Wartime Christmas (eBook)

Andrew Hubert, Maria Hubert (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
204 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-1-80399-513-7 (ISBN)

Infos

For those who lived through wartime Christmases, the celebrations during those years had an especially poignant flavour. This unique anthology recreates those times of heartache and brief moments of pleasurable escape and happiness. Share with wartime veterans and their families memories of Christmas under fire; read about the gift of a pig for POWs' dinner from the Japanese emperor and how Glenn Miller's disappearance almost ruined the AEF Christmas show; enjoy ENSA veterans' anecdotes of Christmas concerts in the most awkward situations. From Christmas on the Russian Front, on board ship in heaving seas and a soldier's experiences in Egypt, 'It ain't arf hot' pantomimes and the Archbishop of York's Christmas message in 1940, to an account of life in the Warsaw ghetto, here is a collection of what made Christmas special during the years of the Second World War. Illustrated throughout, A Wartime Christmas showcases the hope, warmth and colour that the occasion inspired during those bleak times.

Textauszug

CHRISTMAS ON THE KITCHEN FRONT

Christmas was a great problem for the housewife, with most foods rationed, and queues for everything else; many would save items all through the year. A bit of dried fruit one week, some tinned fruit the next; her collection of useful recipes would grow too. The Ministry of Food published many leaflets giving seasonal ‘best buys’, and there were a number of food experts and chefs who were very prolific at this time. Ambrose Heath had cookery books on everything from tinned foods and unrationed foods to packed lunches and leftovers in the larder. Many of these wartime cookery books had cartoon covers by Fougasse, to keep the kitchen cheerful in adversity! Here are a few typical Christmas recipes, which a wartime housewife would be able to achieve, ration coupons permitting, taken from these wartime books, and from housewives, who developed a trick or two of their own! Magazines such as Good Housekeeping did much to keep morale high on the Kitchen Front, and to advise housewives of the best way to make do, as in this morale booster from the Christmas issue, probably around 1940.

A few of the most popular wartime cookbooks published to help the housewife ‘make-do-and-mend’. (Private collection)

KEEP UP THE CHRISTMAS TRADITION

Once again the Christmas message of good cheer is heard, and the staff of Good Housekeeping institute offer readers greetings and best wishes. We hope that so far as wartime conditions permit you will all have a happy festival, and we hope too that you will be able to extract some enjoyment from your Christmas cooking and catering, even though it will probably present you with extra difficulties and problems this year. Even if you have to manage without this or that ingredient, there are substitutes to hand, if you are prepared to exercise intelligence and ingenuity.

In the ordinary way you would probably have prepared your puddings and cakes already, but cooking fats being rationed and other ingredients short or difficult to obtain this year, mixtures will be plainer and so cannot be expected to keep so well. We have therefore waited until this month to publish recipes.

It is difficult to say, as we write, what the exact position will be regarding the supply of suet when this article is published, but the abnormally big demand which is to be anticipated at Christmas time may lead to individual difficulties in obtaining supplies for puddings. We are therefore giving you a recipe for an economical pudding in which almost any cooking fat, such as margarine or dripping can be used instead of suet.

Eggs also must be cut down, but if you have dried eggs these can be mixed with water to replace fresh ones. Dried fruit will probably be reasonably plentiful, but you may have to substitute one kind for another. If, however, you embark on your cooking prepared to contrive in this way, there is no reason why your Christmas dinner should suffer.

WARTIME MENUS

The menu Good Housekeeping recommends for the average household is:

Roast chicken and sausages with roast potatoes and curly kale

Scotch dumpling and custard sauce

Mince pies, dessert and coffee.

Not bad in the circumstances! And the better-off menu is hardly different from today’s:

Roast turkey with chestnut stuffing with roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts

Christmas pudding with brandy butter

Simple trifle with mock cream

Dessert and coffee.

That the brandy butter is more likely to be brandy margarine, and the coffee made with acorns or dandelion root is all part of the big morale boost.

Morale boosts apart, what did the average family sit down to at Christmas? From our investigations, few were fortunate enough to have turkey – as one man put it ‘all the trimmings maybe, but without the turkey’!

Let’s start with the Christmas cake; for many, the only thing they managed to save coupons for. Many of the wartime cakes were plain spice cakes with a handful of fruit. Elaborate cardboard covers were made, and decorated to look like iced cakes. Very pretty on the table, and also kept the cake, which was served in small slices to last that bit longer, clean and moist underneath. But Stork Margarine (Van den Bergs) published a wartime cookery book which had something just a bit special for servicemen coming home for Christmas, or indeed to send to the men in the forces. A long-keeping cake iced with the symbols of the Army, the Navy or the Air Force. Expensive on coupons, but for many families, it was a way to show their loved ones how much they cared. The traditional moist Christmas cake recipe was then covered with icing made from blue dyed icing with a darker blue for waves (for the senior service); coffee essence coloured the icing to a khaki colour for the Army, and a white icing with the coloured RAF wings emblem for the Air Force.

