With the arrival of a new century and a new millennium, it’s hardly surprising that several cookbooks have surfaced to trace our culinary journey through the twentieth century. What is surprising is the scant attention they pay to World War II and its impact upon the way we ate and the way we cooked even though that impact is still felt today.
With Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked, Joanne Lamb Hayes amply fills the void. Her coverage of the forties—the war decade—is painstakingly researched yet fascinating to read, thanks to her own childhood memories plus those of countless moms across the country who coped and cooked in those lean days of food rationing.
I was a little girl when World War II broke out and so many of the things my own mother did to stretch meat and salve her family’s sweet tooth despite strict sugar rationing sprang to mind as I read Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen. I’m grateful to Joanne Lamb Hayes for explaining what I was too young to understand at the time (and didn’t bother to learn later). Why, for example, did roast chicken, fricasseed rabbit, and braised beef heart replace prime ribs and roast leg of lamb as the traditional centerpieces of our Sunday dinners? (Because poultry and game weren’t rationed and lesser cuts of meat required fewer points.) Why did so many of our desserts begin with a can of purple plums? (The heavy syrup in which they were packed could be used as a sweetener.) Why did our home-made ice creams always contain sweetened condensed milk? (It was an effective sweetener.) And why was the margarine we used in place of butter white? (Dairy farmers, a powerful voice even then, insisted that yellow margarine not be sold.) The brand Mother bought came with a little capsule of orange dye and my job was to knead it in slowly, thoroughly, so that the white blob turned a bright buttery hue. Not easy even though the kneading could be done right in the unopened cellophane package.
The book’s discussion of Victory Gardens reminded me of my own family’s war effort, which included not only a vegetable garden and strawberry patch but also chickens for eggs and for eating. I’ll never forget the day Daddy brought home a cardboard box filled with cheeping balls of fluff. Or helping him improvise a basement pen of boards, then adding low-wattage lightbulbs to keep the baby chicks warm.
When the birds graduated to the backyard, it was my chore to feed them, gather eggs, and—I still shudder to think—pluck and eviscerate the over-the-hill hens that my father killed. Hardly child’s play. These tough old birds would be simmered into soups and stews. Or just cooked until so tender so that the meat could be stripped from the bones, then slipped into sandwiches, salads, and casseroles.
The “Cultivate and Can” chapter spun me back to the canning marathons that took place every summer in my mother’s kitchen. The whole family would pitch in, and to keep my brother and me interested, my parents turned the tomato peeling, bean snapping, and corn husking into a competition. (If memory serves, the fastest peeler/snapper/husker got a dollar.) Platoons of canning jars stood at the ready as did Mother’s pressure canner, a jiggling, steam-spewing monster that terrified me.
Mother’s mantra in those war years: “Eat your vegetables…eat your vegetables…eat your vegetables.” And Daddy’s: “Eat your carrots, they’ll make your eyes bright.” Both, no doubt, were steeped in the cheery snippets of “victory advice” dished out by the leading magazines of the day, the major food companies, and not least, the United States government. Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen includes scores of these: “Your first job in wartime is to feed your family well”; “Eat the Right Food, U.S. Needs US strong”; “Vitamins Vital for Victory.”
Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen is a valuable resource that shows us how inventive our mothers and grandmothers were at coping with World War II rationing of meat, sugar, butter, cheese, and a staggering array of canned foods, often while holding jobs outside the home. And this, mind you, without electric dishwashers and all the other labor-saving appliances we take for granted today.
Particularly touching is the quote on here from a woman who came home from work dead tired, put a proper meal on the table for her children, then stayed up half the night canning produce from her Victory Garden. Sad to say, she, along with millions of other patriotic women, were fired at the war’s end to make room for the returning soldiers. How many of us knew that?
If only for its in-depth documentation of the 1940s, Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen is a welcome addition to twentieth-century American literature. But it is a cookbook, too, a splendid one that serves up a memorable collection of forties recipes, the quick and easy “comfort foods” so many of us crave today in this age of show-off chefs: meat loaves (some with soy flour added to pump up the protein), ham and egg pie, chicken and waffles, corn fritters, potato rolls, winter squash biscuits, raised chocolate cake, whipped cream cake, Dutch apple cake—plus a fascinating group of frugal recipes showing how to trim precious sugar and butter by using cake, cookie, and cracker crumbs.
Grandmas Wartime Kitchen includes so many of the recipes I remember my mother making that to curl up with it is like taking a trip home. For me, no other book so effectively recaptures the scents, the sights, and the sounds of my youth.
And no other book gives the 1940s their proper place in our culinary history.
Jean Anderson, author of THE AMERICAN CENTURY COOKBOOK