100 Years of Food - 1940s

So where were we before being so rudely interrupted by Halloween? The 1940s! Which brings us Vegetable Pie. Doesn't sound wonderful does it? Let me tell you it actually is quite nice.

Of course everyone knows that there was food rationing in the time of WWII, even in the US. I still have one of Grandma and Grandpa's ration books. There was also a points system which seemingly applied to foods and to other things like clothing. It will have been an odd time, I imagine, of both fear and boredom. Fear for your life if you lived in Europe, fear for your loved ones elsewhere. Given the number of things that were rationed you could get bored eating quite plain food and waiting for some news or for the next bomb. I think it was a time that required a great deal of ingenuity. If you hadn't any of that it will have been pure suffering and tedium.

All that said, I liked the vegetable pie well enough to try making it and we have had it a couple of times. If we had more leftover veg I would make it every week, but we don't. With my present method of cooking a lot but not an enormous amount of veg for each dinner, it looks as though we might managed enough surplus - carefully putting it aside instead of mixing it in with a stir-fry the next night - to make vegetable pie every 3-4 weeks. Something to look forward to. 

Sue showed us the leftovers she had collected throughout the week: mashed potatoes, carrots, tinned peas, cauliflower cheese and parsnips. She also had some chicken stock jelly. As people were limited to one egg per week, she made an oatmeal pastry without egg: 3/4 cup flour, 1/3 cup oatmeal, 1 oz cooking fat/butter, 1 oz. grated cheese.

This egg-less crust was amazingly tasty. I'm not much of a whizz with pastry but, so long as you don't worry how it looks, it's not very hard - just messy. I've become a fan of 'rubbing in' rather than 'cutting in'. It is much easier and faster. Mind, if you lived in the southern US I can see that the heat in your kitchen would be a challenge to overcome. Here in the North of England with my North facing kitchen, heat isn't much a problem. Still, I mixed the pastry and stuck it in the fridge while I greased my pie plate and gathered my veg. Mine included home grown runner beans, some roasted pumpkin and marrow, roasted onions...it's not a low fat dish. Which is why it tasted so good, no doubt.