The book The The Ministry Of Food: Thrifty Wartime Ways To Feed Your Family, had a publicity piece in the Daily Mail on 20 February 2010: The Food That Won Us the War (wonderful classic Daily Mail headline). Bearing in mind the reputation the Mail has for creative journalism when it comes to quotes, and until such time as I feel strong enough to read the book myself, I shall treat this as accurate since it rings true. According to the article Jane F-W says:
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to imagine cooking without onions, but during the war, they disappeared from the shops. This was a serious blow to housewives struggling to make cheaper cuts of meat palatable, or to create tasty vegetarian dishes.
What! Vegetarian dishes? Onions with the meat! Where was she? Well, not Newington Green obviously, she’d have had to dye that name of hers for a start.
I am trying to remember whether my mother ever bought an onion, before or after they disappeared from the shops. Working-class people didn’t cook with onions. Possibly sometimes in a cottage pie, though equally as often not.
A quote that appears on Cook’s Info: British Wartime Food tells a more convincing story:
Served as a side dish at our luncheon of the regular three-course meal, which Englishmen religiously impose upon themselves in conformity with ration regulations, was a medium-size boiled Spanish onion. “You’ve been robbing a bank or playing with the black market”, exclaimed the astonished husband. “Neither”, explained his proud wife. “Michael (her son and an officer on a destroyer guarding trans-Atlantic convoys) brought these from Bermuda on his last trip and I’ve been saving them for just such an occasion.” -- Albin E. Johnson. Europe: Where the Cupboard is Almost Bare. Rotary International: The Rotarian. September 1943. Vol. 63, No. 3. Page 16.
Boiled onion, lubbly! Hmm. And for how long can you save a Spanish onion? Anyway that definitely makes some historic sense, though I don’t think we ever had even a boiled onion. Just possibly some boiled up with the mince in a cottage pie. Vegetables (and fruit) aside from potatoes were only ever boiled or stewed. Except salads, and except bananas and oranges – it was all this foreign stuff you ate raw. Salads consisted of lettuce, tomato and celery. Surprising, that the celery was eaten raw, because braised celery was quite common I think in Victorian times, though that might have been just among the Jane F-W classes. Celery has a stronger flavour when it’s cooked.
There was one notable exception to the shunning of onions, and that was pickled onions, onions pickled in malt vinegar with ‘pickling spices’ – peppercorns, mustard seeds, coriander seeds predominantly, though if people made their own they would have bought the spices ready-mixed. Mostly you bought pickled onions in a fish-and-chip shop, with fried fish, or chips. Fish-and-chip shops kept going throughout both world wars as fish was never on ration, presumably because of the devastating effect it would have had on towns like Aberdeen or Grimsby if it had been – and also no doubt because monitoring fishing quotas before the fish was landed would have been nigh-on impossible, and throwing it back in the sea more than a bit of an own-goal.
So the fish-and-chip shops stayed stocked and open, and what I cannot find out is whether the jars of pickled onions stayed on the shelves during the time that fresh onions were unavailable in the shops, I’ll bet they did. Anyone know?
When in the sixties Wimpy Bars and Chinese restaurants began to appear they were popular and the food seemed tasty and all rather exciting. I’m sure it was the onion that was doing that. I can still recall the taste now. That was before the days of obligatory sugary red gunge in your burger, when you could actually taste it.
The first Chinese restaurant in the area was on Stoke Newington High Street, just round the corner from Church Street if you turn left past the Three Crowns. That opened in 1962 or 63, and one morning I shall wake up remembering what its name was.
Dave
Incidentally the only fish and chip show I know in the UK that advertises ‘Fresh Salads’ is one called Full Bellies, in Crewe:
Picture from Dave Collier on Flickr
Menna says: ‘Dave where were u . . . Onions were the first thing u bought for flavour, my mum started with the gravy before anything else, she put onions in saucepan with flour n water, forget jus!, boiled it til tender then added gravy browning n more flour for the best gravy/brown Windsor soup ever, forget granules this was the first step to every meal’
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