Lunch on the Kitchen Front, Imperial War Museum
Dried eggs, anyone? My interest in the Home Front extends to food rationing, and I’ve always vaguely wanted to reproduce a meal within wartime constraints, but I’ve never followed through. It always seemed like a lot of research and work just to produce a meal (mock duck? murkey? Woolton pie?) that nobody would want to eat.
Your week's ration
So you can imagine how tickled I was to read in Time Out that the Imperial War Museum had done the work for me by transforming its café into the Kitchen Front, serving up dishes from wartime recipes that attempted to grapple with rationing and shortages of everything from sugar to onions to eggs. The IWM is barely 10 minutes’ bike ride from where I work. At last, my chance to lunch in a Communal Feeding Centre!
(“Communal feeding centre” was the name the wartime government, with typical panache, gave to the no-frills restaurants it set up all over the country where anyone could go to have a square meal, ration-free, for a reasonable price. Churchill later renamed them British Restaurants.)
For some perverse reason, the idea of an austerity lunch at the Kitchen Front really enticed me. I mean, crap British meals are not a new experience, but this at least would be an authentically crap British meal, blighted by wartime ingredient constraints, not some overpriced, soul-taintingly cynical travesty of international cuisine. (Favorite anecdote: I once watched an acquaintance order a £15 plate of crab linguine in a trendy East End members’ club, diligently poke through it with a fork and finally, apologizing, send it back untouched on the very reasonable grounds that it contained no actual crab. The answer, delivered by a stony-faced manager? “That’s how it comes.”)
Weird as it sounds, therefore, I was a little disappointed by how pleasant and unremarkable the meal was. I expected austerity! Grimness! Privation! Greasy Dickensian gruel ladled into tin bowls by unsmiling matrons! Spoons chained to the counter and air raid sirens overhead! What I got was a hearty meal served in a clean, airy café by a swanky catering firm.
What to eat? I had a moderate helping of pork stew with cabbage and apples, a hunk of National Loaf (a dense, dry brown bread), a wedge of Cornish Yarg cheese and an apple.
The Bloke had rabbit pot pie with National Loaf, butter, cheese and that green sludge for which the Brits harbor such an inexplicable affection.
And it was fine! Nothing stupendous, just the kind of nommy, unpretentious, stick-to-your-ribs fare I make in the slow cooker on a winter Sunday. My stew was so filling I let the Bloke finish it, which explains why I’m not a restaurant reviewer — I can barely get through one course, let alone the variety of dishes a critic is expected to sample. I didn’t have room for dessert and couldn’t be bothered to sample it.
I left satisfied with my meal but unmoved by the experience, which felt slightly too diffuse and inspired-by-true-events to leave any lasting impression. There were a number of interesting elements to Company of Cooks’ take on the wartime kitchen. First, the presence of a kids’ menu:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I had the impression that in the days of food rationing, the menu for children who refused to eat adult food consisted mainly of knuckle sandwich.
Second: bananas — unobtainable for most of the war — for dessert and a big honkin’ wedge of cheese. I will never complain about being served cheese, but I thought it too would have been subject to shortages. Guys, you are serving austerity food to a willing audience. Go ahead and make us suffer a little!
But the really interesting part of the Kitchen Front came with the bill. Note to my readers in places like Wisconsin: this is a cheap London lunch for two.
The prices I’ve read for food in British Restaurants vary from source to source, but they all cap the cost of a hearty meal — that includes meat and two veg, dessert and tea — at a shilling or less. Ways of comparing yesterday’s money to today’s are many and conflicting, but by any measure, the price of my stew, bread, cheese and apple, at £6.50, came in way above the modern equivalent of that amount. Of course, British Restaurants were non-profit-making enterprises equipped by the government and often staffed by volunteers, so their overheads and margins would have been practically nil, but it’s interesting to juggle the figures.
What would happen if the government ran a similar scheme today to allow working Britons to enjoy cheap, nourishing food every day? If the idea of communal feeding centers put businesses’ nose out of joint, how about a voucher system, like in Paris? Would the money they spent on feeding the population properly be saved at the other end by decreased costs to the NHS? Just a thought. James, honey, Mr. Lunch-was-a-Twix-bar, I’m looking at you.
For ages I’ve been wanting to try living off rations for a week and write about it on my blog, but I never seem to get round to it!
Maybe I should pay a visit to the Imperial War Museum (I have been meaning to check out that exhibition actually) though I think possibly the thriftier option would be to find a Wetherspoons and have a value ham egg and chips for £2.99!
The Wacky Cake was known as War Cake when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties in Nova Scotia. All the older cookbooks had the recipe, and my grandmother sometimes made it. I remember it as quite moist and pretty tasty, sweetened with molasses, much like a gingerbread, with lots of raisins. People often made it as a reasonable facsimile of Christmas cake if they hadn’t started their baking early enough for fruitcakes to mell0w.
