HISTORY: Preserved

Ever since seeing BBC's "Wartime Farm" series, I've been fascinated with the idea of a "pig club" that many rural folks in Britain participated in during WWII. The concept is this: a group of people in a community were given permission to raise a pig, feeding it from their collective food scraps. Then come slaughter time the government claimed a portion of the meat and those in the pig club could divide the rest amongst themselves.

Pig clubs were a great way for several families to benefit from raising a pig together - the responsibility was shared and the meat was shared as well. As far as I'm aware, no rationing was involved for this program. The government did take its share, but still. It was yet another great idea the Brits had for conserving resources, but also making a way for families to have a little extra meat that didn't have to cycle through the rationing system.

Of course, this gets my modern sensibilities working... Many people have …

This week I wanted to look into the less common, non-rationed sources of protein encouraged by the government to use during wartime. Fish is a big one.
I've always liked this U.S. Food Administration poster from WWI. It makes a very good point - cows, pigs, and chickens all needed to be fed and cared for while fish took care of themselves. They used no resources that people could also use. It was wise for the government to encourage people to eat self-sustaining fish.

World War II was no different. Even more than before, the country's resources needed to be used in the most efficient way possible and fish was still an excellent self-sustaining protein.
Here's a poster from WWII encouraging the catching and use of fish as a wartime staple.


Rabbits were a great protein choice too since you could feed them off scraps, they reproduced quickly, and their protein is the densest by ratio of how much food they consume - much better than cows or pigs. I had never seen any wartime p…

Ack! This is the first time I've been late in posting my ration recipe. Not bad for 32 weeks and not being late once until now, even while on vacation! (Yeah, that's pretty awesome, huh? haha!)
I did do the ration recipe, so I didn't technically miss. I do have excuses and because it's my blog I get to list them:
1. I'm working on a book right now and it sucked a lot of time this week. That's pretty exciting!
2. Did I mention that I'm a homeschooling mom? Yeah, we started school this week.
3. Procrastination. Mostly born out of the fact that this week's recipe was, in my opinion, a bust, and that's a little depressing.

Okay, enough of that. Here we go.

Remember the ration week for Knox Gelatine Spread? Well, this week I decided to give the spread a try in one of their recipes. I was worried about it going bad just sitting in my fridge and wanted to use it up in one go. I went back to the Knox Gelatine booklet and decided on Scones since they sounde…

Our garden is in the throes of harvest bounty - such as it is with my lackluster watering habits. If I had a serious Victory Garden, I couldn't afford to be so lazy in watering my plants or to not do succession planting - this would be our winter eating we're talking about! Gardening is something I love, but I am still learning to be better at it and to be more attentive.

Many times when we look back at our grandmothers we assume they all knew how to garden, can, and bake their whole lives because that is just what you did back then. But during my research I found that that was not always the case. Even some of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had a steep learning curve. Wartime conditions asked women to do all sorts of things they'd never done before, including improving skills they had or learning entirely new skills of baking, canning, and gardening. Managing a small kitchen garden was not the same as managing your entire yard turned into a garden - imagine proc…

The minute I saw this drink recipe for Mint Tinkle in Grandma's Wartime Kitchen by Joanne Lamb Hayes, I had to try it! I'll admit it was mostly because of its funny name. Could you really offer this drink to some party guests with a straight face? Would you really be able to take yourself seriously while sipping on an icy cold glass of Mint Tinkle? I had to try it to find out; if anything to just experience Mint Tinkle!
This recipe calls for corn syrup. I usually avoid using corn syrup, but as it was a staple in wartime kitchens to help save on sugar ration points, and because the ginger ale called for in the recipe has corn syrup in it anyway, I thought I'd make an exception this time. 
I really love that sugar was rationed during the war. Our society then and now were so dependent upon sugar, and wartime shortages forced them to go back to their roots from their grandparents' time when sugar wasn't so plentiful or affordable and to get creative. As for corn syru…