During the Second World War and the years that followed, New Zealand, like much of the world, faced a time of austerity – especially when it came to food.
Rationing, coupons and making do became part of everyday life with things like tripe, makeshift butter and fidget pie on the menu.
Cookbooks from this period are all about making food go further and letting nothing go to waste.
With the cost of food a struggle for many families today, RNZ’s Checkpoint had a chat with some of those who can remember this time to get some tips.
Ann Hunt and Patricia McFarland live at Summerset retirement village in Flatbush Auckland.
They have some thoughts about the current cost of groceries.
“I would not like to be in a family at the moment trying to provide good, healthy, fresh food for my family because I look at the prices in the supermarkets and I think how on earth can a family afford those prices?
“The dairy and the butter and the cheese is just beyond a joke,” Ann said.
Patricia agreed it is very hard for families. “We have so many takeaways now that a lot of children now would grow up not knowing any different comparing to some of the food that you’d buy in the supermarket, there probably isn’t much difference in price.”
Each of them have memories of food rationing which began in 1942 and lasted until 1950.
Ration books were registered with local shops and contained a page of “emergency counterfoils” to be used if you were away from home and unable to get butter or sugar from the local grocer.
Hunt grew up in Auckland and was five years old when the Second World War came to an end.
For the next several years life on rations continued.
“My job as a probably more like five to seven [year old], was to walk the 1.5km to the shop once a week to get whatever for food was on ration, the milk or the butter, particularly flour.”
To keep their food fresh, her family used an ice chest and preserved eggs in a jar of jelly.
“I’m not quite sure what kind of gel it was, but it was my worst thing I had to do was put my hand in and get the egg out for my mother.”
She said food was basic, but it was all they knew, they had sandwiches for school, and a banana if you were lucky.
Her recipes are collected in a little red cookbook which is now hard to read and in pieces, passed down through the generations with handwritten recipes.
Everything was homemade growing up – but due to rationing they often had to make do without butter or eggs.
Her wartime recipe is Myrtle’s pudding which came from her mother-in-law.
“It used a tin of unsweetened condensed milk and condensed milk and evaporated milk were on everybody’s shelves because half the time you couldn’t get fresh milk.”
Other ingredients mixed in are sugar, gelatine, lemon juice and vanilla.
“Very like some of the puddings that are now fashionable to buy the blancmanges and things like that, beat until thick and pour it into a tin and set it.”
Patricia McFarland was just six months old when the war broke out, living in the UK in Shropshire.
“I had to go to school with a gas mask on my back and when I got to school, the infant mistress, there were three of us who started school that day, she said, ‘please put your gas masks on stand up in that corner there and sing Baa, Baa Black Sheep’.”
Their school lunches were mostly meat, vegetables and steamed pudding.
At home it was a different story.
“All we could have for tea, was bread and jam that was all there was, except my brother liked condensed milk sandwiches or HP sauce sandwiches but there was no such thing as meat.”
McFarland recalled three ration books growing up for babies, children and adults.
Things like cheese were scarce.
“My father as a treat on a Sunday night, he used to have his portion of cheese he’d have bread and cheese and we would have toast and dripping, which is out of the roast we’d had during the day.”
Her recipe is an emergency “Fidget pie” with carrots, potatoes, swedes and onion, covered in gravy or cheese and pastry.
“So it would all go in that and cover it with pastry that would be an issue in itself because we didn’t have much in the way of butter.
“If it said six ounces of butter or six ounces of shortening, they’d use two ounces of butter, two ounces of margarine which is pretty awful and two ounces of lard, so you mix that all up to make the pastry.”
Ann Hunt and Patricia McFarland are hopeful food prices will come down for future generations but said their war time recipes might help those looking to make do with less.
rnz.co.nz