A Week On WWII Rations DAY 1
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 พ.ค. 2022
- It's time to begin a rather humbling Week On.. World War 2 rations.
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This feels less like an exciting dive into history and more like preparation for the future.
Considering the climate wars are coming fairly soon, it probably is
This most likely will be the future.
I'm surprised we're not on rations already :/
This becomes more true with each passing day...
You dont say
I'm 76, I still have my ration book even though I was born in 1946. We continued rationing until 1954 because we still owed America for what they sent over. In fact, we did not finish paying back every single penny until we were into the 2000s. Our fight against the Nazi's cost us dearly, but our wonderful friends in the Commonwealth helped a lot, as did so many American soldiers.
We owe the wonderful Commonwealth countries a huge debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
@@snowysnowyriver also literal financial debt which SHOULD be repaid.
I'm pretty sure it was 2006 when we finished paying
@@aj7058No
We only finished off paying for the slaves in 2015! That’s cool how you still have it. I didn’t know how they carried on that many years after. Was there black market meat etc?
I’m an African-American guy. Pushing 60. I haven’t watched the entire video but starting with the oatmeal that is the American way of having oatmeal and it was very common when I was younger. It’s a low-cost meal and it’s very filling without a lot of chemicals or additives. Instead of jam sometimes I’ll have raisins and even a few nuts or berries tossed in. My family does not cook with milk but with water and we had a little bit of milk much more sugar and a bit of salt. Often there was butter added as well
I'm only 30, but in the summer I'll grab a handful of blackberries from the garden to cook them into my morning porridge. Managed to take a cutting from a raspberry bush so hopefully next year it'll be those too.
I'm sure this must've been done during rationing.
This is how my Midwest family makes it too, raisins with a little sugar and milk ❤
I don't remember ever having oatmeal made with milk. I've had it, but I don't consider it the traditional American way to make porridge. Raisins were common then.
To make your milk go further you should have used a half water and half milk ratio, next you should have finely grated your cheese and just used a very fine sprinkling, if your onion smelled really strong you needed to slice off what you needed and give it a good soak in some cold water to remove some of the sharpness, then pat it dry with a little paper towel! For the mashed potatoes on your pie you could also add a tiny amount of bovri to add a little more taste!Using a little lard and margarine or butter would give you a fairly decent pastry too.Looking forward to the rest of the week on, keep up the good work 👍👍
I would start by cooking the porridge with water then add milk accordingly, that stops the milk from 'scorching'
@@turnip5359 This is the traditional method.
Were there paper towels then?
@@janetmackinnon3411 I've no idea I'm not that old but someone told me a thin teatowel would do the same job 👍🏻
You are a genius. How do you know all this :)
Pro tip with the cheese and rationing it: use a fairly fine grater, this will make a lot more volume appear on your bread but use alot less.
^^^^^^^^
This!! It's what I do
Yeah, it was almost painful watching him use so much to be able to cover the whole slice of bread. He didn't even use small cuts and space them out.
I'd suggest melting it too, seems to go further as well as grating :)
I would have went a French onion soup route. Using a little margarine or butter, fry the onions in it, grate over some cheese and put it on the bread. But I'm a big fan of the caramelized onion flavor
When my daughter was still at primary school I gave her a living history lesson during the summer holidays. We survived on wartime rations, sometimes ate our dinner under the kitchen table when a plane went overhead (mock air raid). No t.v and no video games. I even asked a local shop keeper to help with regards to what was available and what wasn't. She used to be a fussy eater but was more grateful for what was put on her plate afterwards. With the current cost of living crisis I'm going back to the rations again.
what an extreme way to teach your child about history
Hopefully your daughter is still alive after you taught her about the Holocaust
@@andrewward7168 Not the Holocaust. The Blitz.
Same
Great way to teach, my parents actually grew up during ww2, so they grew up with rationing
We ate a lot of rabbit stew. They weren't rationed, and grandpa, as a farm hand was adept with his shotgun. That's just the way it was and I grew up with dead rabbits hanging by their feet in our larder. Children got some extra rations and these were used for the whole family. Porridge was never, ever made with milk! There's a slightly skewed view here because you were using one person's rations. With unrationed extras, meals for a family of five, which we were, meant larger quantities of fats etc., were available for making a cake, for example. Food was sometimes monotonous and no-one loved powdered egg and soyabean sausage, but we did not go hungry at all!
