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my Grand mother was in charge of the paper work for the food ration books. she was very cross when she heard on our tv that people had been panic buying food during the early stages of the Covid 19 pandemic in the UK.
Mr. Miller, does your ration series also intent to cover the axis powers? As a german I would like to know how my grandmother had to make due in the war while my grandfather was away at the front. Even with what my nation did during the war.
So, rationing even such a garbage food was actually better than market economy? Are you telling me such a simplistic communist economy role model is ok? Who would have thought.
It also has to do with the fact they were eating far more vegetables and less animal products. There is an interesting study from one of the Scandinavian countries during the war when the population was not allowed meat at all for a long period of time and after that all manner of heart issues/disease plummeted.
I used your hard tack recipe a few weeks ago, than the hurricanes hit, and i made even more. I took a bunch of homemade potted meat, a bunch of boullion, and al lthe hard tack to some friends stranded out there, stayed with them for a while as there wasn't a shelter they couldn't get too. We ate on it for days, mixing it into a oatmeal like meal. Just wanted to say thanks for the recipe Max! It helped some people out!
When banas came back, they were on the Blue Ration book, for a child, limited to one per book. To make the treat go further, my mother used to halve one between my brother and me. To stop arguments over who had the biggest half,she used her tape measure and made us watch as she made the cut. How well she kept the peace. A wonderful woman and exemplary mother i still miss. I am 92, the last one left with the memory.
My mum's tactic on sharing something like cake , chocolate etc was to make one do the cuttng, the other then chose which 'half' they wanted. This made sure that whoever was doing the cutting tried to be as fair as possible, otherwise they knew they would be getting the smaller of the two portions! I know exactly what you mean about being the last one with a certain memory. Telling it to someone else isn't the same, as to that person it's your memory that you are sharing with them. It's not a shared memory that you have with another perso, probably one you wouldn't have to go into any detail about because they would instantly know what you are referring to. It is sad, but it's how it is. I'm the last of my immediate family left.
@maryminty5876 it does, but I remind myself of all the fun and love we shared, and tell myself that I was luckier than a lot of people. I miss them, so I owe it to them to live my life to the full. I often think how much they would have enjoyed doing things, so they're with me in my heart.
Coming from the Philippines, we had the inverse problem. Too many bananas (prob also from limited export) but not enough tomatoes being imported. And thus, the Banana Ketchup was born during the War and continued to be love through this day
@@Iskandar64 Yup. we also use it in pizza, pasta, as a marinade for barbecue etc. That's why Filipino Spaghetti (like that of Jollibee) is much sweeter than other types
@@kurathchibicrystalkitty5146As an amateur VA (I voice act for my D&D games and have since 2007), this accent is one that I have continually tried and failed to replicate.
Took care of an elderly British expat lady who was a young child growing up in London during WWII. She said the national loaves as she remembered them were not only quite dense but also far saltier than most bread including some of the later post war recipes she’d tried for nostalgia’s sake. She said her understanding was that the extra salt was added to help keep mold at bay so that the bread would keep longer and therefore reduce waste. It might end up quite dry and stale, but at least it would remain safe to eat. She said her mother used to make vegetable broth a couple times a week from the vegetable scraps and when the bread got very stale she would cut it into cubes and serve it in a bowl of hot vegetable broth with whatever other vegetables they had as meal. The bread would soften in the broth to be more edible and add more substance to the otherwise very meager vegetable soup.
Watching this video made me finally understand why my Grandparents refuses to eat anything but white bread, and it was one of the few things they splurged on (it always came from Marks and Spencers). They were probably sick of eating nasty bread during the war and swore it off for life.
@@ajb7876 My Grandmother-in-law was the same way, said she never wanted to see another can of Spam as long as she lived, and never did as far as I know.
I learned to cook from people who had been taught to cook during WW2 rationing, and they passed down a lot of habits that I didn't realize were related to rationing until I did research in my college years. Among these habits are the following "Cook your vegetables in as little water as possible and as fast as possible to prevent vitamin loss." "Use the water from cooking your vegetables to make your gravy. That way no vitamins are lost." "A good dinner requires a potato dish, two vegetables, and a protein. For supper, one fruit and one vegetable should be served beside the main dish. And one fruit and half a glass of orange juice [always from concentrate as fresh oranges were rare and refrigeration wasnt really a thing until the 60s] should be included with breakfast." "One pound of boneless meat serves four people if you plan your meals properly." "Keep a garden and use it. If you can't eat it, you can trade it or can it." "Willful waste makes woeful want." Some of my favorite dishes as a child were later discovered to be straight out of government pamphlets from WW2 rationing, which was mildly disconcerting. I still look at modern recipes and think, "My, that uses a lot of fat/sugar/flour/etc." and often pass that recipe by in favor of one of my older cookbooks with a more economical recipe. When you learn a mindset, it can be hard to change, even 60 or 70 years after the fact.
Tradition, also called "bullying by dead people" If a recipe has too much fat or sugar for your liking, try to find a recipe from another country for the same dish. There are a bunch of countries, where sugar and fat are more favored or even status symbols. Or you can just adapt the recipe for your own likings, nobody will shoot you for that, unless you break the spaghetti in half, that's a declaration of war.
My father used to recount that he and his siblings (four in all) were given a banana at the end of the war, but their nanny insisted on giving it all to the youngest, because, she said, that as he had been born in 1939, he had never tasted one. The other children were furious, as you can imagine, loudly declaring that, as their brother had never tasted a banana, then he didn’t know what he was missing, whereas they did, so would have enjoyed it far more. I don’t know why she didn’t just cut it into four pieces…
It's one of those things. Seems clear now but at the time she was probably so focused on getting the bananas for the baby, she just didn't think that far
I come from a family of miners, my parents being the first non miners in generations. To the day he died, my grandad loved bananas, and close to his death he would have flashbacks to the mines, which seemed to increase his banana intake. The last time I ever saw my grandad, he wasn’t in a good way and seemed to think he was in a coal mine. He snapped out of his panic for a moment and went ‘here you go son, my last banana, you have it’. I declined and let him eat it. He died 2 days later, I’m incredibly proud to be his grandson
Man the mental image of what he was seeing/thinking makes me think he had to be a fantastic guy. Thinking he's down in a mine, sees a younger kid, hands over what he thinks is his only/last bit of food...
@@Bildgesmythe As a low carber, I use turnips, rutabaga (swedes), and radishes where most people would potatoes. They're all quite good roasted or in soups and stews.
I have a bit of parsnip trivia for you, courtesy of my British horticulture teacher. Apparently, parsnips get sweeter when stored at very low temperatures ... They don't even mind being near frozen. So! Mid-November, farmers would be out in frozen fields, digging up their parsnips ... with jackhammers
I didn't know the last part, but carrots are the same way! Cold weather makes them sweeter. And you can store them in the ground rather than harvesting them all at once!
That's why they're always served roasted with Christmas Dinner here. Beautifully sweet and delicious. I'll take roast parsnips over roast potatoes any day.
They get plain edible following a freeze, before it their flavour is a bit off. I just keep them in the ground until December or so to ensure they get a few freezes, easiest vegetable ever... stores perfectly, can be a little hard to extract from frozen ground though :)
I worked for a retired economics professor, who is now 101 years old. She was in her 20s in London during the Blitz, and worked on a project researching the health and body weight of factory workers during rationing. Both her study and others confirmed that for working class Londoners, they were significantly better nourished under rationing than before. She always emphasized that however tough the war was, being poor in early 20th century London was worse.
Indeed. I also read somewhere that the widespread promotion of fish and chips was after when they took in soldiers to serve in the First World War the authorities were shocked at how malnourished many were.
Yes! this is quite often set just aside. a lot of the times when I see usa "depression era meal" recipes they're just 80s finnish family meals. 50s finnish school meal would basically be gruel - but the gruel would have still been 100% better than 50 years before that having a meal of absolutely nothing.
Yes, that's what annoys me when people try to compare the poverty of today with the poverty of then. London's East End at the beginning of the 20th century was a hell hole. I read a book called The People of the Abyss by Jack London. He disguised himself as a down and out and lived rough in the East End for about six months. It's truly horrific.
@@lasskinn474 - Many poverty struck people died during the Depression in the USA, particularly the elderly. I believe it was because of this that the Social Security system came into being.
My mother, who was pregnant with me in 1944, was continually hungry, but the smell of Woolton Pie made her feel so nauseated that she couldn’t eat. During the war there was always the depressing bread, but bread was rationed AFTER the end of the war. Life was really tough. Incidentally, I remember the day that sweets finally came off ration. Wonderful day, I was 9 years old. Mind you practically everything else was still rationed.
It was extremely tough after WWII - my father's family, having survived the war in the UK, got on a ship for the other side of the world in 1947 to seek a better life. My great aunt had run a pub before the war and during the Blitz was responsible for feeding an underground station full of people (people sheltered in the underground stations during the Blitz - the deep level stations were naturally protected, being so far underground, and if the worst came to the worst, people could always evacuate along the tracks to the next station).
My mum was born in '44 and still very fondly remembers the day sweets came off ration! They were living in the East End, and growing up all the kids used to play on the 'Debry' - or so my mum thought it was called, until she got older and realised it was actually 'debris' - the bomb sites were favourite playgrounds for them, especially as the sites soon got taken over by very tall weeds and my mum remembers how many caterpillars were on them
dang, so you were born right at the end of the war? Do you recall having any idea growing up with rationing that it wasn't "normal"? Did you have any awareness that other countries weren't rationing/weren't rationing as severely, and did it cause envy? (obviously adults knew, but I was always curious about a child's perspective and how much they knew/understood).
@@EmilyKinny My mother was a very good, careful cook so we were never hungry. There were only the two of us as my father was killed - shot down in Holland just before I was born. The thing is we were all in the same boat. At first we lived in a small country town and later in an outer suburb of London and nobody had more than anyone else. We got parcels from my father’s family in Canada, so in some ways we were lucky. I remember sweets called Life Savers and making each roll last for over a week by just having one a day! It was all normal.
I think my favorite part of this series is that WWII is close enough to living memory that theres a ton of family stories in the comments. Im learning as much from them as from the video!!
@@YT4Me57, same here. My Dad, born in 1941, grew up on a farm and remembers how he and his siblings pitched in to help my grandmom can vegetables; they had to pick the vegetables and beans and prepare them for canning.
It was hard to get bananas here in the US as well. Twinkies used to have banana filling but had to change and never went back. And my father, in his early teens then, said if grocers in his area got in bananas they didn't just put them on the shelf. Dad recalls the grocer approaching his mother, a favored customer although she didn't have much money. He'd say, in a low voice, "want some bananas"?" It sounded like an illicit transaction on a street corner
Lmao that's hilarious and sad at the same time 😂 If I was your dad I would think he was trying to woo my wife with bananas! Idk what I'd do without bananas. They're so good for babies and children and sometimes that's all they'll eat if they are picky! All babies and kids love nanners
One thing that always made me chuckle is when I was in primary school, our class were doing world war 2 history and one of the teachers wanted us to perform some of the 'old songs' for a group of elderly folk (we were going to talk to them after about their experiences during the war, this was some 32 years ago), one of the songs was "lets all go down the Strand" which a lot of the kids had learned the refrain of "have a Banana" just after the first line of the chorus from their own grandparents which wasn't officially part of the song. The teacher must have spent a couple of hours drilling us kids to not sing that refrain. So the day comes, we go down, we perform the songs and of course the old folks all do the "have a Banana" at which point we just start cracking up, at first the old folks looked a little offended but one kid was like "SEE, I told you that was in the song!" and the teacher just kind of sighed and facepalmed, after we'd finished she explained to the old folks that because it wasn't originally in the lyrics she thought it was a modern invention at which point the old folks just chuckle and shake their heads.
The 'have a banana' line appears in recordings as well (I'd never heard the song, but I DID know that particular line from 'I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts').
I don't know, but I may be one of Max's few subscribers who actually remember rationing! I was born in UK after the war, and remember the excitement when sugar rationing ended. I also remember my father, who worked for UK Department of Defence, visiting a US airbase. There he was introduced to the American Martini and given a present of 4 eggs, during a period when eggs were still rationed.. Sheer heaven :D
There's a wartime film that was shown to soldiers on etiquette that went over how to behave on the English bases and they really impressed that the Brits would probably invite you around for dinner and explained what the rationing was like. Stuff like not going too high price when standing your round, not taking too much at those dinners, and it being generally polite and kind to bring along something from your Army-issue rations as a present.
My grandmother was a wartime housewife. Not only did she use all these recipes all through her life (and I use some of them today), but she was a ferocious recycler of food and household items. E.g. if you ate an orange, you had to peel it with a knife, so that the rind could be turned into marmalade, etc. Old socks and sweaters were unpicked, and the wool reused for knitting. Newspapers, jars, bottles, everything was reused. Her neighbours were all the same; the dustbinmen had little to collect, as the ladies threw almost nothing away.
So true! I remember my mum and grandma for years after the war ended, always using the butter wrapper to grease cake tins - not a skerrick of butter was ever wasted!
My grandmother too. She had a "Victory Garden" from her teens until her 70s, and religiously canned everything they grew. Like your grandmother, she recycled everything too, and was still in her habit of "saving for the War" well into my own teen years. I remember opening a cabinet in her house to find it packed full of used, cleaned and flattened aluminum foil sheets. Amazing, amazing woman! They don't call them the Greatest Generation for nothing!
I'm a child of the 60s but my parents grew up with, and continued, a waste not, want not, philosophy. It's weird to have lived through the decades that saw the rise of the supermarket, plastic packaging and high-calorie/fat, low nutrient processed food.
22:51 😂 Out of *all* of the online/tv cooks, chefs and foodies I've watched over the years, I have to say *hands down* that Max has THE MOST expressive face when trying foods. No fake effects or moans n groans, completely natural reaction to whatever he is trying. And for that it makes you all the more loveable Max!
Sir William Beveridge, the minister of food, was a great man. One of the world’s foremost economists and experts on unemployment, he prepared a comprehensive report on poverty, employment and the economy that became the basis for the postwar welfare state and full employment. He improved millions of lives through his social reformism. Without Beveridge, we would never have our NHS, our unemployment benefits, our pensions...
@@TheGypsyVannersNo the US was too busy entering the war very, very late and preparing the myth that post-war Europe recovered only due to the Marshall Plan, a concept that stuck in the American mind for decades. lol we really thought we would be in charge of post war Europe and were so mad at the very smart shift toward a safety net. To this day, there are people insisting all US problems are due to sending money to Europe.
Dad brought home a new product from the bakery where he worked in 1970’s. This was a high fiber bread. He opened it, toasted it and buttered it. Took one bite and through it out along with the entire loaf. “This is the same as the ersatz bread we got in the camp”. Dad had spent part of 1945 as a guest at the “Hotel Herman.”
