Wartime Nutrition (1943)

[spaniardx]

Thinking this might be where we get that chestnut "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Not to mention that standard breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, cereal, coffee  with milk or juice. Also, the nutrition classes held in churches and so forth could be why they started what they were calling Home Economics classes when I was in school.

[vitugglan]

That's definitely how we got the old 'Carrots improve your eyesight.' In order to hide that they'd developed radar, the British started telling people to eat carrots to improve their vision and did other tings to make the Germans think this was the reason they were 'seeing' the German planes.

'Coal House: The War Years' and 'The 1940s House', both British TV series, show their rationing by putting some hapless families through it. This film must have been put on early in the war. We went to rationing in 1943, starting small but building up. We had rationing books for food and gasoline. Cars stopped being produced in 1942 in order to convert factories to wartime production. The last new cars were only available for people like doctors and ministers. We had metal and paper drives for the war effort. That they're not mentioning any of this makes me think this was probably made in 1942 or early 1943. They're obviously building up to rationing in this.

[spaniardx]

I think they -- the Brits -- actually began planning for rationing when they knew that there was no way Hitler wasn't going to stop with Poland. And that was back in '36 or so.  That whole doubling of their own food production was mostly done by simply slaughtering entire herds of beef cattle to have more acreage for growing crops and saving the feed gain those beeves would have eaten for other (smaller) livestock and barn yard fowl as well as some for it being funneled into the human food chain. In addition to putting every spare scrape of ground they could under seed. A lot of back gardens in the cities and large villages had a bomb shelter near the house with a small pen for animals like chickens (for eggs and meat) and the rest of the back garden was... well, a garden.

[vitugglan]

Yeah, those shows do a good job of showing most of that. The kids go to play and work in the garden after school, and in the 1940s House, they dig an Anderson shelter in the back yard. They also go through the regulations and the reasoning behind them with a panel that meets in Churchill's old bunker. The so-called 'national loaf' was terrible by both shows' accounts, being too coarse and grainy since they put not just the grain but the hull to the mix.

[spaniardx]

In 2018, after Primary put me on the Keto diet and  told me to just get the Adkins books and apps (great big help he was!) I wasn't supposed to eat regular bread because one slice had more carbs than I was supposed to have in a day. So, we hunted the interwebs and I found keto bread recipes and they were not made with wheat flour or with yeast. I had recently re-watched War Time Farm on YouTube so I had seen the episode where they were bringing out the National Loaf. Even just putting that thing down on the table, you could hear just how solid that thing was. It was a brick!

And that pretty much how the keto bread sounded after baking. It was, for all intents and purposes, gluten free. Also  sugar free. And taste free. There was no rise to it (no yeast)

[vitugglan]

OMG! Lol! The husband was on some modified Keto diet for ages. Put himself on it, sometimes he'll go back to it. What a pain for cooking and snacks!

That bread sounds like the bread I end up turning out. I use yeast, all-purpose flour (they have bread recipes for that specifically, I don't bake enough to get separate flours for cake and bread) and all the other ingredients, follow the directions down to setting an alarm for punching down and kneading, I've tried coating with butter, coating with egg white, not coating at all, and I still get something that resembles a tasteless granite-covered dough ball.

[spaniardx]

Thing is, I've made bread before. Granted, not in a while. But, the spawns and hubby made sure it didn't stick around long enough to get cold. And it was, according to them, very tasty. I would have suggested that, if you want decent home made to get a bread maker. But, you don't bake often enough to probably justify the cost.  Plus, I've heard too many tales of "coffin loaves" from those things. That is, a loaf with a big ole void in the middle.

[vitugglan]

We just buy bread. My best baking is cake.