A fun fact for you, the rationed diet in the UK in WW11 was 3000 calories.
I was born 1945 and lived with my Nan. We had plenty of plain food, home made bread, soups, offal, potatoes in every style including potato pancakes. Milk was full fat and was watered down a little. Nan kept rabbits for meat and the fur was made into mittens and chickens for meat and eggs. The whole garden was full of vege and fruit.
Very healthy they should bring it back would solve a lot of nhs patient referrals
I don't know what the recommended amount is now, but at least through the 1960s the U.S. federal government said fallout shelters should be stocked with enough food to provide every occupant 2000 calories a day.
I didn’t realise rationing in the UK lasted for 14 YEARS LIKE THIS even after the war mad respect for everyone back then I definitely couldn’t have handled it
Oh, indeed it did. People in Dominion countries where rationing was long over would send packages of canned meat and such for quite a while to friends and relatives in Britain…
Rationing continued only because many things were not available or affordable.
It takes a long time to rebuild your industry from a conflict of that magnitude.
The war destroyed the infrastructure of literally every country in Europe and a decent chunk of east Asia as well. There is a reason why the US was able to enact a meteoric rise to economic prominence following the war. We were the only country that still had the undamaged infrastructure.
@@MrJurgenman That wasn't just it. Britain made some economic choices that, with hindsight, weren't very good and the economy recovered much slower than in many other countries in Europe. The result was basically that Britain couldn't afford to import many goods, a problem that was solved through rationing imported goods.
Onions were very scarce for most of the war because we imported them from Holland and the Channel islands .They were given as prizes in raffles .
And oranges were very rare. One girl spent weeks trying to find one orange for her little sister.
Dang! I can't imagine one egg a week, and onions are mandatory in my mind.
My dad was born at the start of the war...he still loves the fact that he can put BOTH jam and butter on bread or a scone. He talked about a more well off farming family that lived nearby him and when my family would visit, they were allowed to have both as the farmers made their own butter and jam.
People typically replaced their meat with offal (things like liver, lamb's fry, kidney) because you could make it go a lot further, also it's actually more nutritionally dense as a nice little bonus...
meat prices were regulated during rationing and meat was rationed by value instead of weight, so buying cheaper cuts yielded more weight of meat for your ration. hence why offal based dishes were popular (and still are in some areas)
@@tech4pros1 In the early-war rush to plant as much grain as possible, pastures were turned into cropland and this sent a mass surplus of meat to the market. There was a limit on how much you could spend every week on meat, so as the surplus was used the cuts of meat you could buy changed.
My grandparents, like many households at the time, kept a few chickens so they had a supply of fresh eggs
but then you had to give up your egg ration, one real egg and the powdered egg before they would let you purchase chicken feed.
@@jenniferwaffle6920 I didn't know that. I suppose the eggs you got from your chickens made it worth giving up your egg ration.
I hope for their sake that they didn't live in an apartment in the city.
@Genial Harry Grout love your username #Porridge
@@anonmouse15 High rise dwellings weren't common until after WW2
We had rashions in 1990s, when we became a republic. We had both books and stamps, which were for flour and sugar and salt. It was hard, but if you bough whole milk instead of skimmef, you also got whipped cream or extra butter, meat (if there was any) you bough something which wasn't consider the best, like bacon, but something with ribs for example - you could remove the meat and then use the bones for soup. You also salted the meat immediatley so it would last longer, because the blackouts were still a thing. We never skipped foraging possibilities for berries and mushrooms and we all grew our own garden, and potatos. So living on rashions, even in city, was minimum, but if you had head and hands, you got extra through foraging, growing, trading (hunters often traded some meat for stamp of flour) and skills. It wasn't for money, nobody had that, or if they had, there was nothing to buy for it, because aside the rashions, the shops were empty. You also shared your findings with elderly family and neighbours.
Where is this?
@@patrickdurham8393Between mentioning transition to republic in the 90s and the culture of gardens, I would guess a Soviet bloc country
Woolton Pie, you can't fail and all it uses from your rations is a little marge or lard and a few oats.