Hi! I don't know much about history so I'm sorry if this is very obvious, but what is the "Hotel herman"? Was this a prisoner of war type situation? Thanks :)
My mom was born in ‘24 in Missouri. She grew up rationing in the Depression and continued to do so through her young adulthood in the 1940s. So many of these themes permeated my childhood in the 1960s. Mom still had leg makeup (thank you, Avon) and she told me how during the war she and her sisters & girlfriends would use eyeliner on the backs of their legs. Seamed stockings were still in her dresser drawer, and to me, they were luxurious and fascinating. The leg makeup left much to be desired! I grew up learning that everything was reused or repurposed and nothing went to waste. Washing tin foil to re-use, diligently clipping coupons, saving green stamps, counting coins & always knowing exactly how much money you had, always darning socks and mending clothing…these were things I regularly did until the 1990s when ziploc bags just were so much more practical! (Yes, I washed and re-used those, too, until the ziploc wouldn’t work anymore!) Fast forward to today, when I feel horrendous guilt over throwing away a recyclable can or not eating the last drop of applesauce in the jar. I don’t have a victory garden because where we live now the deer would eat it all, but Mom and Dad did and there is nothing better than a homegrown tomato, warmed by the sun and eaten like an apple. Yum! Thanks for a fun episode, Max❤
My Great Grandmother lived through the London Blitz, until she went to Canada on the Queen Mary because her husband had been stationed there with the RAF. They weren't told when the ship was going to leave up until maybe an hour before, and after everyone else had boarded, Winston Churchill went aboard himself as I believe he had a meeting in the US he was going to. The Captain of that ship made sure that throughout the journey the Women and Children aboard the ship were as comfortable as they could get as the ship WAS a Troop Transport and was moving as a convoy under guard. She'd tell me these stories as a kid, and up until she died of old age in 2011, I always regret not taking the time to put her stories to paper, but we have a garden here in Southern California that was very likely inspired by the fact her family had a victory garden during the war. I never asked, but watching this video I could see that being an inspiration. My Grandmother is still alive and was a child then, and she really enjoys your channel!
Seems odd that Queen Mary sailed in a convoy, her speed usually meant she sailed alone to avoid Germans by stealth and speed rather than by being convoyed.
That was my first organic chemistry experiment too, or at least it’s the first one I remember. It must be a fairly basic experiment for beginning students. It made my clothes and hair smell like bananas.
My Nanny (grandmother) shared one memory of rations during the war. For her 5th birthday her mother saved rations to make a cake. Then the air raid sirens went off and they had to go for cover. The cake was sitting on the kitchen table and a bomb hit nearby but didn’t go off, the impact of it shook the dust from the house onto the cake!
Fun fact, barley contains the same hormone that tricks you into digesting your food slower that's in Ozempic! So Barley bread would make you feel full longer.
@@standdownrobots_ihaveoldglory I use pearl barley instead of rice in several dishes including with stir fry. It's nice to be able to have half a portion but still not feel hungry an hour later!
My family makes a beef and barley broth originally written down by my great grandmother in the 1890s to this day. Super comforting for the winter months and you always feel good and satiated after eating it.
I was born in 1954 (just after rationing finished). Both my parents were born in 1930 so grew up during WW2. I didn't realise it at the time but they brought me and my brothers up as though the war had never ended. Our diet was more or less rationing, we weren't allowed long trousers until we were 12, didn't see a tea bag until I left school. We didn't really catch up with the post war period until the 70's. Just shows how effective the wartime conditioning was.
@OnafetsEnovap Originally during the war shorts were worn to save fabric. This continued until well afterwards. I started senior school in 1966 and all 120 boys started in shorts. After the Christmas holiday we all returned in long trousers. I know it doesn't make sense, that's the point.
During the first year of the pandemic, our former air-force base had a large jump in poverty, so we began our own victory gardens program. We're still growing food here, as it is a food desert, and grew 300 lbs of produce to give back to our community last year and we're looking at an even more productive harvest this year. It's so fun learning where our inspiration comes from. :D
Something to consider: Until the 1950's we ate a completely different variety of banana in the western world (or at least in the US and UK). The Gros Michel or "Big Mike" was a much bigger, most people say better tasting variety of banana. Between Panama disease and Sigatoka virus, the big banana producers were forced to switch to the Cavendish we currently eat today. So the banana flavor they were imitating in WW2 UK rationing cookbooks is much different than the one we have today.
I hear, though I have never had a Gros Michel to compare, "Banana Flavored" candies, such as taffy, taste more like the Gros Michel then the Cavendish.
Yeah I'm not entirely sure how true that banana flavor being based on gros Michel is, I see it everywhere myself as well but I mine are still growing so I have yet to try the fruit myself. Soon though!
I hear the Gros Michel is still grown in a few parts of the world today. Although they've long fallen out of the mainstream, they're certainly not extinct.
My granda worked at Newcastle Central Station, during the war. A train had arrived carrying hundreds of American soldiers. The Townswomen's guild/WI had made iced finger buns and tea, for their arrival. The icing sugar, currants and tea were all rationed goods, so this was a tremendous show of appreciation, as well as effort, in order to welcome them. They were almost totally ignored - the buns and the women. At the back of the train, there were Italian POW's on their way up to Scotland. My granda waved to the women, who scooted along the platform and started throwing their buns through the windows into very appreciative hands. A Scottish Sergeant tried to stop them. He was not successful. One particularly indomitable woman, brushed him aside. "Look at them! They are just young, frightened boys and other mothers' sons! Haddaway!". Even after rationing ended, in the late 50s, food poverty was so ingrained that there was a kind of PTSD about greed and waste. Which is where our bad reputation for food comes from. It took my mother until the 80s before she stopped analysing how much of a weekly ration we had on our plates.
You are absolutely right, my grandparents had very strange ideas about food because of wartime scarcities. My grandmother became a terrible food hoarder, which I think has rubbed off on me in some strange way. Also, I think they forgot how to cook with generosity when abundance returned, and embraced the conveniences of the 50s and 60s instead, which contributed to the poor reputation of British Food.
That’s actually so sweet. I think my favourite bits of history are the little sparks of humanity like these. Even if they were foreign and the enemy, some still saw them for what they were- people. :)
@@catherinemckeon8414 The provision of essentials was a priority and bananas were too bulky. So, now the Caribbean Islands had to do something with a surfeit of bananas. They made extract, which could be shipped, along with sugar, oil and bauxite. A little bit of 'luxury' was also seen as essential for morale, which is why tea and tobacco were seen as 'must haves'. It was a juggling act!
I'm in the north of England. Both grandfathers fought in the war. My grandparents could grow anything, fix anything, cook anything, and build anything. They were so resourceful it was amazing. Incidentally here in the north allotments are still dotted about, some have been in families for years passed from parent to child. 😊
I’m friends with a 93 year old Swiss woman who survived the war. She told me they were given a ration of one egg per person per month and egg day was always her favorite day of the month lol
My grandparents lived in London during WW2. Granny once told us that even though she was allowed one egg a week, she actually once went about nine months between them. Rationing did a number on her more than the bombing tbh. She would joke about the bombs to us, but there was real pain about the deprivation and she and grandad were a reasonably well off middle class couple. When we cleared out her house after she died, we found so many packets of sweets and chocolates hidden away in drawers and cupboards, it was rather sad, she really never got over it. She died in 2007. ETA: I already see there are tedious comments about British food in this thread. Perhaps people would like to think a little more kindly about a country that was virtually cut off from the world's trade and was struggling to feed their population and that it lasted 7 years beyond the end of the war, the destruction to the economy was THAT bad.
@@random_an0n It was a rough time, especially for Londoners. We had family out in the countryside where things were a little less dire. Grandad wanted granny to go out there and live but she refused to leave her job or him (he wasn't in the army, too old, bad eyesight and in a protected profession). So she stayed and they survived and after the war moved to India and thrived.
My grandma is the same way. We’re American and my great-grandfather owned a grocery store during the war so rationing didn’t hit her quite as hard as a young child. But, sugar was rationed and she loves sweets. I deep cleaned her room for her a couple years ago and I found a bunch of candy stuffed in drawers. I guess it’s something she did as a kid and that habit continued late in life.
Fun fact, my great grandfather was actually in the RAF in world war 2 and was, to our knowledge, the first person to bring bananas back to london after the war. His son, my grandfather, always used to make us bananas on toast with a dash of sugar on it, i never used to understand when i was young why he loved them so much, but now with a better idea of how he grew up it makes a lot of sense to me why he was so proud of his dad, and why he treasured sweet treats so much, he was making up for what he missed out on in his youth.
I don’t think it should ever be underestimated how much these dishes boosted the morale of the population during such uncertain times! I grew up on many recipes created during WWII here in Australia. It’s phenomenal how creative and resourceful people can become and how they even found ways to create dishes which were more than just sustenance alone.
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 He did an episode on Anzac Biscuits- they date back to WWI, but they have remained hugely popular ever since - for Australia, rationing only started in 1943, with meat, butter, sugar & tea. Australia’s role as the “food arsenal of the allied world” also led to local shortages of potatoes, eggs, bacon, tinned goods & fresh milk. I don't know about the OP's recipe book source, but the local CWA's (Country Women's Associations) & women's magazines put out cookbooks- & Anzac biscuits were almost certainly in most, if not all; Australia’s most widely read women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly saw Australian women share their culinary creativity. One of the ways in which they dealt with scarcity was through creating mock foods with the appearance or taste of “the real thing”. In January 1944, the Weekly published six recipes sent in by readers. Four were for mock foods: mock pineapple, mock apple, mock ham & meatless sausage. For instance- Mock Apples: “custard squashes make a good substitute for apples”. They could be prepared by slicing & simmering in water with lemon juice & sugar (Queensland, where the poster of the dish came from- was a sugar-growing region, & they also had bush lemons) From January 1944, meat was rationed to an average of approximately 1 kg per adult/ week; it was reduced further later that year. This was a challenge for Australians who relied on a meat-heavy diet (in the previous century, Australia was lauded for having a higher meat consumption, for the average person- that was higher than the US, the UK, France, Italy, or Germany). Cakes & other baked goods were extremely important to the Australian diet, but standard recipes were drastically impacted by butter & sugar rationing as well as the scarcity of eggs & milk. This led housewives to create recipes such as Austerity Fruit Cake which was made without butter. Another recipe, Honey Cookies- were eggless & butter-less. A woman from New South Wales took substitutions seriously, sharing a recipe for 'Egg-less, Milk-less & Butter-less Cake' in 1943. The home baker replaced butter with dripping & used soaked fruit to create their “moist, fair-sized cake”. Australians responded to rationing with remarkable creativity, & a positive attitude. As the Weekly’s food editor commented, “Rationing doesn’t daunt them!”
@@MossyMozart And yet there's an example of the British Government in this episode stating that while Britain grows good vegetables, nobody cooks them as poorly as the British.
There is a book called “Twenty and Ten” that I read as a child, it’s about World War Two, but it’s from the children’s perspective. There is a whole subplot about a chocolate bar, and how they’re trying to make it last the whole war. I found it opened my eyes toward rationing more than any other book I’ve read about World War Two.
I feel like so many of us in the States don't realize just how hard the UK was hit during WWII, both by the Blitz and by such austere rationing. I understand the memes of British cooking being "bad," but there are still some people alive today who were children during that lean, scary time in history, and it makes sense how every bit of rationed food was appreciated. No matter what it was.
@@thestraydogThe book actually takes place in France. They still had rationing, but it was much more meager there compared to the eggs and milk the children in England got. I believe they had to eat parsnip soup and bread, and not very much of either because they were sharing with the ten Jewish children who didn’t have ration cards. (For obvious reasons.)
Oh that was a favorite book growing up! In my opinion, it's a great way to introduce WWII topics to children without being too heavy. We also enjoyed "Snow Treasures", where a group of Norwegian children smuggle the country's gold down the mountain away from the invading Germain troops.
I was born in Lancashire before the war. My Mum worked in a bandage factory and Dad at BTH on munitions. Dad also had a small barbershop at the front of our terrace house. He served as a Home Guard and had an allotment where he grew tomatoes and cucumbers. The public air-raid shelter was directly across our street and the communal pig-bin was out in our back-street. There we all chucked our peelings and food scraps. We carried gas masks to school and enjoyed stodgy and filling school dinners. Still i remember always being a bit hungry. We younsters didn't complain since there was always some adult saying, "Oy thee! Don't tha know there's a war on?". As if we could forget!
13:09 "nice argument, unfortunately, i have already depicted myself as the based smoking Churchill pot and you as the seething Hitler pie, therefore, your argument is invalid!"
I always said that it was due to rationing that British cusine suffered so terribly. When people say 'oh but you had traded in spices but never used them' I say yes but when you were sent into a total war economy you can't waste space on spices when munitions were needed more
People who say that clearly don't know what British food was like before the wars. Old recipes used a lot of spices and you still see it in old recipes like mince pies, Christmas pudding, and parkin. Then basically a whole generation grew up without access to spices, so obviously that was going to change things
@@heatherbc7914 I think British and Nordic cuisine have disadvantage of being simple. When main course is basically meat, potatoes and drunk beverage there is no way to hide poor materials or preparation under side dishes and spicy sauces. Not to mention very limited access to spices (of course international trade alleviates).
No they didn't use "GRAVY" to make mock stockings but they did use "Gravy Browning" which was essentially dark caramel powder (For the colouring) and cornflour (To thicken the gravy up), I know because my Grandmother told me this was so when I too thought they used Gravy and mentioned this to her and she corrected me...
@@MeStevely no need to be derogatory. The society at the time considered you undressed without certain clothing items so women used what they could to be what was considered respectable when they left the house.
Hi Max Long time watcher, first time comment. I was born in 1960. I'm old enough to have parents and grandparents who went through both wars. My family is 4th, 5th, 6th generation kiwis (New Zealand). I just had to comment when I saw you slicing the bread a talking about thin slices. What you cut was what my Mum and Gran would have termed a 'doorstep' 😂. When Granny cut bread, it was millimeters thin, 3-5mm! And all through my school lunch years I got sandwiches a third the thickness of what you cut. As I got into my teens, we came to think of it as 'seige' mentality, stretching the least amount of food as far as possible and hoarding everything that would 'keep' as long as possible before using it. I also think it's where my passion for razor sharp kitchen knives came from. Thin slicing is a lifelong habit. And I never liked banana sandwiches 🤫 Great episode, thanks
Considering the bread wasn't rationed, but anything you would put on it was, I would assume cutting thick, because when your pack of cheese is only enough for 4 slices, you spread it over 4 slices.
Max forgot the sultanas! Here in Australia, kids still love banana sandwiches - but you've got to sprinkle the mash with a few sultanas to increase the sweetness!
I don't know where you'd get to see it online, but another great program is "The Supersizers Go....". Hosted by Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, every week they go to a different decade or era & live, eat & drink the way they would have. It first aired in 2008, so getting difficult to find. It may be available on BBC 2, & there are some episodes/snippets available on RUclips. The presenters are pretty good. Sue Perkins it good in everything & Giles Coren (brother of Victoria Coren Mitchell) is an entertaining food writer, and television and radio presenter.
As a German Historian for the "Institute of Contemporary History" in Munich, Germany i really love these Videos! Would also love to see you doing a couple of Recipes of German WW1 and WW2 Food (not gonna lie, we still use them in our Military nowadays because they are so good). In fact, when i served my 2 Tours in Afghanistan and 1 Tour in Kosovo with the 23rd Gebirgsjägerbrigade we also ate those old Recipes! Like the famous "Gulasch" (Goulash) from the "Gulaschkanone" (Goulash Cannon). That one's still used to this Day and i actually make it for myself at least once a Week because it's so good, despite being Military Frontline Food! Definitely would love you to cover any of these and if you need Recipes translated to English, i got you! Keep up the great Work! Prost & Cheers from Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps
This would be great to hear as very little about the wartime diet of any of the Axis powers from either WWI or WWII has ever really been published in my experience.
