A Week On WWII Rations DAY 1 

This feels less like an exciting dive into history and more like preparation for the future.

I'm 76, I still have my ration book even though I was born in 1946. We continued rationing until 1954 because we still owed America for what they sent over. In fact, we did not finish paying back every single penny until we were into the 2000s. Our fight against the Nazi's cost us dearly, but our wonderful friends in the Commonwealth helped a lot, as did so many American soldiers.

To make your milk go further you should have used a half water and half milk ratio, next you should have finely grated your cheese and just used a very fine sprinkling, if your onion smelled really strong you needed to slice off what you needed and give it a good soak in some cold water to remove some of the sharpness, then pat it dry with a little paper towel! For the mashed potatoes on your pie you could also add a tiny amount of bovri to add a little more taste!Using a little lard and margarine or butter would give you a fairly decent pastry too.Looking forward to the rest of the week on, keep up the good work 👍👍

Pro tip with the cheese and rationing it: use a fairly fine grater, this will make a lot more volume appear on your bread but use alot less.

I’m an African-American guy. Pushing 60. I haven’t watched the entire video but starting with the oatmeal that is the American way of having oatmeal and it was very common when I was younger. It’s a low-cost meal and it’s very filling without a lot of chemicals or additives. Instead of jam sometimes I’ll have raisins and even a few nuts or berries tossed in. My family does not cook with milk but with water and we had a little bit of milk much more sugar and a bit of salt. Often there was butter added as well

I didn’t realise rationing in the UK lasted for 14 YEARS LIKE THIS even after the war mad respect for everyone back then I definitely couldn’t have handled it

A fun fact for you, the rationed diet in the UK in WW11 was 3000 calories. I was born 1945 and lived with my Nan. We had plenty of plain food, home made bread, soups, offal, potatoes in every style including potato pancakes. Milk was full fat and was watered down a little. Nan kept rabbits for meat and the fur was made into mittens and chickens for meat and eggs. The whole garden was full of vege and fruit.

We ate a lot of rabbit stew. They weren't rationed, and grandpa, as a farm hand was adept with his shotgun. That's just the way it was and I grew up with dead rabbits hanging by their feet in our larder. Children got some extra rations and these were used for the whole family. Porridge was never, ever made with milk! There's a slightly skewed view here because you were using one person's rations. With unrationed extras, meals for a family of five, which we were, meant larger quantities of fats etc., were available for making a cake, for example. Food was sometimes monotonous and no-one loved powdered egg and soyabean sausage, but we did not go hungry at all!

When my daughter was still at primary school I gave her a living history lesson during the summer holidays. We survived on wartime rations, sometimes ate our dinner under the kitchen table when a plane went overhead (mock air raid). No t.v and no video games. I even asked a local shop keeper to help with regards to what was available and what wasn't. She used to be a fussy eater but was more grateful for what was put on her plate afterwards. With the current cost of living crisis I'm going back to the rations again.

You are missing the veg to bulk up the meals.

Your going to regret using the cheese so early

People typically replaced their meat with offal (things like liver, lamb's fry, kidney) because you could make it go a lot further, also it's actually more nutritionally dense as a nice little bonus...

The thing is people during the war used to grow there own vegetables to bulk out their rations but obviously Mike can’t do that in such a short space of time so I would allow myself to buy any amount of vegetables to make it authentic

Onions were very scarce for most of the war because we imported them from Holland and the Channel islands .They were given as prizes in raffles .

Fitting week-on for the current world we're living in. EDIT: A 50/50 ratio of lard and butter makes an excellent pastry crust, just saying. Get the flavor from the butter, and the flake from the lard.

My dad was born at the start of the war...he still loves the fact that he can put BOTH jam and butter on bread or a scone. He talked about a more well off farming family that lived nearby him and when my family would visit, they were allowed to have both as the farmers made their own butter and jam.

My grandparents, like many households at the time, kept a few chickens so they had a supply of fresh eggs

Woolton Pie, you can't fail and all it uses from your rations is a little marge or lard and a few oats. Honestly, it used to be one of Mums favourites and we still eat it years after her passing.

One thing that you are missing is the work hours. People worked 48 hours per week minimum and often did volunteer work on top of that.

Many workplaces provided their workers with a hearty lunch. Also there were many restaurants that sold very inexpensive meals to the public. So for many people, one meal each day wasn't rationed. And fresh fruits and vegetables weren't rationed.