Honestly, it used to be one of Mums favourites and we still eat it years after her passing.
Many workplaces provided their workers with a hearty lunch. Also there were many restaurants that sold very inexpensive meals to the public. So for many people, one meal each day wasn't rationed. And fresh fruits and vegetables weren't rationed.
I must disagree with the words hearty lunch!. As a child I remember being taken to the dockyard canteen near my home and for all that people in manual labour were given larger amounts the food was very simple and meagre. And these were men building ships.
The thing is people during the war used to grow there own vegetables to bulk out their rations but obviously Mike can’t do that in such a short space of time so I would allow myself to buy any amount of vegetables to make it authentic
Any amount probably wouldn't be authentic. Of course people more likely had a garden, but they were seasonal, had to take care of the family, were maybe trading or taking care of others... Abundance was never a thing
@@rebel4466 According to this one video series and other sources, they had so many carrots they didn't know what to do with them.
I agree.. People canned a lot back in those days. So tomatoes, or whatever they grew could be enjoyed all year, or bartered for something else. I have a feeling, we might have to be doing this, in the near future. I hope not, but I think we will, the way things are going (in the US).
Or at least just enough to bulk out for vegetable stews and such. There'd still be a limit especially cuz there was usually larger families and a lot more physically hard work to do with longer workhours.
@@Seth9809 I suspect an urban myth.
1 my parents lived through the war.
2 Fish and chips where available throughout the whole the UK never rationed.
3. British cafes where open where limited menus where available at subsidized prices.
4. Many people ate better during the war than they did 10 years early during the great depression.
At the end of the war, well off people were slimmer, the poor had been eating afar more nourishing diet than they ever had before. The country was actually far healthier than before rationing.
But there wrre times when the potatoes were unavailable. Fish and chips might not have been rationed, but sometimes there just were not potatoes.
@@georgielancaster1356 The types of fish available also changed. Even if fishing boats could put to sea their catch didn't always make it far inland because of transportation difficulties.
My mum lived through rationing… she said that you could have butter OR jam on your toast… and that bananas were kept only for the elderly. Because they kept chickens, she had a boiled egg for breakfast every day. They also had bees, meaning they were rationed a bag of corn and a bag of sugar to feed the bees over the winter. They were given a quota of both eggs and honey to keep for themselves, the rest went to be rationed out as needed. The most common vegetable was cabbage because you could grow it most of the year in very little space.
I'm American, but my understanding is that any non-farm Brit who kept chickens didn't have to send any of the eggs to the government, but they had to give up their own egg ration in order to buy feed for their chickens.
I smiled when I saw this. Because this would be a normal meal for me, through good times and bad. I was born in the early 50's not long after the war and frugality was just a way of life for our family and I have continued it throughout my life. So no change for me. It keeps me in good stead every time the bad times come round, and round and round....never ending!
I remember one time for drama class we had to do this little play thing where we'd pretend to be people lining up for rations and for my part I had to angrily skip the queue and all my character said was: "I want my bacon and I want it now!"
And for some reason it came out in a really thick Glaswegian ascent and that's the singular shining moment of my acting career.
😂😂 very funny… sorry , I found that story hilarious!❤
Fitting week-on for the current world we're living in.
EDIT: A 50/50 ratio of lard and butter makes an excellent pastry crust, just saying. Get the flavor from the butter, and the flake from the lard.
We're f**ked and now the queen's dead
both of my grand parents were stationed in england during ww2. they would still sweeten our cereal with home made strawberry jam. it was so good. they also would add oats and egg to hambuger when making patties for hamburgers to make them stretch further. my mother still makes them that way and they're still my fave burgers. yummy and very filling
Yes - using oats to bulk out mince will definitely help in today's current situation as well - they just absorb all of the meatiness from the beef
Stale bread works really well too, but oats are more nutritious.
I make meat loaf like this.
@@nanettemorton4054 Me too. My great grandma's recipe so it makes sense.
@@nanettemorton4054 This is essentially why meat loaf exists, and in some form in almost every culture.
Lentils do a good job in other dishes
One thing that you are missing is the work hours. People worked 48 hours per week minimum and often did volunteer work on top of that.