Germany suffered from enough shortages that you invented the word “ersatz” to describe replacement goods. The Wikipedia page for “ersatz” lists a recipe from the food ministry labeled labeled "(Top Secret) Berlin 24.X1 1941" that calls for: 50% bruised rye grain 20% sliced sugar beets 20% "tree flour" (sawdust) and 10% minced leaves and straw. sounds… delicious. although it was certainly, ahem, more than what my ancestors would have been eating if they were in germany at the same time
There was a bit of an outcry in the camping & bush-craft world when Unilever/Knorr discontinued the Erbswurst (Pea Sausage) in 2005. Invented in 1867 by Johann Heinrich Grüneberg, it first fed troops during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War/Franco-German War. It went on to feed troops for over a hundred years. Easy to store, pack & boil down to made a great pea & meat fat soup. often considered one of the first commercially produced "instant foods". Would make a great episode for Max to make as there are some good recipes for making an ersatz version online.
@@Hybris51129 we don't hear much about the Italian and Japanese wartime diet on the homefront either. I think we do have some details on what the French had under occupation. And the Dutch
I cant beleive you mentioned nylon rationing! My nana told me about using gravy browning to dye her legs when she was in the women's RAF service. She said it worked but she could never get a straight line up the back of her legs by herself!
, my mum and auntie used gravy browning on their legs to give the illusion of wearing nylons. They used to draw a seam up the back with an eyebrow pencil.
@@kitefan1 I the UK we have brown gravy in and on meat pies, sausages and mash, Sunday roast dinners, beef and lamb stews, cottage/shepherds pies etc...
My mother's family was in a small village in Germany during WWII. My uncles told me they didn't get rationing for food, so they were basically on their own. They stole the used cooking oil from the camps and vegetable scraps to eat. Sadly, 2 aunts died of malnutrition. I can't imagine the horror of those times.
I was told that one reason rationing continued in Britain was because any extra food was being sent to mainland Europe to help those who literally had nothing to eat, Better rationed food in Britain and sending help to those who didn't even have that much than removing rationing and letting others starve. Mum and dad grew up with rationing, a lasting effect was we always had a huge vege garden [dad grew his own vegetables until he went into a nursing home in his 90s] and a pound of meat would feed the 4 of us for a meal, as children a chicken would feed the 4 of us for 2 meals [legs./wings bit of breast meat one day, rest of the breast meat the next day] while Monday's dinner was always made from Sunday's leftovers as well.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYouYou spreading Propaganda. Britain caused Hunger in Europe several times. Also before this war. These are not good people feeding others thats pure Propaganda. The prevent food from coming into coubtries strategly.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou there are videos of the air bridge into berlin. I'm willing to bet all the food not consumed in britain was on a plane into the city and the rest of west germany. The numbers are simply staggering
@@Pottan23 Ration food might have been boring but people weren't starving - in fact they've never been better fed and there is a seriously good case for returning to rationing as far as the health of the citizens are concerned though I can imagine the screams that would ensue should it be suggested - unlike people in Berlin.
We tried to pass laws limiting the size of soda that could be purchased and the Republicans and their cultists lost their damn minds over it. Food is immensely politicized. There are parts of the USA where I am literally not safe to talk about being a vegetarian because meat eating in massive quantities is associated with patriotism. There is also tremendous hatred and scorn of fat people (which I am) with no understanding of the biology of epigenetics or the trauma of poverty or living in a discriminatory society. @@MayYourGodGoWithYou
Max! My great grandfather was a belly gunner in a B-17 which crash landed in Holland. He, and the other members of his crew except for the radio operator were all taken as prisoners of war in October. The radio operator got away and found members of the resistance who helped him with food and clothing and shelter and maps. They sent him over the Pyrenees to Spain and all the way to Gibraltar where he caught a boat to England and arrived on Christmas Day. When he got to London he went to the radio station and requested a specific song to let the people who helped him know that he had made it safely. The song? It was “Yes! We have no bananas”. I was singing it for this whole video. What a surprise when you started singing it too!
If you want to explore a much darker side of wartime rationing, maybe something to do with the Bengal Famine. Don’t know how many “recipes” survive from India at the time, but this video made me think of it, and it’s not a side of the conflict we always hear about.
Yes you are correct. I've been an armchair historian since I was 11. I'm 67 now ,but never new about that until a year or two back. It's a part of history that should not be forgotten. It took me decades to understand that the allied side of the war was not full of hero's and heroic deeds. It had a in some instances a very dark side.
it wouldn’t be talked about because it doesn’t have black or white people dying in it. Brown folks never get that much attention, History/Media is never kind to ‘em. Both just ridicule them.
RUclips has been doing its job right since a few days ago. Like, it actually notifies me when new videos are uploaded instead of telling me about it five days after.
I've been watching and enjoying Tasting History for a while, but this episode is of particular interest to me, as it clarifies a very old story I was told. When I was much younger there was an older gentleman who lived down the road from me, he used to walk his dog around the time I finished school each day. Almost every day my mother stopped to speak to him, he was kind and friendly, and I remember one day when he asked me what I was learning about in school. I told him we were learning about the war and about rationing. He proceeded to tell me of his time spent in the countryside away from his parents during the war, and that food was such a struggle with rationing going on that they used to have fake bananas on toast made with parsnips, little me was very facinated by this and I would have stayed to hear more of his stories had my sister not wanted to get home and watch television. It's been some years since I've seen him, and I expect he passed some time ago, I hope peacefully. Thank you for the video Max, and for the reminder of that nice old man.
WW2 also nearly did for small batch creameries throughout Britain. In order to reduce percieved wastage and uneven supply, a large proportion of the milk was directed towards the production of "government cheddar". By the end of the war, fewer than 100 cheese producers remained in business.
People who are interested should watch the Wartime Farm series here on YT. Extremely interesting information regarding rationing & providing food on the homefront.
@@christinesteckel3390 It took a long time for the industry to recover from that tbh. But there are at least like 700 recognised varieties of cheese being produced in the UK now, so matter have improved a fair bit.
Allotments are still a thing in London! My British cousin has one. My auntie and I visited her and we walked over to it. Then she made lunch with some of the vegetables from her plot. 🙂I think we should have a program for that here in the States in large cities, especially in areas that have become food deserts.
A lot of cities in the US have community garden programs. Many are run by volunteer groups. There are also tool libraries. My church has a piece of land that is a weird shape and unbuildable. We turned it into garden space and rent raised boxes to people in the neighborhood who want to grow stuff. The church has three or four boxes and the produce is donated to the foodbank on site.
There are a few, but it should be more widespread, I agree. There's an allotment area a block from me, but it's the only one I know of in a town of 50,000 people, and it might have 20 allotments at most.
Agreement regarding small gardens in cities. Especially some of the older ones. There are several blocks in the City of Saint Louis, MO where most of the houses have been removed. So there is now just grass that either the neighbors or the City has to keep mowed...
Unfortunately thanks to Reagan era industrial laws, a lot of land in poorer areas is former or current toxic waste sites (but industry and government have no responsibility to inform residents, and laws protect the industries from being identified or declaring what waste was there). This in turn means eating any food grown directly on the land (or walking barefoot in it) or using the ground water can be fatal. most of the time you see government officials chopping down community gardens and soaking them in herbicides it is because of those Reagan era industrial protection laws but they don't want people to die from eating a toxic carrot either. The rest of the time is because of redlining laws though....
My Dad remembers Rationing, his parents owned a little shop, so he saw it from both sides, my Gran used to swap her jam ration for an extra sugar ration then go pick fruit from the hedgerow and use the extra sugar ration to make her own Jam.
I think you should do a video on the postwar "great British dinner out" - prawn cocktail, steak garni, and black forest gateau - and its cultural significance at that time.
I grew up in Germany in the 70's, living with my grandmother. She lived in a 3 family (3 story) house on a edge of Darmstadt Germany. I'll never forget her telling me to be quiet, so as to not bother Frau Theis (who lived below us). My job was to cut and carry wood for ourselves and Frau Theis. All of our heat came from wood and coal, but coal was a luxury. We heated the house, cooked our meals and heated water for baths with wood and occasionally coal. Electricity was also a luxury and the state offered a 5 Mark coin every week (good for about 8 hours of electricity) We used that every Sunday after church to watch a TV show called Pusteblumen, another one call Der Mous and I got to turn on the radio and listen to Casey Kasem. We had a garden and we had chickens for eggs. We walked to the butcher shop for our daily meat, we walked to the bakery for bread and we walked to the grocer for everything else. Although I was allowed to gather eggs, the garden was off limits to me. Post war Germany was pretty tight... Today, living in Texas, I have no complaints!
It’s really pleasant to find an American talking about England with no banter or sly digs nor being an arse kiss. Cheers for the history lesson, knew bits but can’t say I knew 90% of the teaching here.
There's a documentary series available on RUclips from the BBC entitled "Wartime Farm." It is quite in-depth with rationing, victory gardens, foraging, blackouts, pig clubs, canning and more. It runs over the course of a year and includes recreating a wartime Christmas. I recommend it highly.
My grandpa was a British agricultural worker during WWII. He lived with us pretty much full time in his last years and Every. Single. Time. cheesy pasta was on the menu we were treated to the story of how his mother used to make cheese sauce for the family with his extra milk and cheese rations
According to mum - and she was the one who drew the line down the backs of the legs for her sister and other evacuees, mum had a very steady hand - gravy browning worked fine as long as you didn't have to pass any dogs. There were a couple of dogs on her road and and they would do their best to escape through the front gate and follow those down the road with gravy browning stockings. After a couple of times my aunts went without during the day and only wore ''fake'' stockings if they were going out somewhere special in the evening, didn't even wear them to church on Sunday.
For the gravy legs: you were supposed to just use gravy *browning*, a food-colouring for getting the dark, rich brown gravy's that was popular at the time. I don't think it was supposed to be with meat in.
Tongue is not a tough cut, if cooked right. In fact, it’s delicious. We had it a lot when I was growing up, because it was, at the time, a very cheap cut. And I was seriously miffed when I grew up and went to try to buy tongue and it was a “specialty meat” and cost a fortune.
I still remember the last cow tongue we had for dinner in the late sixties. Dad said, "That's it. We won't be having it again. It's worth too much for us to eat it." His brother farmed and was the source of our beef.
From the uk here. My nan still talks about being a kid in the war. And always makes what she calls her recession pie from the war. Corn beef, mash potatoes and onions in a pie with what ever type of pastry she can get hold of. ^^
John Kirkwood (on YT) recently made a cheese, potato, and onion pie that looked really good. I was going to try to make it but adding corn beef would take it to the next level. Thanks to you and Nan for the suggestion.😊
I commented on another video about my great aunt using gravy on her legs to go on a date during the period of rationing!! Featured heavily in the story is what happened when her date took her to meet his family and she was enthusiastically greeted by their family dog. Her ‘stockings’ were summarily licked away 😭 God I hope Max read that comment!
My Nan would tell me stories of rationing and victory gardens whilst she was raising two kids (one with polio) during the Blitz and with no husband, who died in the war’s opening overs. I just can’t comprehend the strength it took. She lived until she was 98. A damn good innings.
Ya know a thought occurs to me about this mock banana sandwich if you put the parsnips thru a potato ricer and then added that in with say walnuts, raisins and a bit of honey and mixed it into the bread you could have just a hardy mock banana bread that is also a bit of trail mix.
@@sophiaschier-hanson4163 well I already have something similar using pancake mix and actual bananas, I just didn't think about using a WW2 style recipe instead.
So glad this came up this week. By chance, one of my favourite movies featuring the recently departed Dame Maggie Smith is A Private Function, set during WW2 and featuring the raising of a (shock!) Unlicensed Pig. Hugely fun if you want to watch, Max. Also, thank you for mentioning Betty Driver, an actress who wouldn't register on most American radar but who became a beloved soap star in her later years. Max sure does his research!
It's so sad about Dame Maggie Smith. I absolutely loved her in "Downton Abbey" and she's in one of my favorite movies "Murder by death". She'll be missed.😔
I grew up during WWll, and I remember rationing well. Everyone had a rationed supply for which there were coupons. In a family, the women ( the men were all away at the war) pooled the coupons and saved the amounts to allow them to make pastries, bread . Some veggie plots were allowed and we always went to pick the wild fruits which allowed the making of jams and jellies. Fruit was a problem. My mother had a special coupon for orange juice for my young sister . I didn't get any but I was fed cod liver oil and what was called chemical juice. Tasted like cranberry. When war ended the first fruit we got were bananas which I hated. Long time ago but we managed. Keep calm and carry on!
After watching this video, I headed straight to the comments knowing there would be people giving their accounts of family members affected by the rations. This truly is a special place to preserve history. ❤ I have discovered a niche group of RUclipsrs who document their own experiences of living on WWII rations in the UK today and it makes you appreciate what we can easily take for granted when the recipes/lifestyle are recreated. 🥧
My grandmother in Belgium told me she use a mixture of chicory to paint the leg and then an eye pencil to do the line. Gosh that brought back memories about my grandma 💙
As kids my grandad told us a story of when he was a kid during rationing and his mum would make him "sausage impression" sandwiches. She'd cook up sausage, put it on his sandwich until the bread soaked up some of the fat/flavour and then take the sausages out and out them on his dads sandwiches to eat.
We found my great grandmothers USA ration book and ration stamps amongst her cookbooks and recipes. Still have them in the box we found them in. She was born in 1914 for those curious and lived a long 94 years.
I remember both mock banana and mock crab, from the 50s. I'm not sure about mock crab,, but it may have involved hard-boiled eggs, salad cream (a delicacy to avoid), and Worcestershire sauce. Throughout the war, Churchill's idea of a proper breakfast was partridge and burgundy. In both wars, but especially the Second, the royal family set an example.
Oh yes, I remember the mock crab. But, to be honest, we have no idea what the Royal Family ate during the war. They had vast estates to send them fresh produce. But certainly they made a show of setting an example, and rightly so.
There's long been jokes that Churchill drank & smoked his way through the war; I suppose, if you had access to a private cellar, why waste it? And pre-war quality food & drink, & the foods people had eaten before the war, was something of a preoccupation for them...
The national loaf used wholemeal flour so it was much healthier than white bread. My mum and dad reckoned rationing was the healthiest diet and both lived to 91. There was no limit on British fruit and vegetables and along with the fresh egg every week there was also a packet of dried egg every four weeks. The gravy browning used for fake stocking was baiscally just dark caramel.
This video remaindered me of childhood times growing up in communist Romania. We had less food that you show here, but the bread was better. We actually got bananas once a year, on Christmas, and oranges maybe twice.
If you grow your own parnsnips and leave them out in the ground all winter they get sweeter and sweeter. My dad loved them. My mom love on a farm in SE Kentucky so they had chickens and raised a pigs and had smoke house. Late fall was hog killing time where the men would take the big pig would cut up and they would start smoking up behind. It was a ten foot by ten foot concrete block structure. They did that well up till the early 60's
@@MMathisgrowing them kind of fell out of fashion when it became clear that handling them and then being exposed to sun would result in burns anywhere the juices of the plant touched skin. But really, the original finding of that was about using a concentrated form of it to burn tumors off of skin intentionally which is a little bit different from just handling the plant and getting small burns from sun sensitivity for a few days. Yes that can happen, but the time of year one eats parsnips tends to have less intense UV rays so it's not an issue anyway. Worst case scenario, where food prep gloves or just protect your hands from sunlight outside for a couple of days😅
@@MMathis parsnips down home in the south island are so much better than north island ones, the frost and snow coverts the starches to sugar, they dont get nearly enough love up here and saddly neither does swede
Where I grew up in southeastern BC this is what was done with parsnips and carrots. Imagine the disagreeable surprise I had when, once on my own and in another part of the country, I bought parsnips at the grocery store and discovered how bitter and nasty they could be. The carrots weren't as good either, but still edible.
