the war effort by being inventive in the kitchen. Thirdly, and most importantly, because the government did not know how long or how bad the food shortages were going to become, they needed to ensure that the health of the next generation did not suffer as a consequence. They were only too well aware of the problems that bad diet could have on the development of children from the depression of the 1930s. They knew that children’s diets, whilst not exactly fun, should include all their nutritional requirements, and invented such cartoon characters as Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot in order to try and make it fun for the children to eat their vegetables. The character of Popeye had been used in much the same way during the 1930s to make spinach seem attractive to young children. Other posters showed a silhouetted child drinking from a mug and the backbone of the child was a bottle of milk. The caption read: ‘Milk: the backbone of young Britain.’

So the efforts of the Ministry of Food during the war made the diet of the poorer people of Britain better than it had ever been before. Cheap loaves of unhealthy white bread were replaced by wholemeal bread, and sweet, stodgy and fatty puddings were taken out of the diet due to the short supply of sugar and fat. Some evacuee children, sent to the country from the inner cities, drank fresh milk on a regular basis for the first time in their lives.