The Ministry of Food (MOF) in 1942 published a leaflet with a delicious recipe for stuffed mutton, fruit pies, Christmas pudding and emergency cream which was remarkably effective.

McDougall’s published a heart-warming recipe for a sugarless Christmas pudding in 1940:

McDougall’s cheerful Christmas advertisement for sugarless Christmas pudding. (Private collection)

½ lb McDougall’s SR flour

1 teaspoonful each spice and cinnamon

¼ teaspoonful each salt and nutmeg

½ lb breadcrumbs

½ lb shredded suet

½ lb each currants and sultanas

¼ lb mixed peel

6 oz chopped dates

1 large cooking apple grated

1 large carrot grated

6 oz treacle or syrup or honey

4 eggs

1½ gill milk, 1 gill brandy (optional)

Mix all together, put into greased basins and cover, then steam for five hours.

For a Christmas Eve supper, the MOF leaflet for December 1942 suggested Hampton pie:

½ lb cooked sausages

½ gill milk

Tablespoonful mustard

1 onion chopped and fried

1 dessertspoonful parsley

2 tablespoonfuls ketchup

Mashed potato to cover

Slice the sausage, mix with parsley, ketchup, mustard and stock. Arrange sausage in layers alternating with fried onion rings. Cover with mashed potato and bake in hot oven. That would have served two adults.

For the children, the MOF tried very hard at Christmas to create something for a treat – and in those days treats were treats! One housewife who kept a wartime recipe and household hints book, had an MOF leaflet with a recipe for cinnamon drops, to which she adds the note that, ‘tied up in twists of paper, these make pretty take-home gifts after a tea-party, or to put in the stocking.’

5 teaspoonfuls ground cinnamon

8 oz sugar

¼ pint water

Mix the cinnamon with the sugar, add the water and stir over a gentle heat until the sugar is dissolved, then boil rapidly without stirring until the crack stage (use a jam thermometer). That is, when dropped in cold water, mixture hardens immediately. For this quantity allow twenty minutes. Drop in small pieces from the point of a knife on to a greased plate and leave to harden.

This same housewife has a recipe for wartime toffee, using 2 oz sugar, 4 oz syrup, 2 teaspoonfuls bicarbonate of soda. Boil sugar and syrup together and add bicarb; stir quickly and put on to greased dish. No doubt this was a special treat for either her own children or perhaps if she was in charge of a children’s home or school, and made these things for the children in her charge. Her recipe book is full of such delights, but sadly she left no record of her name. The book ends abruptly with only a few pages used.

One of the last entries is for gingerbread men, ‘To put in the top of the stockings’.

2 oz sugar or syrup

2 oz margarine

8 oz plain flour

½ teaspoonful spice

2 teaspoonfuls ginger

1 level teaspoonful bicarb and lemon juice.

Melt syrup, sugar and margarine in a bowl, add a little flour, spice and lemon. Beat until smooth. Dissolve bicarb in a tablespoonful of tepid water and allow to cool. Then add the flour to mixture, blending to a stiff dough. Knead until smooth. Make head, body, arms and legs and stick together with egg. Add currants for eyes.

Having had the chicken, if they were lucky, or the mock goose or stuffed mutton (basically the same thing!) with root vegetables, and a small portion of pudding and custard or mock cream for Christmas dinner, most families amused themselves by playing games until tea-time. This meal was not usually a collation between lunchtime and dinner as it is now, but during the war years was served about 6 p.m., and served as a supper, so Christmas Day tea-time was fairly substantial by the order of the day. Bread and margarine, or perhaps a little lemon curd made with dried egg, a few ounces of margarine and sugar and orange or lemon. This would make one jar, which spread thinly, could serve about eight people at a sitting, or last throughout the week!

Cheese tartlets were served hot or cold and consisted of short paste cases with a filling made from 2 oz breadcrumbs, 2 oz grated ends of cheese, 1 dried egg and 1 oz margarine, salt, pepper, milk and a pinch of baking-powder. This quantity in 4 oz pastry was supposed to suffice for four servings, according to the Ministry of Food.

Syrup was a little easier to get than sugar, so ginger snaps, made with 2 oz margarine, 1 tablespoonful...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.11.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Schlagworte: AEF • aef christmas show • Anecdotes • Anthology • Archbishop of York • Celebrations • Christmas • concerts • Egypt • ENSA • ensa veterans • Family • fire • Gift • Glenn Miller • it ain • it ain't half hot • Memories • Panto • pantomime|archbishop of york • pantomimes • Pig • POWs • Prisoners of war • Reminiscences • Russian Front • Second World War • t arf hot • veterans • Warsaw Ghetto • warsaw gh|warsaw ghetto • wartime • World War 2 • World War II • World War Two • ww2 • WWII
• ISBN-10: 1-80399-513-0 / 1803995130
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80399-513-7 / 9781803995137