Fun fact: Canada was one of the major counters to the German U-Boats, keeping merchant vessels safe along the journey to the UK that delivered so much of the supplies they needed to keep them fed. By the end of the war, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was considered to have the best anti-submarine warfare in the world, and had the 3rd largest navy in the world after the UK and USA. They not only protected goods from Canada, but were also huge in the defense of American goods once Lend Lease began. Kinda depressing that we're now ranked like 46th in the world now or some other depressingly low number... Despite that, the crossing was considered exceptionally dangerous and many merchant vessels were still attacked. They were attacked in such high numbers and the job was considered so dangerous in fact that to this day Canada's Merchant Navy and Merchant Marines are honoured no different than any other branch of the military on Remembrance Day (our holiday for honouring our fallen troops).
Thank you for a new Tasting History video Max - a comfort to me personally as I've just got back from visiting my nana in her nursing home (she has advanced dementia)
I live in KY and work at a nursing home for dementia patients. I'm sure some of these ladies and gents could still tell us a thing of two about those days! They may not know what today is, but yesteryear can be very clear.
@@Lionstar16Sorry to hear that dude. My grandma is in the same situation and she asks me where her dead husband, mother and brothers are and it’s always hard to find what to say. It’s tough to visit and it takes a lot out of you but know that you are doing the right thing and you won’t regret seeing her when her time comes. You’re not alone out there, as Three Dog says, keep fighting the good fight!
Hey folks - my dad died with Alzheimer's five years ago and I just want to share a little something. It's something somebody told me that turned out to be true. The decline is so painful and horrible that for a while, for a few years before and then after the end, all you can think about is what your loved one was like at the end. You feel you'll never be able to remember what they were 'really' like and all your memories are ruined and tainted. But it's not true. As time passes you will integrate those memories back into the whole person. You will be able to remember all of them, before the decline - you will get them back. I promise.
Another aspect of rationing in Britain - right after the war ended in 1945 US Lend-Lease shipments of food stopped. Britain was extremely short of money to import anything, they ramped up exports of every type to earn foreign exchange. This meant imports were severely cut back, and rationing continued for some things nine years after the end of the war.
We learnt to make mock banana sandwiches at primary school to teach us about rationing. I don't think they were too bad (although it is around 40 years since I ate it). My parents insist the banana flavouring tastes a lot more like 50s bananas than the bananas we have now.
It's very true about the banana flavor being the old style of banana, before banana wilt wiped them out. The first time that I went to Hawaii and tried some of their homegrown varieties it became very clear that artificial banana simulates those, not what is currently in grocery stores.
Love this topic! Retro Claude is working thru a clothing ration book from this era to slow down on fast fashion and other clothing spending. Its worth a watch! It’s amazing to learn how our grandparents survived this part of history.
But to me that's normal, I've always made my own clothes - my mother made them when I was growing up - and when I'm fed up with something I'll unpick it and refashion it into something else. Currently doing that now, taking out part of the front bodice and skirt and will add a panel in a different fabric, and voila a new dress will be born. Hand-me-downs were common when I was growing up as well, sometimes I was lucky to wear clothing a couple of times before my neighbour decided it didn't fit me any more [she liked mum's sewing and fabric choices] and it was time she had the ''hand-me-down'' for herself. Worked both ways but her mother often bought second hand clothes from a flea market she had a stall at instead of sewing them. Worked out for both of us in a way.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou that’s very cool! I’m gotten into seeing my own clothes and thrifting over the last 4 years. I don’t think I’ll go back to buying fast fashion.
It's actually so fun to watch these videos, my great grandparents unfortunately were young children/teens during WW2 and consequently didn't speak about anything they remembered, learning about the history of why English food is still how it is today is pretty interesting, especially the affects of both wars.
How interesting. I’m 70 and I remember my British mother explaining how folks made do during rationing and the Blitz. Fascinating history. Grateful she shared.
"Yes, We Have No Bananas" was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and recorded by Billy Jones in 1923. The writers had stopped at a fruit stand whose Greek owner's first word was always "YES!" and told them, "Yes! We have no bananas" inspiring a song that remained a number one hit for Five weeks and has been covered in later years by artists such as Benny Goodman, Spike Jones and Louis Prima.
The late Queen Elizabeth II, back when she was still Princess Elizabeth, had to accept silk ration cards donated by the public in order to have a nice dress for her 1947 marriage to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. They also had to serve their wedding guests fish that was caught wild on the Balmoral estate, because meat was still rationed, and they couldn't provide enough beef for the attendees. Small wonder that throughout her long life, Gaelic Steak was the one dish that she treated herself to whenever she felt a little indulgent. ❤
There are YT segments on Queen Elizabeth's favorite dishes, and steak (and/or a beef dish) usually appears in those segments. She was rationing like so many, which is why she was so loved among those who lived through WWII.
Rationing was necessary not only because Britain was an island nation but also because it was densely populated; it had over 45 million people, the island of Ireland had over 4 million, over 1 million in Northern Ireland, and almost 3 million in the Republic of Ireland. Britain and Ireland combined had 50 million people in 1939.
Max, don't forget: banana flavoring was made to taste like the Gros Michel bananas, but they were wiped out, so the ones we're familiar with today are the Cavendish variety. So, it wouldn't be surprising for these mock bananas to taste "weird". You get the same issue with banana flavored candies that don't quite taste like banana, they were also mimicing the flavor of the Gros Michel banana.
I think i've commented on one of the other videos of this series that both my grandfathers were in what were termed 'reserve occupations'. My maternal grandfather was a signalman on the railways (I listened to hair-raising tales of horses scratching themselves on unexploded bombs that had landed next to Grandad's signal hut) my paternal grandfather was an engineer's engineer: he made and maintained the machines that made planes, etc. Both were also exceptional gardeners, whose gardens were always full of fresh fruit and veg. My maternal grandfather had a special greenhouse for growing things like tomatoes and cucumbers, and even as he got older, my paternal grandfather kept up a big vegetable garden, and was proud to say almost all the veg served to the family when we visited him and grandma, were from their sizeable back garden. I assume that both of them started this during the WWII war effort, as neither of them were asked to perform military service. However they came to do it, both of them took pride in growing fruit and vegetables to help feed their family. I wonder how many other followers of Tasting History have memories of grandparents and their gardens?
Parents, not grandparents! We always had a garden and it was for vegetables and not for flowers. My father was stationed somewhere in Wales after the war. My mother told me he would just keep a rifle by the bedroom window and shoot any rabbit that ventured into the garden. So providing protein to go with the vegetables!
I loved my paternal Grandad’s garden when I was a kid. It was like a secret garden - behind a hedge at the bottom of their rather sizeable garden. There must have been rows of carrots and the like, but mostly I remember the currant bushes trained up in rows and sneaking down there to graze on the whitecurrants…. Got some currant bushes in my garden now, and funnily enough I don’t say a word either when my kid browses on fruit in the garden. I just see it as them getting to know where food comes from and keeping their nutrition up…
My grandparents met during the war working at a tooling factory and they ended up like a lot of people with a victory garden. It carried on after the war and many people kept beautiful gardens, it was a mark of pride. My grandma also got caught buying a pair of stockings from a spiv and had to attend a seminar with everyone else who got caught about the wrongs of buying illicit goods.
my mom was a nurse in the navy during WWII. They were issued white stockings as part of their uniform. They would often sell them on the side to civilians who would dye them black. I guess that makes my late veteran (south pacific) mom a black marketeer.
@@dariuslane7893 I'm not Churchill. And while there was no gluttony in Britain during the war, people were fed. That was the point of rationing. Everybody getting meager rations, but at least everybody got those rations. I've studied the matter quite a bit, and I've never come across people going hungry for days. What you might get at a British restaurant you might not have gotten at home for a while would be solid meal with some meat, like a Shepherds pie, just because economies of scale making a difference.
Hi Max! Yes, Britain was well prepared for rationing during the war. As for a sugar substitute, more so here in the northeastern U.S., maple sugar. Yes, sugar not syrup. I knew many people who boiled down maple sap to produce maple syrup. However if one continued boiling the syrup the first result is maple cream. Continuing the boil the cream harden into more of a chunky block which is then broken up producing granulated maple sugar. This is an ancient recipe dating back to native Americans which became quite valuable to rural families during World War II.
I'm in Ontario which also has a large maple syrup industry. You can get maple sugar from some of the sugar bushes but it is very expensive. Tastes great in coffee.
@@minuteman4199 oh yes there certainly is a thriving maple industry in Canada. I agree maple sugar is quite expensive because of the lengthy process it takes to achieve. Although during the Great Depression and World War II rationing it was worth the effort.
My 97 year old mum still has the rationing mindset - food is never wasted. Anything about to go off gets made into something- a pie, a cake etc. Her brother craved bananas during the war but had forgotten how to eat them. When he finally got his hands on one he bit straight into it without removing the skin.
My mother said she and Dad quit putting sugar in their coffee and tea as sugar was rationed and they preferred to use it in baking. Every suburban house had an empty lot for their victory garden. She also mentioned painting her legs to imitate stockings but i never asked her what she used. A bit of Canadian trivia.
Max's bf has to have the WEIRDEST lunch meals in the office lol. "Oh yah my partner makes a living tasting weird historical recipes. I gotta eat the leftovers."
My grandparents were born in the north of England in 1945. They still remember rations. My grandad talks about it sometimes still. He says he'd always remember Christmas cos it was the only time of year you got oranges out of season. The kids were happy to have apples and oranges at Christmas because they were sweet. They went to school together but the boys and girls were separated in different buildings. Think they married when they were 20. Still going now, though my grandfather has a bad heart and I'm worried my grandmother is showing signs of Alzheimer's or going senile. They're old as hell now
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
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Max, you should look into the cookbook We'lll Eat Again and maybe actually cook a Woolton Pie at some point
Be careful not to catch the Crazy Cat Lady disease. Yes, that's a real thing. No joke.
my Grand mother was in charge of the paper work for the food ration books. she was very cross when she heard on our tv that people had been panic buying food during the early stages of the Covid 19 pandemic in the UK.
Mr. Miller, does your ration series also intent to cover the axis powers? As a german I would like to know how my grandmother had to make due in the war while my grandfather was away at the front. Even with what my nation did during the war.
@@wolfschadow6399 yep. Germany should be in early December. Japan in January.
Rationing was so well-implemented and the recipes so effective that deaths from malnutrition went _down_ during the war.
So, rationing even such a garbage food was actually better than market economy? Are you telling me such a simplistic communist economy role model is ok? Who would have thought.
I read that the British had the.best health statistics during rationing as well.
Holy shiitaki, that's a sobering thought.
It also has to do with the fact they were eating far more vegetables and less animal products. There is an interesting study from one of the Scandinavian countries during the war when the population was not allowed meat at all for a long period of time and after that all manner of heart issues/disease plummeted.
@@RuthT90that has to do with how meat was traditionally salted. The excess intake of sodium caused problems
I used your hard tack recipe a few weeks ago, than the hurricanes hit, and i made even more. I took a bunch of homemade potted meat, a bunch of boullion, and al lthe hard tack to some friends stranded out there, stayed with them for a while as there wasn't a shelter they couldn't get too.
We ate on it for days, mixing it into a oatmeal like meal. Just wanted to say thanks for the recipe Max! It helped some people out!
clack clack
💞💞💞💞💞👍 you rock!!
Bless you!! ❤
Wonderful improvising!
@@saninorochimaru2 you beat me to it. I was going to post this.
When banas came back, they were on the Blue Ration book, for a child, limited to one per book. To make the treat go further, my mother used to halve one between my brother and me. To stop arguments over who had the biggest half,she used her tape measure and made us watch as she made the cut. How well she kept the peace. A wonderful woman and exemplary mother i still miss. I am 92, the last one left with the memory.
Not any more.
There is now a beautiful picture of a Mom measuring a banana in my mind while two children watch...❤
My mum's tactic on sharing something like cake , chocolate etc was to make one do the cuttng, the other then chose which 'half' they wanted. This made sure that whoever was doing the cutting tried to be as fair as possible, otherwise they knew they would be getting the smaller of the two portions!
I know exactly what you mean about being the last one with a certain memory. Telling it to someone else isn't the same, as to that person it's your memory that you are sharing with them. It's not a shared memory that you have with another perso, probably one you wouldn't have to go into any detail about because they would instantly know what you are referring to. It is sad, but it's how it is. I'm the last of my immediate family left.
@DenisePeel Thank you. I felt like one of Dickens' orphans when my brother died. Your childhood becomes so bitter sweet.
@maryminty5876 it does, but I remind myself of all the fun and love we shared, and tell myself that I was luckier than a lot of people. I miss them, so I owe it to them to live my life to the full. I often think how much they would have enjoyed doing things, so they're with me in my heart.
Coming from the Philippines, we had the inverse problem. Too many bananas (prob also from limited export) but not enough tomatoes being imported. And thus, the Banana Ketchup was born during the War and continued to be love through this day
Banana Ketchup?
@@Iskandar64 Yup. we also use it in pizza, pasta, as a marinade for barbecue etc. That's why Filipino Spaghetti (like that of Jollibee) is much sweeter than other types
@@Iskandar64 Great stuff, you can find it at asian stores. I prefer the spicy variety.
😱 my Filipino friend pointed this out but now I know why! @@mayjimeno2327
I love banana ketchup so much! only found out about it through youtube a few years ago (in germany) and was so happy some stores imported it
I absolutely love your "newsreel" voice whenever you're reading old ads from that era. So fun to listen to!
Reminds me a bit of the announcer from Legend of Korra. 😁
I especially appreciated the delivery of "Women!" 😆
@@kurathchibicrystalkitty5146For me, he sounds like a low-pitched Alastor
@@kurathchibicrystalkitty5146 thats seriously it its 1:1
@@kurathchibicrystalkitty5146As an amateur VA (I voice act for my D&D games and have since 2007), this accent is one that I have continually tried and failed to replicate.
Took care of an elderly British expat lady who was a young child growing up in London during WWII. She said the national loaves as she remembered them were not only quite dense but also far saltier than most bread including some of the later post war recipes she’d tried for nostalgia’s sake. She said her understanding was that the extra salt was added to help keep mold at bay so that the bread would keep longer and therefore reduce waste. It might end up quite dry and stale, but at least it would remain safe to eat. She said her mother used to make vegetable broth a couple times a week from the vegetable scraps and when the bread got very stale she would cut it into cubes and serve it in a bowl of hot vegetable broth with whatever other vegetables they had as meal. The bread would soften in the broth to be more edible and add more substance to the otherwise very meager vegetable soup.
Sounds like dairy free French onion soup to me 😉
Watching this video made me finally understand why my Grandparents refuses to eat anything but white bread, and it was one of the few things they splurged on (it always came from Marks and Spencers). They were probably sick of eating nasty bread during the war and swore it off for life.
@@Zerbey Reminds me of a story i once heard about a WW2 US Army vet who for the rest of his post war life absolutely refused to ever eat Spam again.