I don’t know why molasses was considered easier to get than sugar. Perhaps sugar, being more bland, was just more desirable since it could be used in different dishes without that telltale taste. Although it was rationed, Canada was supplying itself with sugar from sugar beets during the war. I can remember some of the sugar on store shelves being labeled “beet sugar” well into the sixties, and eventually it was deemed not worth producing because the stuff imported from the West Indies was so cheap.
Regarding wartime Britain, I’m thinking people considered it a sacrifice to eat wholegrain bread, as it was white bread that was valued. Even though it must have tasted pretty good, having the government forcing cheap and nutritious on you was probably galling. The shortages also must have become more acute as time went on. I recall hearing that the postwar rationing was the most severe.
Madeleine Henrey, who published under the name Mrs. Robert Henrey, or sometimes even as Robert Henrey, wrote a lot of books about her life in London before, during, and after the war. She was very popular in her day, but I’m the only person I’ve ever known who has read any of her work. I remember her saying that she was given an onion one day, in the elevator of her apartment building, by a man who was visiting one of her neighbours. He had an allotment garden in the suburbs, and a car to get back and forth to it, which she did not have. She wrote, “An onion was no small gift at that time in London. With it I was able to make a delicious stew from the lamb meat I had been able to buy that day”. (This might not be an exact quote, but it’s pretty close.)
She also writes of getting excited to see some children’s crayons in a store window as she wanted to buy them for her son, but it turned out they were only dummies. She mentions hoping to find knitting wool but being disappointed. In a later book, written several years after the end of the war, she describes her joy at seeing a window full of knitting wool for the first time in all those years.
Wow, that’s a whole different cake then! I do have several gingerbread-like WWII cake recipes, but the Wacky Cake I know is a plain chocolate cake. No fruit and definitely wouldn’t be workable with molasses.
Ahhh, this is so interesting! I always wondered what it would be like to live on the equivalent of wartime food rations. My folks always gave me the impression that it was a very healthy, if not incredibly dull, diet to live on. Must have been a nightmare trying to feed picky children and teenagers. I really love that alotments became really popular as a way to suppliment the meagre supplies. I heard that people began to cultivate the green patches on the side of railway lines and football pitches and such.
Fun fact: the gardens at Buckingham Palace were dug up and planted with vegetables:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/5523619/The-Queen-installs-a-vegetable-patch-at-Buckingham-Palace.html
People in cities also joined urban pig clubs — pay in till slaughtering time, then pig out (heh) on your share of the carcass. Pigs were fed on food scraps and kept in all kinds of places… including the empty swimming pool of a posh London women’s club.
Ooh, mental! Can you imagine if things like that happened now? Such a world away in terms of mentality from the current Primark-throwaway culture, only two generations later, eh?
How interesting you got to taste wartime food! Like you though, I figured things would be a bit more bleak and less… how do I say this? Modern cafe-ish? Because looking at the menu, I can stroll into just about any lunchtime cafe and get something almost identical (including a dry, brown bread that is titled “artisan”. rofl!). Perhaps they tweaked things a bit to appeal to the modern palate?
Like you, I’ve often thought it would be intriguing to make food similar to what was eaten at the time, taking into consideration shortages. I remember as a child I did bake a few 40s era wartime dishes from one of the American Girl Dolls cookbooks (if you’re not familiar with these, they’re a popular line of dolls from various eras of history; Molly is the one from the 40s), and some of the recipes took into consideration the fact that things like sugar and bananas were not as available in the US during the war. I baked up one particularly unappetizing cake that was supposed to be a substitute for the more pastry-like cake that sugar shortages made largely unavailable. The closest description I can come to is that it was like a very dry fruitcake.
(Probably, as an adult, I wouldn’t have minded it so much–as long as I had a hot cup of tea with it! 
I know I’ve seen a few books on 40s cooking–mostly from the American perspective–and now I’m curious to see if my library has them!
♥ Casey
blog | elegantmusings.com
I’m excited to see your report so quickly! But I’m a little disappointed too — other than the national loaf (which looks like it weighs a ton) this could easily have been served in a number of restaurants I can think of. People can’t have really eaten this well daily, can they? At least not in the UK. Maybe you’ll just have to eat on rations for a day or two and report back! (And if the UK had anything like Wacky Cake, I recommend it, we make it on a regular basis. It does need some sugar, but you get a whole cake without eggs or butter!)
Well, you could eat well if you were rich enough to dine in fancy restaurants a lot, or lived on a farm, or were an imaginative cook on good terms with your grocer, but for most people it seems to have been a struggle, involving long hours of queuing and endless substitutions. Which is why British Restaurants sprang up.
My dissatisfaction arose from the impression that the Kitchen Front is trying to give customers both a feel for wartime food and the kind of meal they expect from a 2010 restaurant. I understand that the museum cafe can’t afford to cut into its profit margins, but I’m not sure you can do both!
Pedants among your readers may note that they only charged us for one hunk of bread and cheese which means those of you reading in Wisconsin will be doubly outraged.
Well, my meal came with bread, cheese and fruit. Yours only came with mash, so I had to pay extra, you greedy little swine.