Would a wartime diet help our waistlines?
However, Ekins also confirmed my fears; ‘The real issues were the sheer time it took.’ She said, ‘I found that initially it was taking me hours everyday to prepare meals.’ Convenience foods can be a hard habit to break, and as many of us are not, and do not have housewives as in the Forties, the time consuming nature of this diet gives it a dwindling practicality for those with a busy working life and/or hectic social schedule.
Practicalities diminish further if you are of the disposition to entertain guests. This is not a diet for the generous, unless your willpower can stretch to resisting luxuries set aside for visitors (although this, of course, would not have been possible in the Forties).
Wartime cuisine was not noted for its variety as it was challenging to think of new things to do with the available ingredients. Making do with what you had was a well used and implemented phrase, looking at my rations I still felt bemused, and asked Ekins how she had felt. ‘When you try cooking with this you realise just how little this is,’ she told me, and mentioned her initial hunger pangs. Creating meals from rations all week would certainly require some innovation. I’m not sure I shall be stooping to the likes of bread and dripping mind you.
Furthermore, with a little help from Ekins and her recipes, and with the speed of preparation which will undoubtedly come from familiarising oneself with the ration book ingredients, this era appears to set a shining example for health and wellbeing. Perhaps we would all be better off if we adopted the wartime motto, ‘Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, and Do without’. I certainly shall.
Category: 1940s, Vintage news
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I got into this a few years ago and bought a helpful book entitled ‘The Ration Book Diet’, (a quick search on Amazon throws up a number of similar titles) and unlike Pattern’s recipes have been adapted for modern life, my personal favorite was corned beef hash with beans. That said, women of the forties were thinner because they ate less and got more exercise and you don’t need to follow a forties diet to do those things, but it could be a novel way to get started.
Having lived 100% on a 1940′s wartime ration diet for around 4 months, I found your tastes changed too. For instance suddenly having no convenience foods such as fatty snacks like crisps, collecting dripping from your bacon rashers (yeah I know sounds disgusting) and using that to cook some potato pancakes in or even to spread on bread and toast it lightly so the dripping melted into the bread became a REAL treat!!!! (seriously)
These sort of taste changes only kicked in after a month or so and really surprised me!
Anyway- great article Jasmine. Do you think you will do this again or was it just too time consuming to cook from scratch everyday?
Carolyn Ekins
Hi,
I have been interested in adopting this type of lifestyle/eating habit type of thing for quite some time. I don’t have the money to order the book that you spoke about however…I was wondering if you could possibly send me some stuff via email such as recipes and the ration amounts?
Thank you jasmine for an interesting article. This is something i have thought of trying for some time, although i’m a vegetarian so i’d have to use meat substitutes. I’d also miss pasta dishes, although i guess that macaroni would have been available. Do you know if it was rationed?
I was lucky enough to meet marguerite patten 5 years ago at one of her talks. She’s a wonderful speaker & very elegant and slim, a lovely lady.
I do hope you’ll let us know how you get on, jasmine. Good luck! X
Another big difference from today was that the average person rarely ate out. Most meals were made at home and there really wasn’t much in the way of conveinence food.
My dad, who was born in 1940, told me that he remembers in 1946, after the war had ended, having Christmas dinner where 25 people shared one chicken. Hard to imagine in our modern world of plenty.
This article reminded me of Jitterbug, a blogger that has adopted a 40′s lifestyle. She uses a “reducing” plan that’s helped her lose 58 pounds so far. I just love her blog, which is here: http://destination1940.blogspot.com/.
Great article. I like cooking wartime style meals occasionally but I don’t think I could manage it every day.
I’m always amazed at how far you can make food stretch when you have to. It would be interesting to see how people would cope on rations these days.
Kat- having lived on a rationing diet 24/7 (apart from a few blips) for 6 months now I can confirm that it is hard… initially because of adapting to a diet where some of the essentials are very much restricted ( eggs I find the hardest to cope with) but also because of the sheer time it takes to cook from scratch which can be quite frustrating at times when you work away from the home and still have your family to cook for too
Saying that- it is surprising how quickly you adapt to living like this and you are right- it does save a LOT of money!
C xx
It sounds intriguing but I don’t think I could do it, at least, not at this point in time. Interesting article though!
After watching the DVD for ’1940′s House’ I decided to try this diet (supplemented with some of my grandmother’s depression-era recipes) and found that numerous benefits came of it.
I saved money, I became better at managing time (let’s face it, grandma worked twice as hard as any of us do, without all of our modern conveniences – and she MADE time), my allergies started going away, I lost weight, and I found I could do without a lot of things that had previously been ‘necessities’.
It isn’t just a diet, it’s a frame of mind that can be summed up with these words -
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.
Besides, the food is pretty good if you use the right spice combinations.