@@ajb7876 My Grandmother-in-law was the same way, said she never wanted to see another can of Spam as long as she lived, and never did as far as I know.
and after you eat the meager vegetable soup it comes out as a meager vegetable soup poop
I learned to cook from people who had been taught to cook during WW2 rationing, and they passed down a lot of habits that I didn't realize were related to rationing until I did research in my college years. Among these habits are the following
"Cook your vegetables in as little water as possible and as fast as possible to prevent vitamin loss."
"Use the water from cooking your vegetables to make your gravy. That way no vitamins are lost."
"A good dinner requires a potato dish, two vegetables, and a protein. For supper, one fruit and one vegetable should be served beside the main dish. And one fruit and half a glass of orange juice [always from concentrate as fresh oranges were rare and refrigeration wasnt really a thing until the 60s] should be included with breakfast."
"One pound of boneless meat serves four people if you plan your meals properly."
"Keep a garden and use it. If you can't eat it, you can trade it or can it."
"Willful waste makes woeful want."
Some of my favorite dishes as a child were later discovered to be straight out of government pamphlets from WW2 rationing, which was mildly disconcerting. I still look at modern recipes and think, "My, that uses a lot of fat/sugar/flour/etc." and often pass that recipe by in favor of one of my older cookbooks with a more economical recipe. When you learn a mindset, it can be hard to change, even 60 or 70 years after the fact.
""Cook your vegetables in as little water as possible and ..."
That sounds like steaming.
What were those favorite dishes of yours?
Tradition, also called "bullying by dead people"
If a recipe has too much fat or sugar for your liking, try to find a recipe from another country for the same dish. There are a bunch of countries, where sugar and fat are more favored or even status symbols. Or you can just adapt the recipe for your own likings, nobody will shoot you for that, unless you break the spaghetti in half, that's a declaration of war.
It's okay, the nazi's aren't still flying overhead. You can eat normal food again.
I can barely eat store bought cakes in the US. They use just way too much sugar.
My grandmother was still cooking out of her 1940 ration book until 2005
I remember my Brit Nan cooking over a pot Fag 🚬 in mouth
😱
Keep that book forever 😍
@@ChadConnorThat is when she found Amazon and ordered a new cookbook.
I have a late 40s cook book, not rations, but very fascinating. The book is legit falling apart and I am still trying to find a way to get it rebound
My father used to recount that he and his siblings (four in all) were given a banana at the end of the war, but their nanny insisted on giving it all to the youngest, because, she said, that as he had been born in 1939, he had never tasted one. The other children were furious, as you can imagine, loudly declaring that, as their brother had never tasted a banana, then he didn’t know what he was missing, whereas they did, so would have enjoyed it far more. I don’t know why she didn’t just cut it into four pieces…
It's one of those things. Seems clear now but at the time she was probably so focused on getting the bananas for the baby, she just didn't think that far
I come from a family of miners, my parents being the first non miners in generations. To the day he died, my grandad loved bananas, and close to his death he would have flashbacks to the mines, which seemed to increase his banana intake. The last time I ever saw my grandad, he wasn’t in a good way and seemed to think he was in a coal mine. He snapped out of his panic for a moment and went ‘here you go son, my last banana, you have it’. I declined and let him eat it. He died 2 days later, I’m incredibly proud to be his grandson
Touching, it almost mirrors the many interesting moments my grandpa had when his health was declining.
This is incredible. Thank you for sharing ❤
Aw God bless him. He sounds like a fantastic guy
Man the mental image of what he was seeing/thinking makes me think he had to be a fantastic guy. Thinking he's down in a mine, sees a younger kid, hands over what he thinks is his only/last bit of food...
My grandfather was a miner as well. His mind was sharp as a tack til the day he died. His body was a wreck though.
My dad lived in London during the Blitz as a young boy. When I asked him what was his worst memory of the war he replied "parsnips"
I've heard the same about turnip
Love them both😂
Lordy, I hated parsnips as a kid (US, 1960s). They’re tolerable now, but I rarely have the opportunity or inclination to eat them.
@@Bildgesmythe As a low carber, I use turnips, rutabaga (swedes), and radishes where most people would potatoes. They're all quite good roasted or in soups and stews.
Lot of people couldn't stand rabbit after the war, my grandparents included.
I have a bit of parsnip trivia for you, courtesy of my British horticulture teacher.
Apparently, parsnips get sweeter when stored at very low temperatures ... They don't even mind being near frozen.
So!
Mid-November, farmers would be out in frozen fields, digging up their parsnips ... with jackhammers
I didn't know the last part, but carrots are the same way! Cold weather makes them sweeter. And you can store them in the ground rather than harvesting them all at once!
I'm from Maine and we used to cover the parsnips in the garden with leaves in the fall and dig them up in spring. Really sweet and good.
That's why they're always served roasted with Christmas Dinner here. Beautifully sweet and delicious. I'll take roast parsnips over roast potatoes any day.
Would a jaque-hammer work for the french?
They get plain edible following a freeze, before it their flavour is a bit off.
I just keep them in the ground until December or so to ensure they get a few freezes, easiest vegetable ever... stores perfectly, can be a little hard to extract from frozen ground though :)
I worked for a retired economics professor, who is now 101 years old. She was in her 20s in London during the Blitz, and worked on a project researching the health and body weight of factory workers during rationing. Both her study and others confirmed that for working class Londoners, they were significantly better nourished under rationing than before. She always emphasized that however tough the war was, being poor in early 20th century London was worse.
There's something deeply ironic in that idea. That war rationing could improve your living situation if you were poor enough...
Indeed. I also read somewhere that the widespread promotion of fish and chips was after when they took in soldiers to serve in the First World War the authorities were shocked at how malnourished many were.
Yes! this is quite often set just aside.
a lot of the times when I see usa "depression era meal" recipes they're just 80s finnish family meals. 50s finnish school meal would basically be gruel - but the gruel would have still been 100% better than 50 years before that having a meal of absolutely nothing.
Yes, that's what annoys me when people try to compare the poverty of today with the poverty of then. London's East End at the beginning of the 20th century was a hell hole. I read a book called The People of the Abyss by Jack London. He disguised himself as a down and out and lived rough in the East End for about six months. It's truly horrific.
@@lasskinn474 - Many poverty struck people died during the Depression in the USA, particularly the elderly. I believe it was because of this that the Social Security system came into being.
My mother, who was pregnant with me in 1944, was continually hungry, but the smell of Woolton Pie made her feel so nauseated that she couldn’t eat. During the war there was always the depressing bread, but bread was rationed AFTER the end of the war. Life was really tough. Incidentally, I remember the day that sweets finally came off ration. Wonderful day, I was 9 years old. Mind you practically everything else was still rationed.
It was extremely tough after WWII - my father's family, having survived the war in the UK, got on a ship for the other side of the world in 1947 to seek a better life. My great aunt had run a pub before the war and during the Blitz was responsible for feeding an underground station full of people (people sheltered in the underground stations during the Blitz - the deep level stations were naturally protected, being so far underground, and if the worst came to the worst, people could always evacuate along the tracks to the next station).
My mum was born in '44 and still very fondly remembers the day sweets came off ration! They were living in the East End, and growing up all the kids used to play on the 'Debry' - or so my mum thought it was called, until she got older and realised it was actually 'debris' - the bomb sites were favourite playgrounds for them, especially as the sites soon got taken over by very tall weeds and my mum remembers how many caterpillars were on them
dang, so you were born right at the end of the war? Do you recall having any idea growing up with rationing that it wasn't "normal"? Did you have any awareness that other countries weren't rationing/weren't rationing as severely, and did it cause envy? (obviously adults knew, but I was always curious about a child's perspective and how much they knew/understood).
@@EmilyKinny My mother was a very good, careful cook so we were never hungry. There were only the two of us as my father was killed - shot down in Holland just before I was born. The thing is we were all in the same boat. At first we lived in a small country town and later in an outer suburb of London and nobody had more than anyone else. We got parcels from my father’s family in Canada, so in some ways we were lucky. I remember sweets called Life Savers and making each roll last for over a week by just having one a day! It was all normal.
@@margueritejohnson8373 i feel so guilty now just gobbling up a whole roll of lifesavers when i was a kid in the 70s
I think my favorite part of this series is that WWII is close enough to living memory that theres a ton of family stories in the comments. Im learning as much from them as from the video!!
I agree its kinda awesome
Yes indeed. Baby Boomers retain the oral memories of their parents and grandparents ❤
@@YT4Me57, same here. My Dad, born in 1941, grew up on a farm and remembers how he and his siblings pitched in to help my grandmom can vegetables; they had to pick the vegetables and beans and prepare them for canning.
It was hard to get bananas here in the US as well. Twinkies used to have banana filling but had to change and never went back. And my father, in his early teens then, said if grocers in his area got in bananas they didn't just put them on the shelf. Dad recalls the grocer approaching his mother, a favored customer although she didn't have much money. He'd say, in a low voice, "want some bananas"?" It sounded like an illicit transaction on a street corner
Lmao that's hilarious and sad at the same time 😂
If I was your dad I would think he was trying to woo my wife with bananas!
Idk what I'd do without bananas. They're so good for babies and children and sometimes that's all they'll eat if they are picky!
All babies and kids love nanners
One thing that always made me chuckle is when I was in primary school, our class were doing world war 2 history and one of the teachers wanted us to perform some of the 'old songs' for a group of elderly folk (we were going to talk to them after about their experiences during the war, this was some 32 years ago), one of the songs was "lets all go down the Strand" which a lot of the kids had learned the refrain of "have a Banana" just after the first line of the chorus from their own grandparents which wasn't officially part of the song. The teacher must have spent a couple of hours drilling us kids to not sing that refrain.
So the day comes, we go down, we perform the songs and of course the old folks all do the "have a Banana" at which point we just start cracking up, at first the old folks looked a little offended but one kid was like "SEE, I told you that was in the song!" and the teacher just kind of sighed and facepalmed, after we'd finished she explained to the old folks that because it wasn't originally in the lyrics she thought it was a modern invention at which point the old folks just chuckle and shake their heads.
The 'have a banana' line appears in recordings as well (I'd never heard the song, but I DID know that particular line from 'I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts').
HAHA! Great story! I enjoyed reading that. :)
I don't know, but I may be one of Max's few subscribers who actually remember rationing! I was born in UK after the war, and remember the excitement when sugar rationing ended. I also remember my father, who worked for UK Department of Defence, visiting a US airbase. There he was introduced to the American Martini and given a present of 4 eggs, during a period when eggs were still rationed.. Sheer heaven :D
There's a wartime film that was shown to soldiers on etiquette that went over how to behave on the English bases and they really impressed that the Brits would probably invite you around for dinner and explained what the rationing was like. Stuff like not going too high price when standing your round, not taking too much at those dinners, and it being generally polite and kind to bring along something from your Army-issue rations as a present.
Do you remember if pregnant women were given more rations? I'm always so curious how the pregnant women and nursing mothers managed.
My grandmother was a wartime housewife. Not only did she use all these recipes all through her life (and I use some of them today), but she was a ferocious recycler of food and household items. E.g. if you ate an orange, you had to peel it with a knife, so that the rind could be turned into marmalade, etc. Old socks and sweaters were unpicked, and the wool reused for knitting. Newspapers, jars, bottles, everything was reused. Her neighbours were all the same; the dustbinmen had little to collect, as the ladies threw almost nothing away.
So true! I remember my mum and grandma for years after the war ended, always using the butter wrapper to grease cake tins - not a skerrick of butter was ever wasted!
I still do this.@@pollywaffledoodah3057
My grandmother too. She had a "Victory Garden" from her teens until her 70s, and religiously canned everything they grew. Like your grandmother, she recycled everything too, and was still in her habit of "saving for the War" well into my own teen years. I remember opening a cabinet in her house to find it packed full of used, cleaned and flattened aluminum foil sheets. Amazing, amazing woman! They don't call them the Greatest Generation for nothing!
Both my Grandmas were the same way. Nothing went to waste.
I'm a child of the 60s but my parents grew up with, and continued, a waste not, want not, philosophy. It's weird to have lived through the decades that saw the rise of the supermarket, plastic packaging and high-calorie/fat, low nutrient processed food.
22:51 😂 Out of *all* of the online/tv cooks, chefs and foodies I've watched over the years, I have to say *hands down* that Max has THE MOST expressive face when trying foods. No fake effects or moans n groans, completely natural reaction to whatever he is trying. And for that it makes you all the more loveable Max!
Sir William Beveridge, the minister of food, was a great man. One of the world’s foremost economists and experts on unemployment, he prepared a comprehensive report on poverty, employment and the economy that became the basis for the postwar welfare state and full employment. He improved millions of lives through his social reformism. Without Beveridge, we would never have our NHS, our unemployment benefits, our pensions...
Let alone and not least beveridges 🍺
Wish they would have brought him to the US
@@TheGypsyVannersNo the US was too busy entering the war very, very late and preparing the myth that post-war Europe recovered only due to the Marshall Plan, a concept that stuck in the American mind for decades. lol we really thought we would be in charge of post war Europe and were so mad at the very smart shift toward a safety net. To this day, there are people insisting all US problems are due to sending money to Europe.
@@standdownrobots_ihaveoldglory They are wishing we had your programs
@@standdownrobots_ihaveoldglory "Very, very late"? We entered in 1941 same year as the Soviets :|
Dad brought home a new product from the bakery where he worked in 1970’s. This was a high fiber bread. He opened it, toasted it and buttered it. Took one bite and through it out along with the entire loaf. “This is the same as the ersatz bread we got in the camp”. Dad had spent part of 1945 as a guest at the “Hotel Herman.”
Hi! I don't know much about history so I'm sorry if this is very obvious, but what is the "Hotel herman"? Was this a prisoner of war type situation? Thanks :)
It means a German pow camp.
@@jacobdill4499no it means his dad stayed at a hotel and is a picky eater. He didn't tip the staff either.
@@blob5907 How do you know? Were you there?
My mom was born in ‘24 in Missouri. She grew up rationing in the Depression and continued to do so through her young adulthood in the 1940s. So many of these themes permeated my childhood in the 1960s. Mom still had leg makeup (thank you, Avon) and she told me how during the war she and her sisters & girlfriends would use eyeliner on the backs of their legs. Seamed stockings were still in her dresser drawer, and to me, they were luxurious and fascinating. The leg makeup left much to be desired!
I grew up learning that everything was reused or repurposed and nothing went to waste. Washing tin foil to re-use, diligently clipping coupons, saving green stamps, counting coins & always knowing exactly how much money you had, always darning socks and mending clothing…these were things I regularly did until the 1990s when ziploc bags just were so much more practical! (Yes, I washed and re-used those, too, until the ziploc wouldn’t work anymore!)
Fast forward to today, when I feel horrendous guilt over throwing away a recyclable can or not eating the last drop of applesauce in the jar.
I don’t have a victory garden because where we live now the deer would eat it all, but Mom and Dad did and there is nothing better than a homegrown tomato, warmed by the sun and eaten like an apple. Yum! Thanks for a fun episode, Max❤
Pvc pipe frames with netting over them. That's how my rural Missouri neighbors kept out deer and birds. 😂
My Great Grandmother lived through the London Blitz, until she went to Canada on the Queen Mary because her husband had been stationed there with the RAF. They weren't told when the ship was going to leave up until maybe an hour before, and after everyone else had boarded, Winston Churchill went aboard himself as I believe he had a meeting in the US he was going to. The Captain of that ship made sure that throughout the journey the Women and Children aboard the ship were as comfortable as they could get as the ship WAS a Troop Transport and was moving as a convoy under guard. She'd tell me these stories as a kid, and up until she died of old age in 2011, I always regret not taking the time to put her stories to paper, but we have a garden here in Southern California that was very likely inspired by the fact her family had a victory garden during the war. I never asked, but watching this video I could see that being an inspiration. My Grandmother is still alive and was a child then, and she really enjoys your channel!
