大象传媒

when sugar was rationed my mother said we should have to stop having it in our tea and so, instead of the big teaspoon in the sugar bowl, she put a smaller one. The next week we saw there was only an egg spoon in the sugar bowl and the following week it was only a salt-spoon and we could hardly taste any sugar at all in our tea. the next week there wasno bowl of sugar to be seen on the table at all and ever since then none of us has ever used any sugar in our tea. But it did mean that the sugar saved in this way could provide us with the home-made cakes and jam and puddings that we all liked so much. Many other everyday foods vanished from the shops too so that cooking attractive and nourishing meals for a family became quite a challenge. For instance the meat ration allowed only a few ounces a week to each adult and only 2 or 3 ounces of butter or margarine. When so many ships of our Merchant Navy were being torpedoed by German submarines and food supplies were desperately short we had to rely on the vegetables and fruit we grew in our gardens and allotments and on the few un-rationed foods such as wild rabbits, whale-meat and occasional fresh fish. At one time I recall the egg ration was one per fortnight for every adult -- we were fortunate because my mother kept a few chickens in a small shed alongside the air-raid shelter in our back garden so we did st least get new-laid eggs but of course to buy a small amount of chicken-meal we had to surrender our egg ration coupons and when the hens were not laying any eggs in midwinter then we just did not have any eggs at all unless a kind neighbour offered us a tin of dried egg powder in exchange for a jar of home-made jam -- this was most likely to be black-berry and apple as no fruit was being imported and certainly no oranges with which to make marmalade. At Christmas we became very inventive, using dried elderberries, grated carrots and chopped apple together with the white suet from around a lamb or ox-kidney to make an austerity pudding or cake for Christmas Day. Of course there was no icing sugar so some very strange decorations were devised - white cardboard with stencilled greetings or a garland of artistically-crumpled tinfoil milk=tops. Britain during WW2 certainly illustrated the adage that "necessityis the mother invention"

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