Several years ago, as we were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, I attended a seminar on American eating habits. The keynote speaker awakened the audience by saying “when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, American women left the kitchen and never returned.” I knew she was wrong. Although I wasn’t very old on December 7, 1941, most of my time was spent in the kitchen and I remembered things being pretty busy there. I was determined to find the truth about women in wartime America. As I thought about all the good things that came from that kitchen, I got hungrier and hungrier. But where were those recipes? Long replaced in my mother’s recipe book by “more up-to-date things,” those fresh, frugal, from-scratch recipes for which I hungered had to be around somewhere. Thus started a quest through libraries, used-book and -magazine stores, and yard sales that filled my living room with piles of yellowing printed material and my kitchen with delicious memories. As I was reading the cookbooks, magazine food articles, and consumer pamphlets, I felt that I was given the opportunity to peek into a 1940s icebox or “mechanical” refrigerator. What was inside not only gave clues to the tastes of the times but to the ingenuity of the American homemaker when faced with a unique set of circumstances.
In addition to finding the recipes I remembered, I discovered a lot about the women who created them. Did they leave the home? Yes, when the government asked for their help, they responded immediately. All over the country, women followed the example of Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder. Some learned to do jobs formerly done by men, others became clerical workers or Red Cross volunteers, and many ran family farms. According to Mintz and Kellogg in Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, the number of women in the labor force soared from 14 to 19 million. Nearly half of all American women held a job at some point during the war. While in peacetime, employed women were mostly young and unmarried, during the war three quarters of the women entering the work force were married.
But did they leave their kitchens? Only for a part of their day. Not only were they not given permission to ease up on kitchen standards because of all the extra responsibilities they had taken on, but the media continued to emphasize the importance of providing hearty menus, setting an attractive table, and appearing perfectly attired and coifed for the dinner hour. In essence, women were asked to work harder and harder, and they rose to the challenge.
As long as mostly regular Army and young single enlistees left for Europe, a woman’s role was still clearly that of homemaker. In 1942, magazines told homemakers “your first job in wartime is to feed your family well,” “our home front lies in the kitchens of America,” “American housewives are responsible for keeping eighteen times as many men properly fed on the Production Front as those who feed the men on the Fighting Front.” Women were reminded that “There’s a War Job in every kitchen” and were addressed as “the first home guard” and “soldiers in house dresses.” But by 1943, the message to women was to get a job. Government-sponsored ads clearly stated, “The more women at work, the sooner we’ll win,” “your country needs you in a vital job,” and “harness that housework energy and skill to any home front service.” Persuasion took many different forms. A well-dressed model in a fashion article advised readers, “This is the way I look for a job,” while a uniformed WAC quipped, “I’d rather be with them than waiting for them.”
Although the media continued to support women’s wartime roles through the summer of 1945, they gradually began to construct the foundations for a very different postwar lifestyle. For most women there was no decision: The day the war ended thousands of them all over America were fired to make jobs available for returning soldiers. As their world shrank back to the home, women continued to garden and can as they had during the war. However, many of the delicious dishes made with alternative wartime ingredients became memories as new supermarkets became filled with frozen, dehydrated, and packaged products.
There is no question in my mind that the memory of those three years, eight months, and seven days has dominated all else that has happened to America in this century. The men and women who pulled together “for the duration” came out of the experience with the confidence and energy to build a dynamic nation. And even today, if you get several of them together in a room the conversation sooner or later turns to “The War.” In 1941, I was too young to know exactly what was happening and to know that things weren’t always going to be that way, but I remember the blackouts, standing in line for ration books, boarders living in our extra room, and the shelves of beautifully canned fruit and vegetables in our basement. I was never hungry—I don’t think many Americans were—but we were all reminded that our Allies in Europe needed a share of our bounty because the war had destroyed their farms and factories. The most exciting evening of my young life was the night in August of 1945 when the lights came on at the movie theater in our small town. The whole town came out to see it.
In collecting the recipes for this book, I spoke to women who had cooked for their families during those trying times. They were unanimous in their feeling of pride in their contribution to the cause and their certainty that there was not really a lack of food, just not always the kind of food you really wanted. Many look back to the thriftiness they had learned during the First World War and the Depression to come up with creative ways to cope with the shortages. Surprisingly, many of those techniques and the dishes they are associated with have come to represent comfort to us today. Rather than reminding us of a time when a threatening world made it necessary for us to raise and preserve our own fruits and vegetables and eat lots of meat loaf so a half pound of beef would serve six, they remind us of the security of Grandma’s kitchen and the delicious foods that came from it. The pages that follow are filled with those memories, translated and tested for today’s kitchens, but still just as delicious, nourishing, and time saving as they were fifty years ago.
In addition, you will find an occasional “Wartime Special” recipe, printed just the way it was published during the war. These recipes are so much a part of their time that you probably won’t want to serve them today, but they are an interesting record of the ways in which people coped and I found them lots of fun to read.