Seems odd that Queen Mary sailed in a convoy, her speed usually meant she sailed alone to avoid Germans by stealth and speed rather than by being convoyed.
The first ever organic chemistry synthesis experiment I did in college was making banana oil, which is quite simple. The whole lab smelled fantastic
That was my first organic chemistry experiment too, or at least it’s the first one I remember. It must be a fairly basic experiment for beginning students. It made my clothes and hair smell like bananas.
Isoamyl acetate! A great example of ester synthesis.
don't you mean it smelled banantastic?
I remember esters...😂
Ah we also did that in high school… I remember making lots of things like rum aroma and banana in that class
My Nanny (grandmother) shared one memory of rations during the war. For her 5th birthday her mother saved rations to make a cake. Then the air raid sirens went off and they had to go for cover. The cake was sitting on the kitchen table and a bomb hit nearby but didn’t go off, the impact of it shook the dust from the house onto the cake!
Did they cut the dusty top off and eat the rest?
Fun fact, barley contains the same hormone that tricks you into digesting your food slower that's in Ozempic! So Barley bread would make you feel full longer.
If you’ve ever eaten whole barley, you know how dense that stuff is. You’ll feel full for days! Only one way to safely consume barley: 🍺 😂
@@standdownrobots_ihaveoldglory I use pearl barley instead of rice in several dishes including with stir fry. It's nice to be able to have half a portion but still not feel hungry an hour later!
My mum always used barley in her vegetable broth. It really was filling.
My family makes a beef and barley broth originally written down by my great grandmother in the 1890s to this day. Super comforting for the winter months and you always feel good and satiated after eating it.
I was born in 1954 (just after rationing finished). Both my parents were born in 1930 so grew up during WW2. I didn't realise it at the time but they brought me and my brothers up as though the war had never ended. Our diet was more or less rationing, we weren't allowed long trousers until we were 12, didn't see a tea bag until I left school. We didn't really catch up with the post war period until the 70's. Just shows how effective the wartime conditioning was.
Same here, but I do think it was a better diet than what many people have now that make them obese.
@OnafetsEnovap Originally during the war shorts were worn to save fabric. This continued until well afterwards. I started senior school in 1966 and all 120 boys started in shorts. After the Christmas holiday we all returned in long trousers. I know it doesn't make sense, that's the point.
During the first year of the pandemic, our former air-force base had a large jump in poverty, so we began our own victory gardens program. We're still growing food here, as it is a food desert, and grew 300 lbs of produce to give back to our community last year and we're looking at an even more productive harvest this year. It's so fun learning where our inspiration comes from. :D
Something to consider:
Until the 1950's we ate a completely different variety of banana in the western world (or at least in the US and UK). The Gros Michel or "Big Mike" was a much bigger, most people say better tasting variety of banana. Between Panama disease and Sigatoka virus, the big banana producers were forced to switch to the Cavendish we currently eat today. So the banana flavor they were imitating in WW2 UK rationing cookbooks is much different than the one we have today.
I recently heard artificial banana flavour is based on the Gros Michel, which frankly would explain a lot.
I hear, though I have never had a Gros Michel to compare, "Banana Flavored" candies, such as taffy, taste more like the Gros Michel then the Cavendish.
Yeah I'm not entirely sure how true that banana flavor being based on gros Michel is, I see it everywhere myself as well but I mine are still growing so I have yet to try the fruit myself. Soon though!
@@therufflife4121 I insist you come back and report on this!
I hear the Gros Michel is still grown in a few parts of the world today. Although they've long fallen out of the mainstream, they're certainly not extinct.
My granda worked at Newcastle Central Station, during the war. A train had arrived carrying hundreds of American soldiers. The Townswomen's guild/WI had made iced finger buns and tea, for their arrival.
The icing sugar, currants and tea were all rationed goods, so this was a tremendous show of appreciation, as well as effort, in order to welcome them.
They were almost totally ignored - the buns and the women.
At the back of the train, there were Italian POW's on their way up to Scotland. My granda waved to the women, who scooted along the platform and started throwing their buns through the windows into very appreciative hands.
A Scottish Sergeant tried to stop them. He was not successful.
One particularly indomitable woman, brushed him aside.
"Look at them! They are just young, frightened boys and other mothers' sons! Haddaway!".
Even after rationing ended, in the late 50s, food poverty was so ingrained that there was a kind of PTSD about greed and waste. Which is where our bad reputation for food comes from. It took my mother until the 80s before she stopped analysing how much of a weekly ration we had on our plates.
You are absolutely right, my grandparents had very strange ideas about food because of wartime scarcities. My grandmother became a terrible food hoarder, which I think has rubbed off on me in some strange way. Also, I think they forgot how to cook with generosity when abundance returned, and embraced the conveniences of the 50s and 60s instead, which contributed to the poor reputation of British Food.
Thank you! That was a story worth sharing.
That’s actually so sweet. I think my favourite bits of history are the little sparks of humanity like these. Even if they were foreign and the enemy, some still saw them for what they were- people. :)
No 🍌 🍌 bananas, but banana extract? Would more fit per boatload? Yes? No? Some other reason(s)?
@@catherinemckeon8414 The provision of essentials was a priority and bananas were too bulky. So, now the Caribbean Islands had to do something with a surfeit of bananas. They made extract, which could be shipped, along with sugar, oil and bauxite.
A little bit of 'luxury' was also seen as essential for morale, which is why tea and tobacco were seen as 'must haves'.
It was a juggling act!
I'm in the north of England. Both grandfathers fought in the war.
My grandparents could grow anything, fix anything, cook anything, and build anything. They were so resourceful it was amazing.
Incidentally here in the north allotments are still dotted about, some have been in families for years passed from parent to child.
😊
I’m friends with a 93 year old Swiss woman who survived the war. She told me they were given a ration of one egg per person per month and egg day was always her favorite day of the month lol
And nowadays eggs are an expensive luxury. $1 USD per egg these days...
@testname4464 where are you getting eggs? Erwon?
@@matthewtheuret8215 california.
What? @@testname4464
????? I'm in CA and a dozen is like 5 bucks
My grandparents lived in London during WW2. Granny once told us that even though she was allowed one egg a week, she actually once went about nine months between them. Rationing did a number on her more than the bombing tbh. She would joke about the bombs to us, but there was real pain about the deprivation and she and grandad were a reasonably well off middle class couple. When we cleared out her house after she died, we found so many packets of sweets and chocolates hidden away in drawers and cupboards, it was rather sad, she really never got over it. She died in 2007.
ETA: I already see there are tedious comments about British food in this thread. Perhaps people would like to think a little more kindly about a country that was virtually cut off from the world's trade and was struggling to feed their population and that it lasted 7 years beyond the end of the war, the destruction to the economy was THAT bad.
we survived,americans wouldnt the second the avacados ran out they would surrender instantly lmao
@@random_an0n It was a rough time, especially for Londoners. We had family out in the countryside where things were a little less dire. Grandad wanted granny to go out there and live but she refused to leave her job or him (he wasn't in the army, too old, bad eyesight and in a protected profession). So she stayed and they survived and after the war moved to India and thrived.
Now the UK government wants everyone to register their chickens and are about to outlaw beef.
especially since Britain is an island and that made trade difficult during war
My grandma is the same way. We’re American and my great-grandfather owned a grocery store during the war so rationing didn’t hit her quite as hard as a young child. But, sugar was rationed and she loves sweets. I deep cleaned her room for her a couple years ago and I found a bunch of candy stuffed in drawers. I guess it’s something she did as a kid and that habit continued late in life.
Fun fact, my great grandfather was actually in the RAF in world war 2 and was, to our knowledge, the first person to bring bananas back to london after the war. His son, my grandfather, always used to make us bananas on toast with a dash of sugar on it, i never used to understand when i was young why he loved them so much, but now with a better idea of how he grew up it makes a lot of sense to me why he was so proud of his dad, and why he treasured sweet treats so much, he was making up for what he missed out on in his youth.
I don’t think it should ever be underestimated how much these dishes boosted the morale of the population during such uncertain times!
I grew up on many recipes created during WWII here in Australia.
It’s phenomenal how creative and resourceful people can become and how they even found ways to create dishes which were more than just sustenance alone.
What were those recipes?
@@humbug2308 - Now come on. You heard Mr Miller say the reputation for bad British food is undeserved. Pay attention!
@@erzsebetkovacs2527
He did an episode on Anzac Biscuits- they date back to WWI, but they have remained hugely popular ever since - for Australia, rationing only started in 1943, with meat, butter, sugar & tea. Australia’s role as the “food arsenal of the allied world” also led to local shortages of potatoes, eggs, bacon, tinned goods & fresh milk.
I don't know about the OP's recipe book source, but the local CWA's (Country Women's Associations) & women's magazines put out cookbooks- & Anzac biscuits were almost certainly in most, if not all; Australia’s most widely read women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly saw Australian women share their culinary creativity.
One of the ways in which they dealt with scarcity was through creating mock foods with the appearance or taste of “the real thing”. In January 1944, the Weekly published six recipes sent in by readers. Four were for mock foods: mock pineapple, mock apple, mock ham & meatless sausage.
For instance- Mock Apples: “custard squashes make a good substitute for apples”. They could be prepared by slicing & simmering in water with lemon juice & sugar (Queensland, where the poster of the dish came from- was a sugar-growing region, & they also had bush lemons)
From January 1944, meat was rationed to an average of approximately 1 kg per adult/ week; it was reduced further later that year. This was a challenge for Australians who relied on a meat-heavy diet (in the previous century, Australia was lauded for having a higher meat consumption, for the average person- that was higher than the US, the UK, France, Italy, or Germany).
Cakes & other baked goods were extremely important to the Australian diet, but standard recipes were drastically impacted by butter & sugar rationing as well as the scarcity of eggs & milk. This led housewives to create recipes such as Austerity Fruit Cake which was made without butter. Another recipe, Honey Cookies- were eggless & butter-less.
A woman from New South Wales took substitutions seriously, sharing a recipe for 'Egg-less, Milk-less & Butter-less Cake' in 1943. The home baker replaced butter with dripping & used soaked fruit to create their “moist, fair-sized cake”.
Australians responded to rationing with remarkable creativity, & a positive attitude. As the Weekly’s food editor commented, “Rationing doesn’t daunt them!”
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 One of the first things that came to mind was the tapioca pudding my Nan would make 😊
@@MossyMozart And yet there's an example of the British Government in this episode stating that while Britain grows good vegetables, nobody cooks them as poorly as the British.
There is a book called “Twenty and Ten” that I read as a child, it’s about World War Two, but it’s from the children’s perspective. There is a whole subplot about a chocolate bar, and how they’re trying to make it last the whole war. I found it opened my eyes toward rationing more than any other book I’ve read about World War Two.
I feel like so many of us in the States don't realize just how hard the UK was hit during WWII, both by the Blitz and by such austere rationing. I understand the memes of British cooking being "bad," but there are still some people alive today who were children during that lean, scary time in history, and it makes sense how every bit of rationed food was appreciated. No matter what it was.
@@thestraydogThe book actually takes place in France. They still had rationing, but it was much more meager there compared to the eggs and milk the children in England got. I believe they had to eat parsnip soup and bread, and not very much of either because they were sharing with the ten Jewish children who didn’t have ration cards. (For obvious reasons.)
@@AMoser-g7d Wow, I'll have to find that book. Thanks!
Oh that was a favorite book growing up! In my opinion, it's a great way to introduce WWII topics to children without being too heavy. We also enjoyed "Snow Treasures", where a group of Norwegian children smuggle the country's gold down the mountain away from the invading Germain troops.
I was born in Lancashire before the war. My Mum worked in a bandage factory and Dad at BTH on munitions. Dad also had a small barbershop at the front of our terrace house. He served as a Home Guard and had an allotment where he grew tomatoes and cucumbers. The public air-raid shelter was directly across our street and the communal pig-bin was out in our back-street. There we all chucked our peelings and food scraps. We carried gas masks to school and enjoyed stodgy and filling school dinners. Still i remember always being a bit hungry. We younsters didn't complain since there was always some adult saying, "Oy thee! Don't tha know there's a war on?". As if we could forget!
13:09 "nice argument, unfortunately, i have already depicted myself as the based smoking Churchill pot and you as the seething Hitler pie, therefore, your argument is invalid!"
Based
I always said that it was due to rationing that British cusine suffered so terribly. When people say 'oh but you had traded in spices but never used them' I say yes but when you were sent into a total war economy you can't waste space on spices when munitions were needed more
People who say that clearly don't know what British food was like before the wars. Old recipes used a lot of spices and you still see it in old recipes like mince pies, Christmas pudding, and parkin. Then basically a whole generation grew up without access to spices, so obviously that was going to change things
@@heatherbc7914 I think British and Nordic cuisine have disadvantage of being simple. When main course is basically meat, potatoes and drunk beverage there is no way to hide poor materials or preparation under side dishes and spicy sauces. Not to mention very limited access to spices (of course international trade alleviates).
no its because british people cant taste
No they didn't use "GRAVY" to make mock stockings but they did use "Gravy Browning" which was essentially dark caramel powder (For the colouring) and cornflour (To thicken the gravy up), I know because my Grandmother told me this was so when I too thought they used Gravy and mentioned this to her and she corrected me...
@@aelthric think I still have a bottle somewhere in the back of the cupboard from when I did some re-enactment
Women would also draw black lines up the back of their legs to simulate the seams of the stockings on sale at the time. Silly bints.
@@MeStevely no need to be derogatory. The society at the time considered you undressed without certain clothing items so women used what they could to be what was considered respectable when they left the house.
@@MeStevelywithout stockings you were considered a slut.
My mother and auntie used it for fake stockings, and yes, they did draw lines up the back to look like seams.
Hi Max
Long time watcher, first time comment.
I was born in 1960.
I'm old enough to have parents and grandparents who went through both wars.
My family is 4th, 5th, 6th generation kiwis (New Zealand).
I just had to comment when I saw you slicing the bread a talking about thin slices. What you cut was what my Mum and Gran would have termed a 'doorstep' 😂. When Granny cut bread, it was millimeters thin, 3-5mm! And all through my school lunch years I got sandwiches a third the thickness of what you cut.
As I got into my teens, we came to think of it as 'seige' mentality, stretching the least amount of food as far as possible and hoarding everything that would 'keep' as long as possible before using it.
I also think it's where my passion for razor sharp kitchen knives came from. Thin slicing is a lifelong habit. And I never liked banana sandwiches 🤫
Great episode, thanks
Considering the bread wasn't rationed, but anything you would put on it was, I would assume cutting thick, because when your pack of cheese is only enough for 4 slices, you spread it over 4 slices.
Max forgot the sultanas! Here in Australia, kids still love banana sandwiches - but you've got to sprinkle the mash with a few sultanas to increase the sweetness!
I just finished watching BBC's "Wartime Farm" series again. It's a great look at what people went through.
So good!
OH I love that series! and the other Farm series
I thought of that series immediately when I saw today's topic, it's probably my favorite from all the different Farm ones.