Rationing didn’t completely end in the USA until 1954. I remember how happy Momma was when we replaced the icebox with a shiny new Westinghouse refrigerator. Food came back first but retooling the factories took a while.
Like the Bris the U.S. had to feed 1/4 of Germany, along with all of Japan. And then the Korean War was also in the mix.
All the Americans are yelling, "Make grilled cheese sandwiches!" 😳
Me from Belgium also :o)
The fact this is coming up now as recommended for UK is scary
Your going to regret using the cheese so early
A very original “Week-on”, reminds me of the refugee ration challenge, hope you’ll revisit that one as you said you would some day and only do what was just in the box of rations and not use any of the add-ons.
The Ration Challenge for this year takes place from 19th to 26th June. Are you doing it Mike?
I'm pretty sure that the pie he made would have been split between a minimum of 2 people!!! They might have added a bit of old crusty bread or any greens from out the garden, to turn it into more of a substantial meal. The amount of things I know about world war rationing will surprise most people. You could ration that small pie out to 4 people easily, by using preserves obtained over time... for example sauces, picked onions, cabbage, gherkins etc. Most people would save things like sugar until they had enough to make something good out of it.... rationing there own rations, so we had something to look forward to.
Was genuinely having a bad day today till i saw this video pop up. I always love your videos Mike. Thank you
Me too - what a great idea for a week On - I love ration food history.
Hope it gets better for you brother
In 2023 that amount of food per week would be a luxury
Too bad the modem rations are determined by your wallet and what state you live in.( some states get some items other states don't, because of location and distance products must travel)
Oats were definitely not restricted so tightly to 114 grams for a WEEK. You could have easily purchased 114 grams of oats PER DAY (even far more, and many did because it was literally all they could afford, so they ate oats, bread, grains 3 times a day for years). Most grains were still reasonably abundant during the war and were readily available. MANY people survived entirely on bread, oats / grains for the entirety of the war because they couldn't afford meat / dairy etc. Limiting yourself to 114 grams of oats for a 1 week is utter lunacy. You should be eating that much PER DAY
Oats were restricted, they're winter feed for livestock. Limiting oats wasn't necessarily limited all grain and cereal
Next week, Mike sells out his family for some Turkish Delight.
You are missing the veg to bulk up the meals.
onion was imported and disappeared so they didn't need to ration them because no one could get any. beetroot was much more common in sandwiches. too bad you didn't take your sweet ration as raisins it would have been good in your oatmeal. Lord Walton pie was basically a vegetable version of your pie and very common. basically it's a vegetarian skewed diet.
Raisins would have been on the points system.
Or grow your own onions in your garden or on the Victory allottments, who substitue leeks.
Oh I forgot about beetroot sandwiches!!! People grew to love them! In a mixed salad.sandwich, I love them.
And with.sour cream and chopped mint, as a side salad I thought I would hate it, but I LOVED it!!!
@@alysoncocking1236 They were REALLY COSTLY, too.
Yes people dreamed of onions - and oranges. I remember a story of an older sister spending 6 weeks trying to track down an orange, to give to her little sister, who couldn't remember the taste!
My mum tells me they had rabbit a lot and their own chickens so I think they were quite lucky, also my grandad was a keen vegetable grower.
Never seen this done before! Also had no idea powdered egg was even a thing
Powdered egg is absolutely a thing, you can find it in many ingredients lists on convenience food. It's not necessarily bad for you, it's just de-hydrated egg, though.
@@KatKaleen you can also buy it in the main supermarkets
@@enarabone2555 which supermarkets?
@@nathanrayne Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Tesco's 😀👍🏻
@@enarabone2555 thank you! I've never seen them there before!
Hey Mike, where I live in Anglesey, I do know a couple of really elderly "wartime" survivors, and even now in the 2022s they'll peel and boil a whole onion and have it on toast! It's actually not as boring as it sound!
It's 2022 and people are eating boiled onions on toast?
I like to roast an onion, still in its skin, till it is lovely and soft. Serve it with meat, mash and something green.
Just for future reference, I would have taken the fat that you spread on the bread, and fried the onions a bit, and grated the cheese with a small grater, I think it would have tasted better, and you could have used less cheese. This is the first video I've seen of yours, so I'm looking forward to seeing what else is coming tomorrow (next video).
