Alan Bennett on Wartime British Food

I enjoyed playwright Alan Bennett‘s recollections in his 2019 diary in the London Review of Books, courtesy of The Browser.

11 February. A piece in the TLS by Laura Freeman about how hunger was reflected in the novels of the postwar period. I suppose it’s because it’s to do with novels (and therefore middle class and upwards), but it hardly relates to my own childhood memories. I have no particular memories of wartime food, and even if I had, a working-class family in Leeds wouldn’t have been dining out on much except fish and chips in the cafés of department stores like Hitchens (fish and chips, tea and bread and butter 1/9), with Schofields slightly higher up the scale. There was Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley, where we would often have just chips when we went hiking across the fields to Burley in Wharfedale. What I don’t recall is any longing for food (or for elaborate food) that coloured the everyday. On the contrary, what sticks in the mind is how tasty some very ordinary meals were: the first new potatoes, for instance, so delicious one would save them up till last when having one’s dinner (i.e. lunch). The first strawberries similarly, gooseberries, plums – all bought (and queued for) at the Co-op on Armley Ridge Road. Even the nowadays much reviled Spam and corned beef seemed quite tasty to me then, more so than the stewing steak we had regularly, as Dad was a butcher at Armley Lodge Road Co-op. He was either very scrupulous or quite timid, so we never had more than the ration, the meat always overcooked and never the grander cuts. The first proper steak I had was in the army in Cambridge when I was 18 and which shocked me as it was rare – blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.

Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the period, I naively assumed that the food the Bennetts had eaten at Halliday Place was much the same as the food everyone ate in the war, regardless of social status. So I was still capable of being shocked in my twenties when I read in Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love (a novel not I think mentioned by Laura Freeman) of the ration-dodging suppers available to the upper and middle classes, but also of delight when the Bolter’s lover turns out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.

Bennett’s reminiscences accord with my own memories of the decade after the war when rationing was still in place. Not that my family ever had fish and chips because we lived way out in the country and fish and chips was only available in the cities. That and thrift meant that we never went to restaurants. The pallid fish and lumpy boiled potatoes in the hotel restaurant where I had my first meal out when I was 11 or 12 only confirmed my parents’ opinion that eating out was a waste of money, so it was an adventure not repeated until I was in my late teens when Indian and Chinese restaurants began popping up even outside the big cities.

And yes to the deliciousness of new potatoes, strawberries, gooseberries and plums, treats that have vanished from my life. And yes to what a shock it was to discover that some people ate large hunks of rare steak.

Added in response to comments on FB and here.

What I remember chiefly is that my parents at least were very, very aware of how lucky Britain was compared to the Continent. For many people, wartime food was as good or better than what they had had before. Just before she died I asked my mother how she had handled rationing. Because her father had died in the post WWI Spanish flu epidemic she grew up in very straitened circumstances, albeit middle class. She said there was no difference from before the war. Much of the moaning about rationing was from the upper 10%.

And in response to George Gale, yes sugar and fat were much missed for sweetening tea and making cakes and puddings. And it was emblazoned in everyone’s memory. I remember my father ceremonially throwing away the bottle of saccharine tablets in 1953 when sugar rationing finally ended. Parents rushed to give birthday parties for their children who turned their noses up at trifles and jellies preferring the sausage rolls and ham sandwiches.

I think, though, for many people it was not so much the food rationing as all the other rationing. Gasoline rationing meant that it was hard to move around and not just for the wealthy who had cars. Coal rationing meant that everyone was cold all through the winter, hot baths were a luxury, and cooking had to be carefully planned. Soap rationing hit laundering in those pre-detergent days. And clothes rationing. I was ten years old before I had store bought clothes. My socks were knitted from unravelled worn out sweaters, my underpants sewn from old summer dresses. And we were not poor.

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