The Wartime Kitchen and Garden is another very good series.
I don't know where you'd get to see it online, but another great program is "The Supersizers Go....". Hosted by Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, every week they go to a different decade or era & live, eat & drink the way they would have. It first aired in 2008, so getting difficult to find. It may be available on BBC 2, & there are some episodes/snippets available on RUclips. The presenters are pretty good. Sue Perkins it good in everything & Giles Coren (brother of Victoria Coren Mitchell) is an entertaining food writer, and television and radio presenter.
As a German Historian for the "Institute of Contemporary History" in Munich, Germany i really love these Videos!
Would also love to see you doing a couple of Recipes of German WW1 and WW2 Food (not gonna lie, we still use them in our Military nowadays because they are so good). In fact, when i served my 2 Tours in Afghanistan and 1 Tour in Kosovo with the 23rd Gebirgsjägerbrigade we also ate those old Recipes!
Like the famous "Gulasch" (Goulash) from the "Gulaschkanone" (Goulash Cannon). That one's still used to this Day and i actually make it for myself at least once a Week because it's so good, despite being Military Frontline Food!
Definitely would love you to cover any of these and if you need Recipes translated to English, i got you!
Keep up the great Work!
Prost & Cheers from Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps
This would be great to hear as very little about the wartime diet of any of the Axis powers from either WWI or WWII has ever really been published in my experience.
I was stationed near Mainz with the 8th US Infantry Division!
Germany suffered from enough shortages that you invented the word “ersatz” to describe replacement goods.
The Wikipedia page for “ersatz” lists a recipe from the food ministry labeled labeled "(Top Secret) Berlin 24.X1 1941" that calls for:
50% bruised rye grain
20% sliced sugar beets
20% "tree flour" (sawdust)
and 10% minced leaves and straw.
sounds… delicious. although it was certainly, ahem, more than what my ancestors would have been eating if they were in germany at the same time
There was a bit of an outcry in the camping & bush-craft world when Unilever/Knorr discontinued the Erbswurst (Pea Sausage) in 2005.
Invented in 1867 by Johann Heinrich Grüneberg, it first fed troops during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War/Franco-German War. It went on to feed troops for over a hundred years. Easy to store, pack & boil down to made a great pea & meat fat soup. often considered one of the first commercially produced "instant foods". Would make a great episode for Max to make as there are some good recipes for making an ersatz version online.
@@Hybris51129 we don't hear much about the Italian and Japanese wartime diet on the homefront either. I think we do have some details on what the French had under occupation. And the Dutch
I cant beleive you mentioned nylon rationing! My nana told me about using gravy browning to dye her legs when she was in the women's RAF service. She said it worked but she could never get a straight line up the back of her legs by herself!
Gravy browning (Caramel, Molasses) was used for the "fake tan", not just the left-overs from Sunday dinner. Awesome, as always, thank-you.
So it was used? I thought it was just propaganda.
Yeah, I've seen that gravy browning and it would probably work. I decided when I was a kid that chicken gravy should be pale.
, my mum and auntie used gravy browning on their legs to give the illusion of wearing nylons. They used to draw a seam up the back with an eyebrow pencil.
@@kitefan1 I the UK we have brown gravy in and on meat pies, sausages and mash, Sunday roast dinners, beef and lamb stews, cottage/shepherds pies etc...
@@erzsebetkovacs2527yes it was. My Nan used gravy browning as stockings.
My mother's family was in a small village in Germany during WWII. My uncles told me they didn't get rationing for food, so they were basically on their own. They stole the used cooking oil from the camps and vegetable scraps to eat. Sadly, 2 aunts died of malnutrition. I can't imagine the horror of those times.
I was told that one reason rationing continued in Britain was because any extra food was being sent to mainland Europe to help those who literally had nothing to eat, Better rationed food in Britain and sending help to those who didn't even have that much than removing rationing and letting others starve. Mum and dad grew up with rationing, a lasting effect was we always had a huge vege garden [dad grew his own vegetables until he went into a nursing home in his 90s] and a pound of meat would feed the 4 of us for a meal, as children a chicken would feed the 4 of us for 2 meals [legs./wings bit of breast meat one day, rest of the breast meat the next day] while Monday's dinner was always made from Sunday's leftovers as well.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYouYou spreading Propaganda. Britain caused Hunger in Europe several times. Also before this war. These are not good people feeding others thats pure Propaganda. The prevent food from coming into coubtries strategly.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou there are videos of the air bridge into berlin. I'm willing to bet all the food not consumed in britain was on a plane into the city and the rest of west germany. The numbers are simply staggering
@@Pottan23 Ration food might have been boring but people weren't starving - in fact they've never been better fed and there is a seriously good case for returning to rationing as far as the health of the citizens are concerned though I can imagine the screams that would ensue should it be suggested - unlike people in Berlin.
We tried to pass laws limiting the size of soda that could be purchased and the Republicans and their cultists lost their damn minds over it.
Food is immensely politicized. There are parts of the USA where I am literally not safe to talk about being a vegetarian because meat eating in massive quantities is associated with patriotism.
There is also tremendous hatred and scorn of fat people (which I am) with no understanding of the biology of epigenetics or the trauma of poverty or living in a discriminatory society.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou
Max! My great grandfather was a belly gunner in a B-17 which crash landed in Holland. He, and the other members of his crew except for the radio operator were all taken as prisoners of war in October. The radio operator got away and found members of the resistance who helped him with food and clothing and shelter and maps. They sent him over the Pyrenees to Spain and all the way to Gibraltar where he caught a boat to England and arrived on Christmas Day. When he got to London he went to the radio station and requested a specific song to let the people who helped him know that he had made it safely. The song? It was “Yes! We have no bananas”. I was singing it for this whole video. What a surprise when you started singing it too!
If you want to explore a much darker side of wartime rationing, maybe something to do with the Bengal Famine. Don’t know how many “recipes” survive from India at the time, but this video made me think of it, and it’s not a side of the conflict we always hear about.
Yes you are correct. I've been an armchair historian since I was 11. I'm 67 now ,but never new about that until a year or two back. It's a part of history that should not be forgotten. It took me decades to understand that the allied side of the war was not full of hero's and heroic deeds. It had a in some instances a very dark side.
There was a series on this on BBC World Service (insomniac, have radio on all night). Horrifying.
Churchill let the Bengali starve. It is dark stuff.
His video about Russia in WW2 was very, very dark. I cried!
Max doesn't shy away from dark topics.
it wouldn’t be talked about because it doesn’t have black or white people dying in it. Brown folks never get that much attention, History/Media is never kind to ‘em. Both just ridicule them.
RUclips has been doing its job right since a few days ago. Like, it actually notifies me when new videos are uploaded instead of telling me about it five days after.
Glad it’s doing so! It took a break for a few months.
Who do you at the top?
.^_^.
My favorite part is when the ads are occasionally interrupted by the video I selected.
I've been watching and enjoying Tasting History for a while, but this episode is of particular interest to me, as it clarifies a very old story I was told.
When I was much younger there was an older gentleman who lived down the road from me, he used to walk his dog around the time I finished school each day.
Almost every day my mother stopped to speak to him, he was kind and friendly, and I remember one day when he asked me what I was learning about in school.
I told him we were learning about the war and about rationing. He proceeded to tell me of his time spent in the countryside away from his parents during the war, and that food was such a struggle with rationing going on that they used to have fake bananas on toast made with parsnips, little me was very facinated by this and I would have stayed to hear more of his stories had my sister not wanted to get home and watch television.
It's been some years since I've seen him, and I expect he passed some time ago, I hope peacefully.
Thank you for the video Max, and for the reminder of that nice old man.
WW2 also nearly did for small batch creameries throughout Britain. In order to reduce percieved wastage and uneven supply, a large proportion of the milk was directed towards the production of "government cheddar". By the end of the war, fewer than 100 cheese producers remained in business.
People who are interested should watch the Wartime Farm series here on YT. Extremely interesting information regarding rationing & providing food on the homefront.
Wow, how sad! I hope some were able to start up again once they got a steady milk supply.
@@christinesteckel3390 It took a long time for the industry to recover from that tbh. But there are at least like 700 recognised varieties of cheese being produced in the UK now, so matter have improved a fair bit.
Allotments are still a thing in London! My British cousin has one. My auntie and I visited her and we walked over to it. Then she made lunch with some of the vegetables from her plot. 🙂I think we should have a program for that here in the States in large cities, especially in areas that have become food deserts.
A lot of cities in the US have community garden programs. Many are run by volunteer groups. There are also tool libraries. My church has a piece of land that is a weird shape and unbuildable. We turned it into garden space and rent raised boxes to people in the neighborhood who want to grow stuff. The church has three or four boxes and the produce is donated to the foodbank on site.
There are a few, but it should be more widespread, I agree. There's an allotment area a block from me, but it's the only one I know of in a town of 50,000 people, and it might have 20 allotments at most.
Agreement regarding small gardens in cities. Especially some of the older ones. There are several blocks in the City of Saint Louis, MO where most of the houses have been removed. So there is now just grass that either the neighbors or the City has to keep mowed...
I agree, it would be a great thing to add to public parks or other unused public land
Unfortunately thanks to Reagan era industrial laws, a lot of land in poorer areas is former or current toxic waste sites (but industry and government have no responsibility to inform residents, and laws protect the industries from being identified or declaring what waste was there). This in turn means eating any food grown directly on the land (or walking barefoot in it) or using the ground water can be fatal. most of the time you see government officials chopping down community gardens and soaking them in herbicides it is because of those Reagan era industrial protection laws but they don't want people to die from eating a toxic carrot either. The rest of the time is because of redlining laws though....
My Dad remembers Rationing, his parents owned a little shop, so he saw it from both sides, my Gran used to swap her jam ration for an extra sugar ration then go pick fruit from the hedgerow and use the extra sugar ration to make her own Jam.
I think you should do a video on the postwar "great British dinner out" - prawn cocktail, steak garni, and black forest gateau - and its cultural significance at that time.
I grew up in Germany in the 70's, living with my grandmother. She lived in a 3 family (3 story) house on a edge of Darmstadt Germany. I'll never forget her telling me to be quiet, so as to not bother Frau Theis (who lived below us). My job was to cut and carry wood for ourselves and Frau Theis. All of our heat came from wood and coal, but coal was a luxury. We heated the house, cooked our meals and heated water for baths with wood and occasionally coal. Electricity was also a luxury and the state offered a 5 Mark coin every week (good for about 8 hours of electricity) We used that every Sunday after church to watch a TV show called Pusteblumen, another one call Der Mous and I got to turn on the radio and listen to Casey Kasem. We had a garden and we had chickens for eggs. We walked to the butcher shop for our daily meat, we walked to the bakery for bread and we walked to the grocer for everything else. Although I was allowed to gather eggs, the garden was off limits to me. Post war Germany was pretty tight... Today, living in Texas, I have no complaints!
Pusteblume? You mean Löwenzahn, the children‘s show?
@@AB-fr5lg No Pusteblumen and Der Maus were very similar to some Discovery channel shows today. Never heard of Lowenzahn.
It’s really pleasant to find an American talking about England with no banter or sly digs nor being an arse kiss. Cheers for the history lesson, knew bits but can’t say I knew 90% of the teaching here.
There's a documentary series available on RUclips from the BBC entitled "Wartime Farm."
It is quite in-depth with rationing, victory gardens, foraging, blackouts, pig clubs, canning and more. It runs over the course of a year and includes recreating a wartime Christmas. I recommend it highly.
My grandpa was a British agricultural worker during WWII. He lived with us pretty much full time in his last years and Every. Single. Time. cheesy pasta was on the menu we were treated to the story of how his mother used to make cheese sauce for the family with his extra milk and cheese rations
According to mum - and she was the one who drew the line down the backs of the legs for her sister and other evacuees, mum had a very steady hand - gravy browning worked fine as long as you didn't have to pass any dogs. There were a couple of dogs on her road and and they would do their best to escape through the front gate and follow those down the road with gravy browning stockings. After a couple of times my aunts went without during the day and only wore ''fake'' stockings if they were going out somewhere special in the evening, didn't even wear them to church on Sunday.
For the gravy legs: you were supposed to just use gravy *browning*, a food-colouring for getting the dark, rich brown gravy's that was popular at the time. I don't think it was supposed to be with meat in.
Yes, I'm sure no-one wanted to waste meat, or even meat juice.
Tongue is not a tough cut, if cooked right. In fact, it’s delicious. We had it a lot when I was growing up, because it was, at the time, a very cheap cut. And I was seriously miffed when I grew up and went to try to buy tongue and it was a “specialty meat” and cost a fortune.
I still remember the last cow tongue we had for dinner in the late sixties. Dad said, "That's it. We won't be having it again. It's worth too much for us to eat it." His brother farmed and was the source of our beef.
And where else can we put our horseradish so well?😢
I think its a shame you don't see it much in the supermarkets any more. Love a lunch tongue sandwich. 😂
@@IJBLondon I think a large part of the problem is that an 1,100 lb cow only has one tongue ☹️
Visit a Latin store. It's still a major part of the diet
0:14 Max, meat rationing went on in the U.K. until 1954, and coal rationing until 1958! 😲🤯
From the uk here. My nan still talks about being a kid in the war. And always makes what she calls her recession pie from the war. Corn beef, mash potatoes and onions in a pie with what ever type of pastry she can get hold of. ^^
John Kirkwood (on YT) recently made a cheese, potato, and onion pie that looked really good. I was going to try to make it but adding corn beef would take it to the next level. Thanks to you and Nan for the suggestion.😊
I commented on another video about my great aunt using gravy on her legs to go on a date during the period of rationing!!
Featured heavily in the story is what happened when her date took her to meet his family and she was enthusiastically greeted by their family dog.
Her ‘stockings’ were summarily licked away 😭
God I hope Max read that comment!
Why did she put gravy on her legs?
They also drew a stocking seam using charcoal
@@angelikichu7477nylon was rationed
@@angelikichu7477 Gravy *browning* food coloring; caramel color with corn flour.
@@angelikichu7477 If you watch the video you're commenting on, you will know. What a stupid question, lmao!
My Nan would tell me stories of rationing and victory gardens whilst she was raising two kids (one with polio) during the Blitz and with no husband, who died in the war’s opening overs. I just can’t comprehend the strength it took. She lived until she was 98. A damn good innings.
Ya know a thought occurs to me about this mock banana sandwich
if you put the parsnips thru a potato ricer and then added that in with say walnuts, raisins and a bit of honey and mixed it into the bread you could have just a hardy mock banana bread that is also a bit of trail mix.
DOOOO ITTTT! (And post recipe / results! Especially if it is any good! :D)
@@sophiaschier-hanson4163 well I already have something similar using pancake mix and actual bananas, I just didn't think about using a WW2 style recipe instead.
So glad this came up this week. By chance, one of my favourite movies featuring the recently departed Dame Maggie Smith is A Private Function, set during WW2 and featuring the raising of a (shock!) Unlicensed Pig. Hugely fun if you want to watch, Max.
Also, thank you for mentioning Betty Driver, an actress who wouldn't register on most American radar but who became a beloved soap star in her later years.
Max sure does his research!
Is Betty Driver related to Minnie Driver?
It's so sad about Dame Maggie Smith. I absolutely loved her in "Downton Abbey" and she's in one of my favorite movies "Murder by death". She'll be missed.😔
I grew up during WWll, and I remember rationing well. Everyone had a rationed supply for which there were coupons. In a family, the women ( the men were all away at the war) pooled the coupons and saved the amounts to allow them to make pastries, bread . Some veggie plots were allowed and we always went to pick the wild fruits which allowed the making of jams and jellies.