Who wants to tell him he could have used a vegetable peeler to slice the cheese?

I smiled when I saw this. Because this would be a normal meal for me, through good times and bad. I was born in the early 50's not long after the war and frugality was just a way of life for our family and I have continued it throughout my life. So no change for me. It keeps me in good stead every time the bad times come round, and round and round....never ending!

All the Americans are yelling, "Make grilled cheese sandwiches!" 😳

Never seen this done before! Also had no idea powdered egg was even a thing

Was genuinely having a bad day today till i saw this video pop up. I always love your videos Mike. Thank you

Next week, Mike sells out his family for some Turkish Delight.

My mum lived through rationing… she said that you could have butter OR jam on your toast… and that bananas were kept only for the elderly. Because they kept chickens, she had a boiled egg for breakfast every day. They also had bees, meaning they were rationed a bag of corn and a bag of sugar to feed the bees over the winter. They were given a quota of both eggs and honey to keep for themselves, the rest went to be rationed out as needed. The most common vegetable was cabbage because you could grow it most of the year in very little space.

We had rashions in 1990s, when we became a republic. We had both books and stamps, which were for flour and sugar and salt. It was hard, but if you bough whole milk instead of skimmef, you also got whipped cream or extra butter, meat (if there was any) you bough something which wasn't consider the best, like bacon, but something with ribs for example - you could remove the meat and then use the bones for soup. You also salted the meat immediatley so it would last longer, because the blackouts were still a thing. We never skipped foraging possibilities for berries and mushrooms and we all grew our own garden, and potatos. So living on rashions, even in city, was minimum, but if you had head and hands, you got extra through foraging, growing, trading (hunters often traded some meat for stamp of flour) and skills. It wasn't for money, nobody had that, or if they had, there was nothing to buy for it, because aside the rashions, the shops were empty. You also shared your findings with elderly family and neighbours.

Oats were definitely not restricted so tightly to 114 grams for a WEEK. You could have easily purchased 114 grams of oats PER DAY (even far more, and many did because it was literally all they could afford, so they ate oats, bread, grains 3 times a day for years). Most grains were still reasonably abundant during the war and were readily available. MANY people survived entirely on bread, oats / grains for the entirety of the war because they couldn't afford meat / dairy etc. Limiting yourself to 114 grams of oats for a 1 week is utter lunacy. You should be eating that much PER DAY

onion was imported and disappeared so they didn't need to ration them because no one could get any. beetroot was much more common in sandwiches. too bad you didn't take your sweet ration as raisins it would have been good in your oatmeal. Lord Walton pie was basically a vegetable version of your pie and very common. basically it's a vegetarian skewed diet.

Yes - using oats to bulk out mince will definitely help in today's current situation as well - they just absorb all of the meatiness from the beef

Of course you wouldn't actually have received that ration as you would have been conscripted by now. As someone"old enough" to have heard all about these rations 1st hand.....your sugar ration would almost certainly have been mostly used for your baking and jam making. Whole milk would have increased your calories which was why the rations and how you should use them were the subject of many cookbooks & radio shows etc. You are doing a week on which is more difficult in some ways than doing months on as seasonal items were available. Of course there was also bartering were you may exchange some of your ration with a family member or friend. You should really have gone for beef dripping as you are doing a week on it may have been more useful. You used enough margerine for at least 4 and more like 6 pieces of bread.....i remember being shown how to butter your bread by a relative....the sad part of it was even though the war years were long since gone many older people kept many of those "scrimping" habits for life. Fried bread in dripping is delicious i never really enjoyed the beef dripping sandwiches though. Powdered egg was again used in alot of recipe's to replace real egg....the real eggs all went to the fighting men.

Taste is irrelevant -- whole milk was more caloric, with more fat & protein & calcium. You're hamstringing yourself by choosing reduced milk. Also, why not grill or fry the onions?

1 my parents lived through the war. 2 Fish and chips where available throughout the whole the UK never rationed. 3. British cafes where open where limited menus where available at subsidized prices. 4. Many people ate better during the war than they did 10 years early during the great depression.

A very original “Week-on”, reminds me of the refugee ration challenge, hope you’ll revisit that one as you said you would some day and only do what was just in the box of rations and not use any of the add-ons.

