The Great Depression in the Dust Bowl before the WW2 conflict was very difficult. That area is typically the bread basket of the world. My mother lived to be 102 and noted her happy family with a fiddle playing father and cinnamon rolls baking mother felt happy to get oranges and nuts! That was their xmas in lean years! That region also does not have many trees. People now do not realize how prosperous they are. Cheers. and great recipe station and hostess!
I don't think it's a burn to be cheaper than "real" 1940's house wives. This was a reality for many people who didn't have so many family members. For my grandfather it was just him and his mother. His brothers were all fighting in the war and his father had died. They lived in a tiny farm house out in the middle of nowhere. When Granny passed I found and kept their ration books.
This was so entertaining! I'm a new subscriber. It's also Sept 2023 when I'm watching this, so I'm enjoying the Christmas theme while it's 86 degrees outside! "I'm dedicated to my bullshit". 🤣🤣🤣
Love those innovative cooks who come up with these amazing recipes. I have a pamphlet (yes gov issue) on how to salvage your meal if you have to leave off in the middle of preparation and go into a bomb shelter. It is a crack-up. Pity is, it was a serious issue. I am sure that, like you, the best ingredient was the addition of a little humour. Love your work. 🤣
Holiday Fruit Cake - From my aunt Shirley Hennessey but I don’t know where it originally came from. My grandmother always made it at Christmas. Notice it is in loaf pans. There is no frosting but you can drizzle on a little icing. I like it warm. ★★★★★ Cakes, Desserts, Holiday/Party Fare Prep Time: 15 mins Cook Time: 1 hr 45 mins Servings: 24 INGREDIENTS 3/4 cup butter, softened 2 cups granulated sugar 1 cup milk 3 cups flour, sifted 2 teaspoons baking powder 3 large eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla 12 ounces candied cherries 6 ounces candied pineapple 3/4 cup blanched almonds 6 ounces candied citron 2 cups coconut 2 cups raisins, white, seedless DIRECTIONS 1. Mix all ingredients except; candied fruit, raisins, coconut, and nuts. 2. Beat 3 minutes on high speed. After mixing well, fold in candied fruit, raisins, coconut, and nuts. ingredients. 3. Use 2 loaf pans and grease well and/or line with Parchment. 4. Pour mixture into pans and bake in preheated oven, at 300 degrees, for about 1-1/2 to 2 hours. Cover with foil last hour to keep from over-browning. Cool for 10 minuthes then remove from pan and cool completely. Can use walnuts , hickory nuts, or pecans in place of almonds. Freeze this if you wish; thaw slowly. Yield: 2 loaves of fragrant, delicious Christmas fruit cakes. NUTRITION Per Serving (excluding unknown items): 278 Calories; 12g Fat (36.6% calories from fat); 4g Protein; 41g Carbohydrate; 1g Dietary Fiber; 43mg Cholesterol; 143mg Sodium. Exchanges: 1 Grain(Starch); 0 Lean Meat; 0 Fruit; 0 Non-Fat Milk; 2 Fat; 2 Other Carbohydrates.
I gotta say. As a 12 yr vegan with a ficination with war time recipes. I just found you and I'm thoroughly enjoying your videos. Can we do more war time pantry recipes. P.s. that vegetable oat crust pie *chefs kiss*
Please do more recipes. I love the dry humour, the little rebellions over the mean allowance of golden syrup, etc. With the bits of poato and fake meat in the pan, you should have put in a bit of water and dried herbs, and made itinto a gravy, for your mince slices, etc, the following day.
I love the recipes, my heart rejoices when you kick the traces and add double the golden syrup. My sort of cook! I cannot follow a recipe. Always, I add more of the nice stuff. Just have to have an affair with a dark, brooding, handsome dairy farmer's son and in that fantasy, have dinners twice a week at the farm, with extra cheese, butter and cream.
I'm sure the baking time for the cake was so long because in wartime, they would heat the oven to temperature, then turn it off after the food was placed into the oven, then it was baked with residual heat.
Lemon substitute at the time would have been citric acid accourding to my 94 yo mother, who lived through WWII being born in 1929. She learned it from her mum in their daily cooking. In later years, my mum wouldn't cook with regular lemons for some of her dishes, swearing that the citric acid tasted better.
Thank you for doing the marzipan. Ive looked at all my wartime recipes about a dozen times each over the past weeks and couldn't commit to one. Haha. I don't mind at all that you veganise it, wartime recipes are about substitution on top of substitution. The bacon looks interesting though but overall that "turkey "sounds yum. Pulling out that exact recipe right now. Thank you again.
I don't want to be rude, because I do very much like this video start to finish, but if you're trying to make a Faux/Ersatz Marzipan and you have ground almonds then that is just a regular Marzipan, the other ingredients are just sugar (Caster and Icing) and eggs to make a normal Marzipan, the idea was to make some in the absence of almonds.
