thewartimekitchen.com

Since meat was rationed, vegetables became an important staple of the wartime diet. With the implementation of the “Dig for Victory” campaign, carrots were one of the important foods that helped win the war. Housewives had the great  experience of preparing such culinary delights as Carrot Biscuits (cookies), Carrot Marmalade (the shredded carrots looked like and served as mock orange peel), carrot on a stick (advertised to children “as good as a lollipop”) and carrot juice drinks from recipes found in the Ministry’s “War Cookery Leaflet 4.″ As sugar was rationed, carrots were also used as a sweetener in baked goods.

When the Ministry of Food was faced with a bumper crop of carrots in 1941,  they used various forms of media to inform the British public that eating carrots would help them see better during the war-imposed blackouts. “Dr. Carrot” was created as a symbol to remind people to eat more vegetables and help reduce the surplus carrot crop.  Posters with the slogan “Carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout”  were plastered throughout the country.

Isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?” (Lord Woolton, Minister of Food, 1941)

By December of 1940, store shelves were getting  bare. Most shops had run out of items such as tinned (canned) salmon, meat, and fruit. But the Ministry of Food had a plan:  Ration points. On December 1, 1941 (a week before the US enters the war due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor), if you had a ration book, you would receive sixteen points per month to spend on any food items you liked (and were available).

The first items up for grabs with ration points were canned items: fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit.  Soon other items were added as they became more scarce, such as condensed milk, cereals, crackers, cookies,  and sweets. There was a catch. The prices in “points” varied depending on the availability of the items. The Ministry of Food had been stockpiling items months before so the program would have an initial success and the stores would have full shelves.

Grocers had a lot of tinned items to sell with points when the program began. There were two major drawbacks to the plan: 1) as certain foods became popular, the price in points would increase. What was 8 points one month, might be 12 or 16 the next month. The newspapers listed items for sale in the shops and their points value. 2) There were long lines. One would have never left the house without your ration book and coupons! My grandmother said to me about shopping during the war, “If you saw a line you got in it.”  You usually then found out what you were in line for when you got closer to the counter. A positive note in wartime was instead of just getting your monthly rationed items, you could actually feel like a shopper again. SPAM© became very popular in the UK. The American brand of processed and spiced ham was made available through the Lend-Lease Act, and became a wartime staple on many British tables. In wartime Britain, a 10-oz (284-gram) tin of SPAM cost 1 shilling and sixpence (about 20 cents), and sixteen points.

The distribution of ration books, and depending on the category in which a person was classified,  determined how much food was allowed. By 1943, typical rations for one adult for one week included:

• 2 pints of milk
• 4 oz  meat (chicken and fish were not rationed, but availability could  be scare)
• 2 oz butter
• 1 fresh egg per week or 1 packet of dried eggs (equivalent to 12 fresh eggs) every 8 weeks
• 2 oz butter
• 4 oz of jam (usually one jar per month)
• 2 oz of cooking fat (lard or suet)
• 4 oz cheese
• 4 oz or about three “rashers” of bacon
• 2 oz of leaf tea
• 8 oz sugar

Fruits and vegetable weren’t rationed, but a person was usually limited to about two lbs per week. What one could get from the grocer also depended on what was available. Citrus fruits and bananas were scare as the enemy was sinking almost any ship; a lot of food ended up at the bottom of the ocean!