In 2023 that amount of food per week would be a luxury

I'm pretty sure that the pie he made would have been split between a minimum of 2 people!!! They might have added a bit of old crusty bread or any greens from out the garden, to turn it into more of a substantial meal. The amount of things I know about world war rationing will surprise most people. You could ration that small pie out to 4 people easily, by using preserves obtained over time... for example sauces, picked onions, cabbage, gherkins etc. Most people would save things like sugar until they had enough to make something good out of it.... rationing there own rations, so we had something to look forward to.

Just shows you how important it really was to "dig for victory" if you didn't you missed out on a lot of food in the form of cheap fresh veg.

both of my grand parents were stationed in england during ww2. they would still sweeten our cereal with home made strawberry jam. it was so good. they also would add oats and egg to hambuger when making patties for hamburgers to make them stretch further. my mother still makes them that way and they're still my fave burgers. yummy and very filling

Just for future reference, I would have taken the fat that you spread on the bread, and fried the onions a bit, and grated the cheese with a small grater, I think it would have tasted better, and you could have used less cheese. This is the first video I've seen of yours, so I'm looking forward to seeing what else is coming tomorrow (next video).

You realize they make these things called measuring cups. You can use those to measure stuff... in cups. Instead of in a washed out wax bag. What am I even watching? Also, my god... stop with the glass "cutting board". You may as well be running your knives over the street outside.

I remember one time for drama class we had to do this little play thing where we'd pretend to be people lining up for rations and for my part I had to angrily skip the queue and all my character said was: "I want my bacon and I want it now!" And for some reason it came out in a really thick Glaswegian ascent and that's the singular shining moment of my acting career.

Use a potato peeler for thin slices of cheese and maintain even pressure

My mum tells me they had rabbit a lot and their own chickens so I think they were quite lucky, also my grandad was a keen vegetable grower.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you grate the cheese? It would have gone so much further?

its taken you 40 years to figure out porridge is lush with sugar in? poor thing

Onions were extremely coveted during the war lol. You putting onions and cheese on a sandwich would have been a luxury. ;)

You have less meat because you bought the most expensive lean minced beef! It works out more if you buy cheaper meat. Plus they had no issue with animal fat and indeed it is not unhealthy that is all twaddle made up entirely. But that aside, they used the fat run off (dripping from meat) to fry things in and top up their lard, butter and margarine ration. So getting a fattier cut of meat was a good idea because you got more for your money and used the excess fat as well. With cheaper cuts you could get nearer a pound depending on what it was you were buying. Ruth Goodman on episode 2 of War time farm shows this very well with the difference between the cheaper shin of beef and a steak for the same ration money. And where is your Spam, or tinned fish? A 12oz tin of Spam would have given you lots more options but you haven't used your point system part of the ration for tinned goods like baked beans and dried fruits etc here, which would have made a huge difference. And you were entitled to a tin of dried milk powder per month as well, which you would use to cook with to keep your fresh milk for hot drinks etc. When I did this for a month I had my points system items as well as my ration coupon items and it made all the difference to the obvious monotony and lack of meats in the diet, not to mention cakes and desserts were a welcome addition. I had no issue with eggs when I did this though as I had about 7 chickens in my garden back then, which was also very much the done thing for people during the war years. Then comes the British cafe! You could eat out at lunch times during the working week back then. So as long as you stick to the meat as one item rule only and choose something close to what was available back then you can eat out once a day as well. And have a once a week trip to the chippy. I didn't choose to use the Briitsh cafe option as it's expensive to eat out these days and hard to choose something along the right lines of what you would have got then, but not impossible. I did have a chippy supper once though.

I think you're not eating the realistic ration diet. The diet I've seen from the period show large amount of veg. More cabbage, potatoes, neeps, carrots and lots of bread.

Ugh. Raw onion? Mike, you need to learn how to use a frying pan.

The national loaf was the complete opposite of Danish bread. It was meant to fill you up.

I wish you had researched properly how people actually used their rations coz they would have gone a lot further. Same with the dried egg as people always said that as long as the correct measurements were used & you follow recipes they were absolutely fine. Dried egg is still used in many premade foods today. Ive been using rations for years as its much healthier. Sugar goes a long way in wartime baking so you have a sweet treat after dinner each evening & a homemade biscuit with your unsweetened tea. Regarding cheese, you always finely grate it! Economical pastry is good too either 1:4 or 1:5 ratio of fat to flour. (Fat should be half lard& half marg or butter). Brush with milk not egg. Buy whole milk & water in down etc. There are many wartime recipe books available, some are even reprints of government publications & recipes sent into newspapers & magazines by housewives. I even dabble in 'dig for victory ' gardening, & 'make do & mend' with my sowing tin.