That's how you make porridge?
I always just boil water, pour it into the oatmeal, let it absorb the water for a bit, then add the milk.
So glad you're doing this Week On. I first became interested after watching the BBC series Wartime Farm, then started collecting books from Marguerite Patten & Jean Fullerton. I'm really excited to learn about your experiences!
Who wants to tell him he could have used a vegetable peeler to slice the cheese?
more often than not they would have grated the cheese - a tiny amount of cheese grated seemed to go a long way.
your channel is so fun, im obsessed with what people ate during all sorts of wars and you honestly made a very nice and informative video 💗great job
Onions were extremely coveted during the war lol. You putting onions and cheese on a sandwich would have been a luxury. ;)
I grew up on rations can well remember hoing to the sweetcshop to buy my sweets. They were all boiled sweets of course different flavours. No choc! We grew fruit and vegetables and kept chickens. We were very healthy
My grandmother would get a one ounce lamb chop per family member, for Sunday, and the rest of the meat ration in stew meat. The meat in the stew was more of a garnish!
Its worth mentioning many brits switched over to the scottish way of making porridge, with salt instead of sugar, to conserve their sugar ration
Brits? Scotland is a part of Britain too.
I'm English but live in Scotland and I'm more hardcore than most scots as I just have water with porridge where most scots add a some milk on top , absolute wimps what happened to them !
Hi Mike, bread was rationed until 1948 and sliced bread was not a available until 1950, as the shops were not allowed to sell till then. I am very interested as to see what you are going to do with your rations this week, it should be quite interesting.
I know this is an old vid, but my great-grandmother used to put powdered eggs in all sorts of things you (allegedly) wouldn't notice. Oatmeal (porridge) was the least offensive, so much so that I often incorporate a fresh egg into my oatmeal in any way that doesn't scramble it. Creamy :)
Powdered eggs and/or powdered milk is usually good enough in baked goods and pancakes. Did the English eat pancakes or are they more an American thing?
Weirdly, and sadly, onions were very short in the start of the war, so much that they were given as raffle prizes in fundraisers.
@@elizabethnewell3133 I'm not sure, but I'd imagine they had flat quick breads of some sort, almost all cultures with access to cereal crops do.
Great-grandmother was born dirt poor in Florida a little over 100 years ago. I translated some terms/omitted some details for the sake of our cousins across the Atlantic and relevance to the video.
@@elizabethnewell3133 Of course we had pancakes ! I'm sure we were eating them before your country even existed ! They've always been popular here !
@@mpatey63I was just wondering if they were commonly eaten there and then, like they are here. Like how the English for many years had maize available, and a few people ate it, but it wasn’t common/ubiquitous like corn on the cob and cornbread is here.
Use a potato peeler for thin slices of cheese and maintain even pressure
Fun fact: in Sweden they have a dedicated cheese slicer which is a normal kitchen tool which does work similarly to a potato peeler.. kinda bizarre how we don't use this in the UK
You can also use the slicing side of a cheese grater which everybody forgets about
I love how he aggressively points at jam with a spoon
My mum is in a 1940s reenactment group, and often makes some of the recipes from back then. She suggested trying vinegar cake (apparently you can’t actually taste the vinegar). I expect there’s a recipe for it online
Do they use a hay box? I found it in a old war cookbook, and I'm building one now.
@@Panbaneesha my mum doesn’t, but we know someone who does
Vinegar was used in cake recipes instead of eggs to help bind the mixture together. I have made some cakes in the past for some of my daughters friends who were vegan. They loved them! I used to add a little vanilla extract to give them a buttery taste. I used vegetable fat instead of butter.
@@samanthahardy9903 Yes, you can substitute a tablespoonful of vinegar for one egg.
@@PanbaneeshaI have one I made. I use it 2-3 times a week.
0:35 Well as the saying went, "Keep Calm and Carry On."
