HISTORY: Preserved

The winner of the amazing Health for Victory booklet is...

Heather M. H.!
Thanks to everyone who entered! And thank you so much for stopping by to check out some of the amazing and interesting recipes I've experimented with in 2014. I appreciate every single visit. :-) I hope you'll continue to come back and try some of the ration recipes I've featured here.



So, through a year of cooking my way through all kinds of WWII ration recipes I've learned a lot. Among the things I've learned are:

1. The cooks of the  '40s were awesome at portion size. They never ceased to amaze me.

2. There are great ways of replacing sugar in recipes like using jams/marmalades, sweetened condensed milk, cake crumbs, canned fruit syrup, and molasses!

3. There was a huge different between the rationing experiences of the Brits compared with the Americans. The Americans had much more variety in ingredients and recipes.

4. I conquered some fears to try some odd recipes involving liver, Je…

I have my son to thank for the last ration recipe of my project! I was making last week's recipe, the Peanut Brittle Ice Cream, and on the next page he saw the recipe for Strawberry Refrigerator Cake. He loves strawberries, so when he saw that he begged me to make it. haha! I had a few recipes I was debating about, but he was so cute about asking me, and it was a technique of the time period I haven't experimented with yet, so I thought why not? Not to mention, I thought ending the project with a celebratory cake was a great idea!

For me, refrigerator cakes are something I associate with the 1950s, but they apparently date much earlier than that. In the 1940s, more people than ever had replaced their ice boxes with refrigerators thanks to widened availability of electricity. The air circulated better and they kept things cooler; not to mention you didn't need large blocks of ice delivered. Many refrigerators even had little frozen compartments big enough for making ice cub…

To celebrate the coming close of my project next week, I wanted to sincerely thank all of you who have followed me on this fun and crazy adventure of making one ration recipe a week for the year 2014. I hope I've inspired you to try some of these amazing historical recipes, and if not, I hope I've given you something interesting to read and learn about at least! :-)

As an extra special thank you, I wanted to give away* one of the amazing resources I've depended on for this project - an original copy of the August 1943 Westinghouse Health for Victory Meal Planning Guide!


This issue focuses on the importance of getting "the basic 7" into wartime meals. It has some fabulous food photos and is an intriguing historical look at the ration diet. The best part is that it has tons of recipes!
To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below with:  1) your first name 2) which ration recipe post was your favorite and why  3) which ration recipe you'd like to try
The deadli…

I was having a hard time coming up with my last couple recipes to try. It's just so hard to choose! I was going through my books and I found a resource that I bought awhile back, but hadn't used for this project yet - "Metropolitan Cook Book". I couldn't believe I'd forgotten about it! When I saw the recipe for Peanut Brittle Ice Cream I knew I'd found this week's recipe! Ice cream has been on my list of ration recipes to make too, so it was perfect.

To me, peanut brittle, like candy canes, means Christmas is here. :-) Usually a bunch of festive ice creams come out around Christmas-time like Peppermint Ice Cream, but I honestly can't say that I've seen a peanut brittle flavor in the stores. I don't know why. It seems an obvious combination to me.

The interesting thing about WWII and ice cream is that ice cream production was stopped during the war because of the milk and sugar rationing. If people wanted ice cream, they had to make it the…

I don't know about you, but eggnog was a Christmas tradition in my family growing up. The holidays just wouldn't be complete without a glass of sweet, cold, creamy, nutmeg-hinted delight. I just love that stuff! I've had all kinds of eggnog over the years. Some amazing, some not that great. I even made my own cooked eggnog from scratch as a teenager once. I think I ended up scorching it on the bottom, because I don't remember it tasting that great. Regular ol' store bought eggnog, in my opinion, is too cloyingly sweet and much too thick. I always thin it out with milk. It also has a bunch of weird junk in it. Then a few years ago I tried an eggnog made from grass-fed cow's milk & cream... oh my. It was amazing! All eggnogs are definitely not created equal.

I was really excited to try an eggnog recipe for one of my final ration recipes. And I'm pretty sure that most people will not want to try this recipe. The biggest reason is because this Eggnog recip…