Before watching this video I'm going to bet Mike will be complaining all week. My parents told me what they received each week as rations in the war, and it sounds like what Mr Jeavons has in one.meal. Let the fun begin :)

A week on Lidl? A week on Burger King A week on Food Warehouse

Hey Mike, where I live in Anglesey, I do know a couple of really elderly "wartime" survivors, and even now in the 2022s they'll peel and boil a whole onion and have it on toast! It's actually not as boring as it sound!

Hi Mike, bread was rationed until 1948 and sliced bread was not a available until 1950, as the shops were not allowed to sell till then. I am very interested as to see what you are going to do with your rations this week, it should be quite interesting.

Rationing didn’t completely end in the USA until 1954. I remember how happy Momma was when we replaced the icebox with a shiny new Westinghouse refrigerator. Food came back first but retooling the factories took a while.

jam AND sugar when both are rationed in the porridge?

The damning indictment about the state of this country right now is that there are thousands of families being forced to live on less food than this right now! There is no war, we are supposedly a developed nation, there are no shortages of food and yet there are people living on less than this!!! It's disgraceful and as a nation we should be ashamed!

A week on greggs!

I take issue with your comment on egg powder. Namely that you didn't think you'd be using it up. If you are trying to replicate life in WWII UK then it is hard to see how you wouldn't use all that egg powder. Excess food was a luxury then. People would use as much of the food they had as possible.

Looks fine to me. Modern obese, lazy generation could survive easily on this, it would go no ends to help them shed lard, become more healthy and appreciate things more. The only mitigating factor is knowing 1940's people burned a lot more calories than today, most walked or cycled everywhere, so much harder for them.

Ive never seen oat porrige made with only milk I have only used water and maybe some milk on it.

I grew up during 5he war, don’t know how my mother managed to feed us, but they reckon that our nation has never been so healthy. That’s something to think about!

You should have grated the cheese but then again I would not have used any cheese on toast thats not a smart way of using it, the cheese should have been used grated on top on a gratin or something similar. And I do think I would use a little jam or marmelade, no butter on toast.

My mum is in a 1940s reenactment group, and often makes some of the recipes from back then. She suggested trying vinegar cake (apparently you can’t actually taste the vinegar). I expect there’s a recipe for it online

Does Grace not know the pan has liquid measurements printed inside it? Also if you had cut the cheese on the smaller end instead of sideways it would have been easier.

You really had me chuckling! Next time bulk your beef up with bread crumbs since bread was not rationed.

A bit of imagination and you could have done so much more and made things go further and taste better there's plenty of wartime recipes on line

I would have talen onions finney chped mix into the meat egg powder bread and water, mix very well with the ball of your hand, frying the meat balls you formed and serve grated carrot with a bit of sugar and water mabe a spot of vinegar if you can get your hand on it as a sort of sweet and tangy salad. I think you can get 2 very hansom meatballs out of the mints meat. I also think your potions are a bit of. You must remember that people used to swap things on smoke may have shaped half of the mints agenst a peace of cheddar, as to copensait for the craving. How ever I can not emagin that they would have cut the cheese with a knife like you did and layered it so thik on one sandwich. How extravagant. Rather then slicing it, I emagen the chese grated,mixed with onions finely diced very finely, and then very thinly spred on the bread, no margarine. Magerin is a cooking oil used for baking. You can also take one or two potatoes, grate them finely, add salt, drain the water after 10 min, don't throw away the water because you can extract the starch. Add a teaspoon of flower, egg powder, take a teaspoon of the mix, fry very thin spred in the pan with hot lard or margarine, probably better lard, both sits until crispy, serve with very thin spred of jam on top. Hash browns. Get oysters, that is somthing the people at the sea had lots of. You challenge although a good idea seems a kittle off. You have to be more creative about it. That is what the people hat to do in WW1 and 2. Don't forget 2 started not long after one.

Its worth mentioning many brits switched over to the scottish way of making porridge, with salt instead of sugar, to conserve their sugar ration

The fact this is coming up now as recommended for UK is scary

So you just eat unsalted, unsweetened porridge??

I know this is an old vid, but my great-grandmother used to put powdered eggs in all sorts of things you (allegedly) wouldn't notice. Oatmeal (porridge) was the least offensive, so much so that I often incorporate a fresh egg into my oatmeal in any way that doesn't scramble it. Creamy :)

A week on anabolic steroids please Mike

It's a bit silly to peel a potato before cooking while having such limited food

As much as people like to talk about how wonderful life was in WW2, rationing must have been awful for a lot of people. Especially those who didn’t have the space to grow additional vegetables.

why didn't you just grate the cheese?