I think her recipe called for a small amount of ground almonds, it wasn't something she just added to make it more like marzipan. I am assuming that almonds were more difficult to get during the war, especially in England. I am not sure, I was too young at the time to remember all the things that were in short supply or rationed.
Cracking vid i just got to see it your cake will cook in 2 hrs but it will be at a lower temp of 140 or 150 degree centigrade as it is a heavy cake and needs long slow baking and soaking the fruits will help or simmer them for about 5 or 10 mins in juice alcohol or water keep up yer guid work thanks.
Are these uploaded elsewhere? I am leaving yt and I enjoy revisiting these. Hope life is great for you. If this is a year old and listed as newest, it seems you left yt before me!
Certainly very expensive to buy. They take time, often, but unless you are buying lab produced fake meat, the products should be far cheaper as a product, to produce. I saw a chickpea vegan recipe for fake pork steak on yt, that looked YUMMY. You could do a huge burger with tons of salsd and hommus, and it would be HEAVEN. If you are willing to make yourself, they are cheap. Best to make a bulk supply and freeze for easy meals.
Might I ask where you located the recipes? I love collecting war-time recipes for their history and would love to add the Christmas ones to my collection.
Of course! Mock Turkey - I could only find references to this online and not the original leaflet/book, but the recipe is reprinted in ‘Wartime Farm’ by Peter Ginn, Ruth Goodman and Alex Langlands Potatoes - ‘Potatoes’ leaflet number 17, Ministry of Food (you can find this reprinted in ‘Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking’ with foreword by Jill Norman, available on Kindle - it’s just a huge collection of MoF leaflets so very helpful for having them all in the same place on my phone) Christmas Cake - from the Christmas Ministry of Food leaflet I showed in the video - scans and reprints of this can be found on google but I don’t know where to find a hard copy unfortunately. Mock Marzipan - from a leaflet entitled ‘Government Recipes’, which I found reprinted in ‘Ration Book Cookery: Recipes and History’ published by English Heritage
Im an Australian I haven’t heard of mock turkey for years I used to love it but ours was made from tomatoes and breadcrumbs along with a few other things. I was not a child of the war but born in ‘48. But a lot of things were still hard to get here mainly building materials. I don’t remember food shortages like in uk. Having said that we used to make all our own jams and preserves. Both my grandparents and parents had gardens that grew veggies as well. We used to shop at the market for meat fish and some produce. I think we were better fed then than we are now. Both mum and dad worked.’
I can’t believe people give you crap for making the recipes vegan. What do they expect you to do, make it with meat and then throw it out because you don’t eat it? I mean, come on people! I would never make them vegan for myself because I do eat meat, but it’s not hard to understand to just use standard sausages, bacon, milk, butter etc and voila it’s not vegan! All of the method is exactly the same. People are idiots. Grrrr. Anyway. The tinned beans would be why the mock marzipan is softer than normal marzipan. Tinned beans are fully cooked. Beans that have been soaked swell up and soften a bit, but they’re a long way off soft. I think grinding up soaked beans would have turned out more like a moist flour than a wet paste. Much closer to actual almond meal. I haven’t done it, but I do make my Gran’s bean soup recipe regularly and if I use soaked beans it needs to simmer for about 3 hours for them to get as soft as tinned beans.
I kind of get it for the Dinner and a Dress series because I'm otherwise trying to make the recipes as 'by the book' as possible, and they tend to be weirder and involve more gymnastics to veganise, but for the most part I think people watch a video and imagine this is like a BBC production rather than one person with very weird interests making it as a hobby, lmao. Or at least it doesn't register with people that I make something like this and then eat it for dinner for like the whole of the following week (the mock turkey did about ten meals...). So I've got better at shrugging it off. THANK YOU for the tinned beans insight, that hadn't occurred to me! Also just goes to show that even if I tried harder to make things authentically, there's always going to be stuff I overlook because the way we process and buy food has changed so much!