This is such a fun idea! Way to go Mike! :D Also, in my mind powdered eggs will always remind me of the teleseries M*A*S*H. I know this series takes place during the war in Korea, but it's not that long after WWII. I wonder what French toast made with powdered eggs would taste like? Especially if all you had to make them with was powdered milk! ;)
Jeavons! It's been a while since I visited your channel! You know, I'm proud of you for carrying on, but I'm especially impressed with this week on! Not only interesting to see, but historically relevant! I'm looking forward to seeing how you're feeling at the end of it! Glad to look forward to something for the next few days! Cheers from America, to you and Grace! ^_^
PS - Stop using that cutting board right now. You're killing me, Mike... I work in a kitchen! Stop it! You're dulling your knives and getting glass/plastic bits in your food! STOP IT!
Love you video’s & good luck for the week 🤗
I'm actually surprised to hear that the coffee was not rationed in UK during WW2. Usually it's on the of first things that goes under rationing,
Don’t think it was really popular in the uk at that time. Nation of tea drinkers
Very few drank coffee. They were tea mad and the big treat was cocoa at night or in cold weather
It was rationed in the United States.
I grew up during 5he war, don’t know how my mother managed to feed us, but they reckon that our nation has never been so healthy. That’s something to think about!
A week on greggs!
not sure but in my aussie memory we didnt have instant porrige until the late 60s using real rolled oat which is heartier and sticks to your ribs can be cooked an used over a few days milk was usually added as a additive after not during cooking same as your sweetner either a tiny sprinkiling of sugar or jam golden syrup or treacle as sweetner and dribble of of milk on top will deadened your tastebuds to the no sweet and no milk in the actual porridge my morenanna used the bacon fat and drippings saved from the meat frying of the cottage pie meat for pan fried day old bread for lunch salt pepper to taste i think my morenanna and liput cooked real porridge as the bulkner in her meatloaf and pies pasties
Some areas could, of course, grow their own. Back gardens used for growing veg, or keeping chickens (a source of eggs and meat) or pigs. Think "The Good Life" on a smaller scale. As for the butter, use bread and scrape method (scrape the butter onto the bread, then scrape it off, then eat the bread, as described by the late Sir Terry Pratchett in one of his novels)
The damning indictment about the state of this country right now is that there are thousands of families being forced to live on less food than this right now!
There is no war, we are supposedly a developed nation, there are no shortages of food and yet there are people living on less than this!!! It's disgraceful and as a nation we should be ashamed!
Out of curiosity, who?
This is not just one country. And this: " there are no shortages of food" is not correct. Actually, we are getting shortages over the past years and will feel them now and in the coming years. Look at Holland, being in a civil war over the governments decisions to dispossess farmers.
Just tuned in.....this is going to be a good one. We should all have to live like this for a week.
The national loaf was the complete opposite of Danish bread. It was meant to fill you up.
Nice to see. a proper worked out week, Maybe a week of cooking from a different decade for a week Day 1 could be from the 1940s leading uP to Day 7 with 2000
That little amount of cheese would kill me off
Tenderflake lard is my go to for pie pastry. The simplest and cheapest tasty pie pastry is just flour, lard and salt with a bit of ice cold water to bring it together. You can make meat and potato pies, leek and veg casserole with pie crust top (or other vegetable pies) or fruit pies. Lard is very versatile for high temp frying and also baking.
You really had me chuckling! Next time bulk your beef up with bread crumbs since bread was not rationed.
When making oatmeal, you start with water first, cook it till it bubbles, when thickened, it’s ready, THEN YOU CAN POUR ON THE MILK OVER
Ooooh, this is going to be a good week on to watch... for us 🙂
I'm looking forward to a lot of hangry moaning, hahaha
Good choice of week on mike👍
And of course week ons wouldn't be the same without Sir Basil😂🖤🐾🐈⬛
My husband, who was a litte boy during the war living in Liverpool, would not eat scrambled eggs or mashed potatoes when we married in the 1970s. He said it reminded him of the powdered foods of the war days.
My mother was born in 1950 in a poor family and to this day will not eat grits because there was a lot of time when her family lived on grits, powdered milk, powdered eggs... My grandmother was a young adult in the depression and saved EVERYTHING always. Wilted veg into broth, etc...
How interesting! I’ve never made oatmeal with milk. We always use water and then top with a bit of milk to cool it off a bit and give it some creamy texture. And maple syrup, because 🇨🇦 :)
Really enjoyed this view of back in the day from across the pond. Thanks for sharing this experience with us!
