Engine Summer

This is a lot of the Daily Telegraph's World War II-era recipes, collected and organized. As a result, it's an interesting look at wartime British cookery and the way that recipes adapted to rationing, and probably not at this point in time to be used as an actual cookbook.

One thing that I note is that some ingredients that were evidently common are not, in fact, common to me. This may be an across-the-ocean thing as opposed to time period, I'm not sure; but fresh redcurrants are both seasonal and very expensive anywhere I've lived, fresh damsons unheard of (damson jam is mad expensive too), fresh loganberries right out; and apparently rabbit was a cheap meat. Oh, and suet. I have cooked with suet precisely once in my life, this time that eredien and I were using a pudding mold she had, and it had to be special-ordered. It is so assumed in this book that one knows how to make a suet crust that they do not bother with a recipe. And I think we have sultanas in this country under the name 'golden raisins' but they are not remotely standard.

On the other hand, of course a great many ingredients were incredibly scarce, and I was interested to notice which ones: dairy, certainly, most dairy, these recipes invariably use margarine and dry milk and something called 'household milk' which seems to be liquid but is distinguished from fresh, and there are many more uses for sour milk than one usually sees in a cookbook. Cheese seemed fairly plentiful, though, it's a staple here. Eggs-- everything here is with reconstituted dried egg. There's a section on how to make most egg dishes with dry ones, including how to fake hard-boiled egg for the center of a Scotch egg, how to fake scrambled eggs (with a helpful note that scrambled eggs are President Roosevelt's favorite food), how to do Yorkshire pudding with dried egg and dry milk. Many cuts of meat seem to have been prohibitively expensive, so they recommend you pot-roast everything, and make a Sunday joint by rolling a flatter piece jelly-roll style and stuffing it with forcemeat. Much fruit seems to have been around, except for some reason lemons, which were so dear that there's a recipe here for lemon curd using margarine, dried eggs, saccharine tablets and pounded lemonade drink mix powder.

There's also a fake marzipan made of almond flavoring and soybean flour, which actually doesn't sound that bad to me.

( Many of the recipes here don't sound that bad, in fact. )

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