@@ohpapillon well perhaps I’m just equally weird then, because I also love making old recipes for fun, I just don’t film them for RU-vid. I do them to eat and experience history in a small way, although I do make use of my modern appliances to make it easier! Murkey has been on my list to try since I first watched Wartime Farm (I might halve the recipe after seeing how big yours was!). Also the meat roll she made for the emergency feeding centre. I think a slice of that on a sandwich would be fabulous. I’ve done a few recipes I’ve seen on Utility Jude’s channel, and another on my to do list is the steamed chocolate pudding from Wartime Kitchen and Garden. I was going to do that to take to Christmas as it was easy to veganise for my sister, but I didn’t end up going due to covid concerns. I wonder if I should quickly do it tonight to take to Easter tomorrow… hmmm. At the moment I’m roughly following a diet to help my adrenals which requires carbs at each meal, so I’ve been flicking through my wartime recipe books again looking for creative ways to utilise leftover mashed potatoes, and also my chickens are moulting right now so I’m only getting one egg a day which means I need to think up some breakfasts without eggs. Where better to look than wartime cookbooks!! So I don’t think it would have occurred to me that you wouldn’t eat it because I make them to eat! You’re welcome re the tinned beans info. I’m also into preserving food and do some American style canning as well as our Aussie methods which are closer to British methods. When you get into all of that, you learn how they make lots of those canned foods and then the differences make a lot of sense. It is pretty amazing how much things have changed with the way food is processed. The war probably started a lot of that, or at least made those products more popular, like powdered milk, powdered eggs, spam, canned corned beef, canned fish etc. It has gone a long way beyond that now though. I have my mum’s Women’s Weekly cookbook from the early 70’s. That was the main cookbook a woman would get here when she got married. It’s full of recipes that use convenience ingredients. You know, a casserole that uses a can of condensed soup type recipes. I haven’t quite worked out exactly when convenience ingredients became normal, but I think it was sometime in the 60’s so I’m trying to collect cookbooks from before then because I want to cook from scratch. My mum used all of those convenience ingredients because that’s what was done when I was young, plus she had a back injury so it was easier for her. I’ve had health issues since I was a child. I don’t know for sure that those ingredients were part of my health issues, but it certainly can’t hurt me to cook everything from scratch myself. I’m actually planning to move to the country very soon and then I’ll have a big organic veggie garden and grow as much as I can so it’s really from scratch! My goal is to get so close to self sufficient that I only need to go to the supermarket once a year. That’s my 5 year goal. See, told you I’m weird too 😂😂😂
@@moniquem783 I think that Australia, at least, was really loving using tinned stuff and artificial stuff, in the 50's. England was still living on rations until the Queens Coronation. But that had been the Government dream. To begin the reign with joy unconfined - the New Elizabethan Age. Even then, things were hard to get. They weren't rationed, just not available. One of those famous 50's recipe books in Australia, had an INFAMOUS pudding to serve, that had half the population spraying drink, at the sight of it, and it appears, half the population seeing nothing dubious about it at all. You took a piece of tinned pineapple, put half a banana in the hole in the centre, sticking up like a flagpole, and were then advised to put 2 tinned cherries or strawberries on the plate, each side of the erect banana. With or without flourishes of whipped cream. So half the table were sniggering. Some of the recipes sound just woeful. So artificial - and the more artificial, the more people felt it was an improvement!
@@georgielancaster1356 actually I believe the candle salad was American and much older than the 50’s. But definitely Australians would snigger at that. One of my grandmothers hated cooking and used a lot of tinned food. My mum and auntie were laughing at Christmas about how their dad would hear a tin being opened and ask are you cooking dinner dear? My sister and I exchanged very funny looks because we both remember that Mum had an electric can opener and she wore it out!!! 😂😂 My other grandmother was Italian and loved cooking and cooked almost everything from scratch. I think part of it is whether you enjoy cooking, and part is how you were taught to cook. If both of those are positive things, then the tins and convenience foods are there for occasional use or for emergencies etc, but if you weren’t taught to cook properly and it’s a chore to you, it makes sense that you’ll reach for those things more and more. I do wonder if the war meant a whole lot of girls didn’t learn how to cook properly. With all the rations, just about any meal you can think of needed to be adapted in some way. And because the rations continued for so long afterwards, and then as you say things were still hard to get, that whole generation of girls probably wasn’t taught the basics. For example there wasn’t enough butter to spare to make proper gravy, so they ended up turning to gravy granules, or they were never really confident with baking cakes because they’d only been taught how to make ration adjusted cakes, so when the cake mix came out they jumped on it. It makes sense. But that then gets passed on to the next generation and the next and you end up with people like me who were taught to open jars and tins and packets. But luckily we now have RU-vid to fill the gaps of what my mum didn’t have the skills to teach me 😊
For an ordinary recipe I would have! Because this was specifically a project using a vintage recipe, which didn’t call for that, I didn’t. It didn’t seem likely that there would be the same availability- according to the BBC, alcohol was so scarce in 1944 that ‘one indicator showing this is the fact that, of the half million inhabitants of Kensington, Hammersmith, Fulham and Chelsea, in London, only one woman was arrested that year for drunkenness over the holiday.’ It probably contributes to the dryness of the cake, but the main factor is definitely the over long baking time.
For lemon? I thought it might be that, as the last alternative. But one would hope at some point, you could get hold of a tin of citric acid or concentrated lemon or lime, from America, or somewhere, at sometime in the 3 to 6 months approaching Xmas.
Tried to watch this but I found her irritating. Had to stop watching! She doesn’t use authentic ingredients either. What’s the point if she isn’t following proper ingredients.
Please do more recipes. I love the dry humour, the little rebellions over the mean allowance of golden syrup, etc. With the bits of poato and fake meat in the pan, you should have put in a bit of water and dried herbs, and made itinto a gravy, for your mince slices, etc.