Fruit was a problem. My mother had a special coupon for orange juice for my young sister . I didn't get any but I was fed cod liver oil and what was called chemical juice. Tasted like cranberry.
When war ended the first fruit we got were bananas which I hated. Long time ago but we managed.
Keep calm and carry on!
After watching this video, I headed straight to the comments knowing there would be people giving their accounts of family members affected by the rations. This truly is a special place to preserve history. ❤ I have discovered a niche group of RUclipsrs who document their own experiences of living on WWII rations in the UK today and it makes you appreciate what we can easily take for granted when the recipes/lifestyle are recreated. 🥧
Within that niche genre, I know Caroline Ekins and The Kitchen Scrap. Any others I’m missing?
@@sophiaschier-hanson4163 oh I didn’t know if them, thank you for telling me!! There’s Utility Jude, Ration Book Rebecca and The 1940’s Experiment.
My grandmother in Belgium told me she use a mixture of chicory to paint the leg and then an eye pencil to do the line. Gosh that brought back memories about my grandma 💙
Awesome Tank Girl pfp! I'll bet your grandmother had a lot of incredible stories of those times
As kids my grandad told us a story of when he was a kid during rationing and his mum would make him "sausage impression" sandwiches. She'd cook up sausage, put it on his sandwich until the bread soaked up some of the fat/flavour and then take the sausages out and out them on his dads sandwiches to eat.
We found my great grandmothers USA ration book and ration stamps amongst her cookbooks and recipes. Still have them in the box we found them in. She was born in 1914 for those curious and lived a long 94 years.
I remember both mock banana and mock crab, from the 50s.
I'm not sure about mock crab,, but it may have involved hard-boiled eggs, salad cream (a delicacy to avoid), and Worcestershire sauce.
Throughout the war, Churchill's idea of a proper breakfast was partridge and burgundy. In both wars, but especially the Second, the royal family set an example.
Oh yes, I remember the mock crab. But, to be honest, we have no idea what the Royal Family ate during the war. They had vast estates to send them fresh produce. But certainly they made a show of setting an example, and rightly so.
There's long been jokes that Churchill drank & smoked his way through the war; I suppose, if you had access to a private cellar, why waste it?
And pre-war quality food & drink, & the foods people had eaten before the war, was something of a preoccupation for them...
The national loaf used wholemeal flour so it was much healthier than white bread. My mum and dad reckoned rationing was the healthiest diet and both lived to 91. There was no limit on British fruit and vegetables and along with the fresh egg every week there was also a packet of dried egg every four weeks. The gravy browning used for fake stocking was baiscally just dark caramel.
This video remaindered me of childhood times growing up in communist Romania. We had less food that you show here, but the bread was better. We actually got bananas once a year, on Christmas, and oranges maybe twice.
И в България по време на комунизма имахме банани и цитруси само за нова година и то невинаги.
If you grow your own parnsnips and leave them out in the ground all winter they get sweeter and sweeter. My dad loved them. My mom love on a farm in SE Kentucky so they had chickens and raised a pigs and had smoke house. Late fall was hog killing time where the men would take the big pig would cut up and they would start smoking up behind. It was a ten foot by ten foot concrete block structure. They did that well up till the early 60's
@@MMathisgrowing them kind of fell out of fashion when it became clear that handling them and then being exposed to sun would result in burns anywhere the juices of the plant touched skin. But really, the original finding of that was about using a concentrated form of it to burn tumors off of skin intentionally which is a little bit different from just handling the plant and getting small burns from sun sensitivity for a few days. Yes that can happen, but the time of year one eats parsnips tends to have less intense UV rays so it's not an issue anyway. Worst case scenario, where food prep gloves or just protect your hands from sunlight outside for a couple of days😅
@@MMathis parsnips down home in the south island are so much better than north island ones, the frost and snow coverts the starches to sugar, they dont get nearly enough love up here and saddly neither does swede
@@MMathis The same with turnips. They were consider poor peoples food.
Where I grew up in southeastern BC this is what was done with parsnips and carrots. Imagine the disagreeable surprise I had when, once on my own and in another part of the country, I bought parsnips at the grocery store and discovered how bitter and nasty they could be. The carrots weren't as good either, but still edible.
I had the song from 21:31 stuck in my head the entire video! My grandfather used to sing that often, he was a medic in WWII.
Fun fact: Canada was one of the major counters to the German U-Boats, keeping merchant vessels safe along the journey to the UK that delivered so much of the supplies they needed to keep them fed. By the end of the war, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was considered to have the best anti-submarine warfare in the world, and had the 3rd largest navy in the world after the UK and USA. They not only protected goods from Canada, but were also huge in the defense of American goods once Lend Lease began.
Kinda depressing that we're now ranked like 46th in the world now or some other depressingly low number...
Despite that, the crossing was considered exceptionally dangerous and many merchant vessels were still attacked. They were attacked in such high numbers and the job was considered so dangerous in fact that to this day Canada's Merchant Navy and Merchant Marines are honoured no different than any other branch of the military on Remembrance Day (our holiday for honouring our fallen troops).
Thank you for a new Tasting History video Max - a comfort to me personally as I've just got back from visiting my nana in her nursing home (she has advanced dementia)
Sorry to hear about her condition, but glad to hear you visit.
@@TastingHistory Thanks Max - she thankfully stills recognises me, but unfortunately asks where her husband (my grandfather) is and he died last year.
I live in KY and work at a nursing home for dementia patients. I'm sure some of these ladies and gents could still tell us a thing of two about those days! They may not know what today is, but yesteryear can be very clear.
@@Lionstar16Sorry to hear that dude. My grandma is in the same situation and she asks me where her dead husband, mother and brothers are and it’s always hard to find what to say. It’s tough to visit and it takes a lot out of you but know that you are doing the right thing and you won’t regret seeing her when her time comes. You’re not alone out there, as Three Dog says, keep fighting the good fight!
Hey folks - my dad died with Alzheimer's five years ago and I just want to share a little something. It's something somebody told me that turned out to be true. The decline is so painful and horrible that for a while, for a few years before and then after the end, all you can think about is what your loved one was like at the end. You feel you'll never be able to remember what they were 'really' like and all your memories are ruined and tainted. But it's not true. As time passes you will integrate those memories back into the whole person. You will be able to remember all of them, before the decline - you will get them back. I promise.
Another aspect of rationing in Britain - right after the war ended in 1945 US Lend-Lease shipments of food stopped. Britain was extremely short of money to import anything, they ramped up exports of every type to earn foreign exchange. This meant imports were severely cut back, and rationing continued for some things nine years after the end of the war.
We learnt to make mock banana sandwiches at primary school to teach us about rationing. I don't think they were too bad (although it is around 40 years since I ate it). My parents insist the banana flavouring tastes a lot more like 50s bananas than the bananas we have now.
It's very true about the banana flavor being the old style of banana, before banana wilt wiped them out. The first time that I went to Hawaii and tried some of their homegrown varieties it became very clear that artificial banana simulates those, not what is currently in grocery stores.
This channel has the kind of content that makes me glad RUclips exists. Great video as usual, Max!
I dunno if anyone's mentioned it yet but I love that you used Grookey as the background Pokemon in the video. It fits so well. Great video as always.
Love this topic! Retro Claude is working thru a clothing ration book from this era to slow down on fast fashion and other clothing spending. Its worth a watch! It’s amazing to learn how our grandparents survived this part of history.
But to me that's normal, I've always made my own clothes - my mother made them when I was growing up - and when I'm fed up with something I'll unpick it and refashion it into something else. Currently doing that now, taking out part of the front bodice and skirt and will add a panel in a different fabric, and voila a new dress will be born. Hand-me-downs were common when I was growing up as well, sometimes I was lucky to wear clothing a couple of times before my neighbour decided it didn't fit me any more [she liked mum's sewing and fabric choices] and it was time she had the ''hand-me-down'' for herself. Worked both ways but her mother often bought second hand clothes from a flea market she had a stall at instead of sewing them. Worked out for both of us in a way.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou that’s very cool! I’m gotten into seeing my own clothes and thrifting over the last 4 years. I don’t think I’ll go back to buying fast fashion.
It's actually so fun to watch these videos, my great grandparents unfortunately were young children/teens during WW2 and consequently didn't speak about anything they remembered, learning about the history of why English food is still how it is today is pretty interesting, especially the affects of both wars.
How interesting. I’m 70 and I remember my British mother explaining how folks made do during rationing and the Blitz. Fascinating history. Grateful she shared.
"Yes, We Have No Bananas" was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and recorded by Billy Jones in 1923. The writers had stopped at a fruit stand whose Greek owner's first word was always "YES!" and told them, "Yes! We have no bananas" inspiring a song that remained a number one hit for Five weeks and has been covered in later years by artists such as Benny Goodman, Spike Jones and Louis Prima.
lol of COURSE there are Greeks involved in that story! Yup! Sounds like an old Greek guy thing to say/ do alright! 🤣
The late Queen Elizabeth II, back when she was still Princess Elizabeth, had to accept silk ration cards donated by the public in order to have a nice dress for her 1947 marriage to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. They also had to serve their wedding guests fish that was caught wild on the Balmoral estate, because meat was still rationed, and they couldn't provide enough beef for the attendees.
Small wonder that throughout her long life, Gaelic Steak was the one dish that she treated herself to whenever she felt a little indulgent.
❤
There are YT segments on Queen Elizabeth's favorite dishes, and steak (and/or a beef dish) usually appears in those segments. She was rationing like so many, which is why she was so loved among those who lived through WWII.
Rationing was necessary not only because Britain was an island nation but also because it was densely populated; it had over 45 million people, the island of Ireland had over 4 million, over 1 million in Northern Ireland, and almost 3 million in the Republic of Ireland. Britain and Ireland combined had 50 million people in 1939.
Max, don't forget: banana flavoring was made to taste like the Gros Michel bananas, but they were wiped out, so the ones we're familiar with today are the Cavendish variety.
So, it wouldn't be surprising for these mock bananas to taste "weird".
You get the same issue with banana flavored candies that don't quite taste like banana, they were also mimicing the flavor of the Gros Michel banana.
This is untrue in its entirety. Please hit up some research!
I think i've commented on one of the other videos of this series that both my grandfathers were in what were termed 'reserve occupations'. My maternal grandfather was a signalman on the railways (I listened to hair-raising tales of horses scratching themselves on unexploded bombs that had landed next to Grandad's signal hut) my paternal grandfather was an engineer's engineer: he made and maintained the machines that made planes, etc.
Both were also exceptional gardeners, whose gardens were always full of fresh fruit and veg. My maternal grandfather had a special greenhouse for growing things like tomatoes and cucumbers, and even as he got older, my paternal grandfather kept up a big vegetable garden, and was proud to say almost all the veg served to the family when we visited him and grandma, were from their sizeable back garden. I assume that both of them started this during the WWII war effort, as neither of them were asked to perform military service. However they came to do it, both of them took pride in growing fruit and vegetables to help feed their family. I wonder how many other followers of Tasting History have memories of grandparents and their gardens?
Parents, not grandparents! We always had a garden and it was for vegetables and not for flowers. My father was stationed somewhere in Wales after the war. My mother told me he would just keep a rifle by the bedroom window and shoot any rabbit that ventured into the garden. So providing protein to go with the vegetables!
I loved my paternal Grandad’s garden when I was a kid. It was like a secret garden - behind a hedge at the bottom of their rather sizeable garden. There must have been rows of carrots and the like, but mostly I remember the currant bushes trained up in rows and sneaking down there to graze on the whitecurrants…. Got some currant bushes in my garden now, and funnily enough I don’t say a word either when my kid browses on fruit in the garden. I just see it as them getting to know where food comes from and keeping their nutrition up…
My grandparents met during the war working at a tooling factory and they ended up like a lot of people with a victory garden. It carried on after the war and many people kept beautiful gardens, it was a mark of pride. My grandma also got caught buying a pair of stockings from a spiv and had to attend a seminar with everyone else who got caught about the wrongs of buying illicit goods.
my mom was a nurse in the navy during WWII. They were issued white stockings as part of their uniform. They would often sell them on the side to civilians who would dye them black. I guess that makes my late veteran (south pacific) mom a black marketeer.
20:23 They were originally called communal feeding centers, but Churchill thought it sounded too much like communism and the name was changed.
I'd be more concerned with the "feeding center" part of it tbh. It sounds like some kind of mechanized farm operation.
you're thinking from a modern perspective, imagine you've not eaten for two days and you saw "feeding center" you wouldn't complain then.
@@dariuslane7893 I'm not Churchill. And while there was no gluttony in Britain during the war, people were fed. That was the point of rationing. Everybody getting meager rations, but at least everybody got those rations. I've studied the matter quite a bit, and I've never come across people going hungry for days.
What you might get at a British restaurant you might not have gotten at home for a while would be solid meal with some meat, like a Shepherds pie, just because economies of scale making a difference.
@@norcatch I was quite clearly responding to MaterialmenteNo..... But did typing all that out to a non existent point make you feel better babe?
@@dariuslane7893 It wasn't addressed to anyone, so I assumed it was to the OP.
Hi Max!
Yes, Britain was well prepared for rationing during the war.
As for a sugar substitute, more so here in the northeastern U.S., maple sugar.
Yes, sugar not syrup. I knew many people who boiled down maple sap to produce maple syrup. However if one continued boiling the syrup the first result is maple cream. Continuing the boil the cream harden into more of a chunky block which is then broken up producing granulated maple sugar.
This is an ancient recipe dating back to native Americans which became quite valuable to rural families during World War II.
I'm in Ontario which also has a large maple syrup industry. You can get maple sugar from some of the sugar bushes but it is very expensive. Tastes great in coffee.
@@minuteman4199 oh yes there certainly is a thriving maple industry in Canada. I agree maple sugar is quite expensive because of the lengthy process it takes to achieve. Although during the Great Depression and World War II rationing it was worth the effort.
My 97 year old mum still has the rationing mindset - food is never wasted. Anything about to go off gets made into something- a pie, a cake etc. Her brother craved bananas during the war but had forgotten how to eat them. When he finally got his hands on one he bit straight into it without removing the skin.
My mother said she and Dad quit putting sugar in their coffee and tea as sugar was rationed and they preferred to use it in baking. Every suburban house had an empty lot for their victory garden. She also mentioned painting her legs to imitate stockings but i never asked her what she used. A bit of Canadian trivia.
They still head real coffee and real tea? So that ist crying on high level.
Max's bf has to have the WEIRDEST lunch meals in the office lol.
"Oh yah my partner makes a living tasting weird historical recipes. I gotta eat the leftovers."
Lol! I think they talked about it in a podcast. Jose is very picky and usually doesn't like most of Max's experimental cuisine 😅
*husband. José and Max are married
@@hannahdigioia692 Good to know! I don't keep up with yt personalities too much
My grandparents were born in the north of England in 1945. They still remember rations. My grandad talks about it sometimes still. He says he'd always remember Christmas cos it was the only time of year you got oranges out of season. The kids were happy to have apples and oranges at Christmas because they were sweet.
They went to school together but the boys and girls were separated in different buildings. Think they married when they were 20. Still going now, though my grandfather has a bad heart and I'm worried my grandmother is showing signs of Alzheimer's or going senile. They're old as hell now