I'm curious to see if the hay box will make an appearance, because not only was cooking fuel in short supply, but many housewives started working at the factories etc. and were still expected to have dinner on the table in the evening. (The hay box, by the way, is worth a look at any rate with today's food/energy prices and climate change).
There is an interesting book about women working at shipyards.
@@nat3007 Sounds interesting, could you tell me title and author?
Oh dear. Do you know Mike at all? He is extremely lazy. He would never do anything as authentic as a hay box (unfortunately). That would require effort. It's three days in as I am writing this and he is putting together the lamest of "meals". Basically porridge for breakfast and bread with something on it for lunch. His excuse is always, "I can't be faffed". He and his wife don't seem to own measuring spoons. They use an empty porridge sachet, an empty spray cap, and dinner spoons as measuring devices. People have begged Mike to not use metal spatulas in Teflon pans or use knives on glass cutting boards. Does Mike ever listen? Nope. Once you realize this you can watch Mike's videos and just shake your head at his buffoonery (and laziness). I think that is the real purpose of this channel.
@@MissieFaye You are making me laugh.
I am WW2 buff and this turned up in my feed. First time I have seen anything of his and I have been feeding animals as his video plays and missed most of it.
I am shocked he said he eats white bread! Where I live, anyone educated or middle class eats wholemeal or multigrain.
White bread is eaten by very old people or the very poor and uneducated. I feel extremely guilty buying white bread for the animals, as treats!
I saw his little lay out of rations and wondered where his bread and flour was. I was sidetracked when he said he has wholemeal bread, that he wasn't going to enjoy.
If I could, I would buy bread that had a tiny amount of dough between a kg of grain. No such thing as too grainy!
Have to watch again. Of course, there are things I wish I could have whispered to my favorite people living on rations during the war. In Britain and Australia, few people had travelled. Nobody ate noodles or pasta or garlic - and olive oil was sold in 2 or 3 ounce bottles, at the chemists - pharmacy, taken, like cod liver oil, like medicine, with a spoon!
I am sure many chemists still had the same bottles on show in the shop, at the end of the war. Nobody seemed aware that you could use it for salads or cooking. Think of all that flavour, unknown - and no garlic or chilli! Only a few families who had had soldiers who served in India, knew about curries - and they just used tins of curry powder, from the local shop. No malls, no huge supermarket chains, no trolleys!
Nearly every day, you bought what you needed, from a half dozen little shops.
Now I have been advised of Mike, when I come back from feeding the possums, I will pay more attention.
You have less meat because you bought the most expensive lean minced beef! It works out more if you buy cheaper meat. Plus they had no issue with animal fat and indeed it is not unhealthy that is all twaddle made up entirely. But that aside, they used the fat run off (dripping from meat) to fry things in and top up their lard, butter and margarine ration. So getting a fattier cut of meat was a good idea because you got more for your money and used the excess fat as well. With cheaper cuts you could get nearer a pound depending on what it was you were buying. Ruth Goodman on episode 2 of War time farm shows this very well with the difference between the cheaper shin of beef and a steak for the same ration money. And where is your Spam, or tinned fish? A 12oz tin of Spam would have given you lots more options but you haven't used your point system part of the ration for tinned goods like baked beans and dried fruits etc here, which would have made a huge difference. And you were entitled to a tin of dried milk powder per month as well, which you would use to cook with to keep your fresh milk for hot drinks etc. When I did this for a month I had my points system items as well as my ration coupon items and it made all the difference to the obvious monotony and lack of meats in the diet, not to mention cakes and desserts were a welcome addition. I had no issue with eggs when I did this though as I had about 7 chickens in my garden back then, which was also very much the done thing for people during the war years. Then comes the British cafe! You could eat out at lunch times during the working week back then. So as long as you stick to the meat as one item rule only and choose something close to what was available back then you can eat out once a day as well. And have a once a week trip to the chippy. I didn't choose to use the Briitsh cafe option as it's expensive to eat out these days and hard to choose something along the right lines of what you would have got then, but not impossible. I did have a chippy supper once though.
Cool idea -- good luck Mike!
I understand that rabbit was a staple during the war.
My family members had the forethought to save a couple of their U.S. ration books, complete with stamps, in a family photo album. They are really interesting to see in person. They also had a farm, so they were in better circumstances than many.
