Cooking the books: we’ll eat again – wartime recipes

After a year long hiatus (and maybe more), March saw the return of my cooking the books series. To recap, if you missed last month’s post, this is something I came up with to try and make better use of my huge collection of cookbooks. The concept is simple – every month I ask my social media followers to vote for one of three books from my collection. Once a winner has been picked I select a recipe at random, I make it and then I blog it!

I put the shout out on twitter earlier in the month with three great British themed books and the winner was unanimous – We’ll Eat Again – a lovely book of original wartime recipes collated by the Imperial War Museum and with an intro from Marguerite Patton. As a history graduate (albeit nearly 13 years ago), it’s no surprise that I love this book. It’s full of wartime newspaper snippets and photographs with only light touch editing holding the collection together. It’s as much an insight into social and cultural history as it is a cookbook! In my final year at university, my dissertation was based on Homefront Britain so I was especially excited that you all chose this book for me cook from. I wrote about morale and music which I enjoyed at the time but looking back, if only I’d know that I was going to end up being such a food lover this blog could have taken a very different route!

Scalloped potatoes

My first challenge was deciphering the measurements as everything in this book is in what my mum calls ‘old money’! in the Thank goodness for Alexa when I was converting ounces into grams. Rather than my usual approach to cooking the books – flipping the pages and finding a recipe at random, I looked through the book to find something I could make with the ingredients I already have in. I also halved the recipe for two.

Ingredients (serves 2):

I’ve halved the amount from four to two servings of scalloped potatoes and have also converted the old measurements of pounds and ounces into metric for ease!

• 450g potatoes
• 1 tbsp flour – it doesn’t specify so I used plain
• 1 tbsp roughly chopped parsley
• 280ml milk
• 80g grated cheese
• 1 tbsp coarsely chopped parsley
• Salt and pepper for seasoning

Method:

• Scrape the potatoes (or peel as I did) and cut into thin slices.
• Blend the flour and the milk.
• Arrange the potatoes in layers in a pie-dish, sprinkling each layer thickly with cheese. Season with salt and pepper and moisten with milk.
• Finish with a layer of cheese, pour over the remaining milk and cover with a lid of greased paper (I used foil).
• Bake in a moderate oven (I assumed 180c/ gas mark 4) for 45 minutes.
• Sprinkle with parley and serve with green vegetables or a side salad.

I’m definitely going to try and cook more wartime recipes from this book as I enjoyed deciphering the recipe from its scant instructions and having to convert the measurements into something modern and easier to understand. If you like the idea of cooking from the past, I’d recommend checking out the wonderful Lavender & Lovage blog which features lots of delicious wartime recipes as well as plenty from the modern era too!

We have a really terrible oven at our new house (it’s not even a fan!!) and I ended up cooking this for longer than the stipulated 45 minutes to get the scalloped potatoes cooked through. You’ll probably notice too that my milk split a little but it didn’t affect the taste. We finished it off the following day with some mince and onions for a hearty weekend lunch part way though a day gardening and it tasted even better. Funny how that’s the case sometimes isn’t it?