Can a family survive on wartime rations?

[diamond lil]

The blog I posted earlier in this thread shows that yes you can manage fine and she does it for a family of 5. Remember that ration was per person, and when you pool a whole familie's rations together then you have plenty scope for good meals. Plus all the foods that weren't on the ration because they were seasonal or local.

[jansman]

What a fascinating subject!I think if we had to do it again,we could. Perhaps as prices go up,this may be a model for us. If food became short,it WOULD be the model. I know there was an experiment a few yrs ago as 'The 1940's House'.
I think it would be interesting to combine the ration with a garden and small livestock with foraging.

[preppingsu]

What a fascinating subject!I think if we had to do it again,we could. Perhaps as prices go up,this may be a model for us. If food became short,it WOULD be the model. I know there was an experiment a few yrs ago as 'The 1940's House'.
I think it would be interesting to combine the ration with a garden and small livestock with foraging.

I agree. It could be very interesting to see how our bodies adapt to a change in diet and potentially less food.

[diamond lil]

It's not less food Sue, it's less garbage Country people had it ok in wartime, I went through a phase once of reading up on the Home Front after I found Nella Last's Diary. They ate better than us quite often. One diary made my mouth water with the Game Pie and Roast Pheasant and Rabbit Pie.
You keep hens - so you can make as much cake & biscuits as you like. Make your own bread.
Add some in-season fruit for tarts, crumble, charlotte, sponge -and have it with tea or with custard.
Pastry is a great filling food, and balance it with healthy oatmeal for porridge, & flapjacks.
Two course meals, alternate soup & pudding - and cut out all snacking between meals. Instead, add a proper tea at teatime... home made bread & butter and jam and scones. That acts as a filler-upper for hungry kids until dinnertime. You grow veg too so you can pile that onto the plates & hide it in the meat. Make one day a week baking day and then freeze it in batches for each day during the week. Try hard to cut out fizzy juices and crisps and garbage. My daughter recently did this with her 5 and she says they managed better, the kids eat better and sleep better now.

[maryb]

They also used to bottle plums pears and apples in season together with hedgerow fruit in autumn as well as making jam (I think there may have been an extra sugar ration but in return they had to give up their jam ration). More varieties of apples were grown to extend the season - russets keep on shelves wrapped in paper right up until Christmas when it must have been really nice to have fresh fruit together with nuts harvested in autumn. They would also salt runner beans, which must have tasted really strong even after soaking - not sure what vitamins would be left. And clamps for storing potatoes and carrots. In fact it's really only May that would have seen much shortage of fresh food when winter stores were finished and the new season's harvest not yet in. And with the longer evenings people could probably cope with that. The hens would have started laying well and that would also have helped to give a bit of variety to the diet. Any surplus eggs were preserved in a bucket of Isinglass or Waterglass (I think Isinglass was made from fish waste) and by the end of the winter you would have to grope around in a bucket of slime to find a slightly more solid lump - that was an egg - the shells got quite soft in storage but they were still good for cooking.

But for all that, they were still vulnerable to disruptions in supply. Most of the country's onions came from the Channel Islands and when they fell in May 1940, you couldn't get onions for love nor money. They had been so cheap that very few people bothered growing them. They didn't make that mistake the following year!

I would think that lemons were one of the few things it would have been hard to do without and no real substitute. Oranges are nice and people certainly missed them but they were not so useful in cooking as lemons

[jansman]

It's not less food Sue, it's less garbage Country people had it ok in wartime, I went through a phase once of reading up on the Home Front after I found Nella Last's Diary. They ate better than us quite often. One diary made my mouth water with the Game Pie and Roast Pheasant and Rabbit Pie.
You keep hens - so you can make as much cake & biscuits as you like. Make your own bread.
Add some in-season fruit for tarts, crumble, charlotte, sponge -and have it with tea or with custard.
Pastry is a great filling food, and balance it with healthy oatmeal for porridge, & flapjacks.
Two course meals, alternate soup & pudding - and cut out all snacking between meals. Instead, add a proper tea at teatime... home made bread & butter and jam and scones. That acts as a filler-upper for hungry kids until dinnertime. You grow veg too so you can pile that onto the plates & hide it in the meat. Make one day a week baking day and then freeze it in batches for each day during the week. Try hard to cut out fizzy juices and crisps and garbage. My daughter recently did this with her 5 and she says they managed better, the kids eat better and sleep better now.

Nella Last's diaries made for interesting reading. My own feeling is that we should be prepping for a more austere future,a standard of living like the 1940's and 50's perhaps. I fear that resources may cause a natural "Powerdown".

[preppingsu]

Jus came across this, there are some nice recipes on here and an interesting experiment.

http://1940sexperiment.wordpress.com/10 ... e-recipes/

[archer1958]

thanks su

[preppingsu]

Another interesting site

http://woottonbridgeiow.org.uk/recipes/wartime.php

[maryb]

hadn't seen that site before, looks very interesting