Powdered egg is quite nice actually, and very handy when you don't have fresh.
Ive never seen oat porrige made with only milk I have only used water and maybe some milk on it.
Maybe we could get a week on military MRE's at some point? I'd love that and some of them are actually pretty dang good!
They'd have also had vegetables to go with the cottage pie, probably boiled potatoes too (yes, they weren't concerned about how many carbs they atr). Toast and jam would have been a more filling lunch and, don't forget bread wasn't rationed so you can fill up on it. You could have had toast at breakfast as well as the porridge. You need to think about how people ate in those days. They'd have cooked the carrots in the cottage pie until they were soft, nobody ate them crunchy. Vegetables help fill you and they're not rationed and everybody would have eaten them with a main meal. There wasn't the variety we have, but there was plenty more you could have eaten without going over your rations. Have you thought about finding a WWII cookery book? If you eat what people actually ate in those days I think you'll be surprised.
Oh man I feel like I probably eat more for breakfast every day... this is going to be an interesting series
Just shows you how important it really was to "dig for victory" if you didn't you missed out on a lot of food in the form of cheap fresh veg.
Does Gracie know that measuring cups exist? An old spray oil cap? An old oatmeal package? It isn't the great depression. Stop by poundland and get some measuring cups! 😂
You can also blend oats to make oat flour. Theres no gluten but you can still use it as a filler, a thickener, make pancakes, etc
Onions were very scares during the War.Probably wouldn't have used that much on one sandwich .
A week on Lidl?
A week on Burger King
A week on Food Warehouse
A week on Lidl where the fruit and vegetables rot in a day
Brilliant, the content I love to see
Powered egg is great if you reconstitute properly. I remember us still having powered egg in the 1950s when I was a child.
Yay! Thank you for more "week ons"!!!
This is just about the best ever. My fave era
I am watching a TH-cam series that follows WW2 in real-time with weekly episodes. In it, it is now 1943 and there's good news for British households this week. Dönitz has recalled most U boats from the Atlantic, so Britain will get supplies with way more certainty. This basically means that imported foodstuffs are much more likely to be available in the shops.
That guy called Indy?
@@turnip5359 Yes, the weekly series of WW2 week by week.
Good start, hoping to see a Woolton Pie make an appearance mid-week.
Of course you wouldn't actually have received that ration as you would have been conscripted by now.
As someone"old enough" to have heard all about these rations 1st hand.....your sugar ration would almost certainly have been mostly used for your baking and jam making. Whole milk would have increased your calories which was why the rations and how you should use them were the subject of many cookbooks & radio shows etc.
You are doing a week on which is more difficult in some ways than doing months on as seasonal items were available.
Of course there was also bartering were you may exchange some of your ration with a family member or friend.
You should really have gone for beef dripping as you are doing a week on it may have been more useful.
You used enough margerine for at least 4 and more like 6 pieces of bread.....i remember being shown how to butter your bread by a relative....the sad part of it was even though the war years were long since gone many older people kept many of those "scrimping" habits for life.
Fried bread in dripping is delicious i never really enjoyed the beef dripping sandwiches though.
Powdered egg was again used in alot of recipe's to replace real egg....the real eggs all went to the fighting men.
Love this, just subscribed! I wish I weighed 15 stone though, am hoping to lose some weight during my experiment too. C xx
As much as people like to talk about how wonderful life was in WW2, rationing must have been awful for a lot of people. Especially those who didn’t have the space to grow additional vegetables.
My grandfather went through the Great Depression as a child and then fought in WW2, so yeah he was no stranger to stretching food out, even when he was older he would wrap up bread like it was the last loaf on earth.
I think of the times my Grandfather went through and how even in todays world, we still have more food available than they had in the 1940’s, so I never complain, my grandfather and his generation had it way worse.
@@stonecodfish2365 - Indeed, for those that profited life was grand, but for the every day person it was anything but glamorous, it’s insane to think about how people made it through those times, they were tough, and the people who served in WW2, beyond words what they went through.
Many people and children would have gotten their mid day meal (lunch) at school or a work canteen. That would have made the ration stretch further.
I am so going to enjoy this challenge. I would have grated the cheese to make it go further.