Ok, just starting to watch but I had to comment. You probably got a load of comments about this already, oats were not unrationed. They were rationed under the points system. Did you mean that when you said the gram amount was an agreed-upon amount?

So glad you're doing this Week On. I first became interested after watching the BBC series Wartime Farm, then started collecting books from Marguerite Patten & Jean Fullerton. I'm really excited to learn about your experiences!

I grew up on rations can well remember hoing to the sweetcshop to buy my sweets. They were all boiled sweets of course different flavours. No choc! We grew fruit and vegetables and kept chickens. We were very healthy

They'd have cooked their porridge in water and maybe added a little milk when serving. I still cook my porridge with 50/50 water/milk.

There were different phases of rationing during the war. At what point was this?

You should of grated the cheese it would go further. Good idea if we went back to basic food now with the prices.

I understand that rabbit was a staple during the war.

I'm actually surprised to hear that the coffee was not rationed in UK during WW2. Usually it's on the of first things that goes under rationing,

Good choice of week on mike👍 And of course week ons wouldn't be the same without Sir Basil😂🖤🐾🐈‍⬛

My grandmother would get a one ounce lamb chop per family member, for Sunday, and the rest of the meat ration in stew meat. The meat in the stew was more of a garnish!

Jeavons! It's been a while since I visited your channel! You know, I'm proud of you for carrying on, but I'm especially impressed with this week on! Not only interesting to see, but historically relevant! I'm looking forward to seeing how you're feeling at the end of it! Glad to look forward to something for the next few days! Cheers from America, to you and Grace! ^_^ PS - Stop using that cutting board right now. You're killing me, Mike... I work in a kitchen! Stop it! You're dulling your knives and getting glass/plastic bits in your food! STOP IT!

That's how you make porridge? I always just boil water, pour it into the oatmeal, let it absorb the water for a bit, then add the milk.

That little amount of cheese would kill me off

Good start, hoping to see a Woolton Pie make an appearance mid-week.

*A cat appears on screen* TO THE LIKE BUTTON!

I'm curious to see if the hay box will make an appearance, because not only was cooking fuel in short supply, but many housewives started working at the factories etc. and were still expected to have dinner on the table in the evening. (The hay box, by the way, is worth a look at any rate with today's food/energy prices and climate change).

I'm pretty sure the rations let you have all the potatoes and veggies you wanted.

This is such a fun idea! Way to go Mike! :D Also, in my mind powdered eggs will always remind me of the teleseries M*A*S*H. I know this series takes place during the war in Korea, but it's not that long after WWII. I wonder what French toast made with powdered eggs would taste like? Especially if all you had to make them with was powdered milk! ;)

World War II rationing was the first time in British history in which every single individual man, woman and child in the country was guaranteed a supply of dairy foods. That alone made a huge difference in nutritional intake. British children actually gained height on average compared to their pre-war counterparts, and British women on average increased their dress size.

This is idiotic. It misses the fact that there was NO RELATIONSHIP between what you were entitled to and what was available. Example: There once was a week where TWELVE ships from America carrying bacon were sunk in one week. Guess whether or not people got their bacon ration THAT month! And he is WAY off on the milk ration! Adult men basically DIDN'T GET ANY!

Goodness… Where do I start? 1. You eat powdered eggs all the time - they are used in loads of processed foods. They actually make them in Somerset still. 2. Soak your porridge overnight in a half and half water and milk mix - goes far more creamy, swells up so is more filling and far more apt according to the rationing ideal. 3. Most people added to their rations by including things such as self raised chickens, rabbits and game. Some more research was needed, perhaps?

not sure but in my aussie memory we didnt have instant porrige until the late 60s using real rolled oat which is heartier and sticks to your ribs can be cooked an used over a few days milk was usually added as a additive after not during cooking same as your sweetner either a tiny sprinkiling of sugar or jam golden syrup or treacle as sweetner and dribble of of milk on top will deadened your tastebuds to the no sweet and no milk in the actual porridge my morenanna used the bacon fat and drippings saved from the meat frying of the cottage pie meat for pan fried day old bread for lunch salt pepper to taste i think my morenanna and liput cooked real porridge as the bulkner in her meatloaf and pies pasties