8th April Day 1
Dear Diary, is it time for bed, I’m tired out!
It has been a busy day getting our Rationing Project underway; shopping, weighing, meal planning, baking…
We have just finished dinner (at 8pm) and it’s time to update you on how things have gone so far, and the plans for the week to come.
Let’s start with the shopping, and the meal plans.
Today we visited four shops: the butchers, the greengrocer, the sweet shop, and our local vintage/antiques shop. Firstly at the sweet shop (yep, priorities!) we spent part of our monthly sweets and chocolate allowance, saving some for purchasing cocoa powder for hot chocolate or baking, later in the month. In all, we came away with 550g of confectionery between us, and the temptation to eat it all on the walk up the high street was hard to resist!
The greengrocers provided the essential potatoes and parsley, whilst in the vintage shop I visited the haberdashery department for darning wool and a pair of knitting needles, whilst Andrew picked up a wooden box of dominoes.
Last but not least, we popped to our friendly butchers, to buy our weekly ration of meat. After a bit of savvy shopping, and with the butchers onside, we came away very pleased, and quite pleasantly surprised with the amount of meat we are able to get this week. Bacon is rationed to 4oz per person per week, that’s approx 100g. We opted to take this as streaky bacon, as you get much more for the weight. Then it was onto other ‘boned’ meat, which was rationed by cost at 10s6pence, per person. Directly translating this cost into modern buying power is tricky. We have used a National Archives Calculator (Currency converter: 1270–2017 (nationalarchives.gov.uk)) to do the math, and it works out to a joint overall limit of £5.00 budget for the week. For this, we purchased 500g leg of beef; a cheep unfashionable cut, which will need long slow cooking as full of connective tissue, but very good value. We also found that the butcher had some calves liver available so purchased 200g.
Total spend across all the shopping was £36.92.
Meal Plan
Friday (today)
Breakfast: skipped
Lunch: toasted black pudding sandwiches, using up bread and pudding left over from earlier in the week. (Waste not!)
Mid afternoon: 2 biscuits
Dinner: Liver with bacon and onion, served with boiled potatoes and steamed spring greens.
Saturday
Breakfast: bubble and squeak with black pudding (leftover potatoes and greens from Friday night)
Lunch: cheese and carrot sandwiches, slice of ovaltine cake, apple/pear
Dinner: Vegetable and Oatmeal Goulash
Sunday
Breakfast: scrambled egg, bacon, toast
Lunch: vegetable pasties, salad
Dinner: slow cooked beef and vegetable stew with dumplings
Also, cook potato and leek soup
Monday
Breakfast: porridge made with half milk and water
Lunch: thermos of soup, bread, apple
Dinner: leftover stew pie with potato pastry
Tuesday
Breakfast: porridge made with half milk and water
Lunch: vegetable pasties, small piece of cheese, slice of ovaltine cake
Dinner: leftover stew with jacket potato
Wednesday
Breakfast: porridge made with half milk and water
Lunch: thermos of soup, bread, apple
Dinner: Potato pancakes with baked beans
Thursday
Breakfast: porridge made with half milk and water
Lunch: bacon and lettuce sandwich, apple, slice of ovaltine cake
Dinner: bubble and squeak
The National Loaf and the Ovaltine Cake.
I mentioned at the start of the blog that today’s activities had also included baking. Bread and cake were both in the oven at one stage or another… with mixed results.
The national loaf recipe I tried out was seemingly OK, until they went in the oven. After which they never rose, and the resulting loaves look more like bricks than bread. I’ll just have to slice them horizontally for sandwiches, and make the rest into bread pudding…
Happily, the Ovaltine cake looks to be a far greater success, although a slightly odd recipe to work with, but we are yet to try it as saving it for filling up lunch boxes.
There’s washing up to do from dinner, and a few more jobs to complete before I head to bed with a book. So I’ll pack away my notes now, and empty the dregs from the teapot ready for a fresh brew in the morning. Good night x
LifeThymes 
Sounds like you’ve had productive day Sophie, personally I have porridge for breakfast every day so that would not be a hardship for me.
I wonder what people would have eaten if they were vegetarian, I guess it wasn’t so fashionable in those days though.
Hope you sleep well. Looking forward to hearing more from you ❤️
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Its an interesting point about vegetarians, as yes they did actually have different rations. There was a number of variations on the standard ration book, such as for vegetarians who didn’t have meat but had extra cheese, for preganant mothers and for children (extra milk, orange juice), and even for religions which have different meat eating rules.
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Very interesting
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What went wrong with your bread recipe – this is virtually identical to my Nana’s recipe which I still make? Also I have a booklet of Wartime recipes collected from the Adur region if you’re interested?
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Hi Susie. Thanks so much for commenting. The bread was made following a recipe for ‘National Loaf’ originally from ‘Ministry of Food’ Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall via thewartimekitchen.com. I think I left it too long at the initial prooving stage, and the yeast got too tired out to work with the very heavy wholemeal flour.
The cake was a better success, like a sticky stodgy malt loaf and certainly filled a space in the lunch box and our bellies today, although I was desperate to slather my slice with butter!
The recipe booklet sounds wonderful and right up my street! I’d love to see it.
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An interesting read Sophie, thank you for sharing your journey.
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Glad you are enjoying it, thanks for commenting!
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