We'll Eat Again: Food in Wartime Britain Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. When was food rationing first introduced in Britain?

Answer: 1940

Although people had registered for ration books in September 1939, it wasn't until January 1940 that the first foods went on the ration.

2. What basic foods were the first to be rationed?

Answer: Bacon, butter and sugar.

Meat was rationed soon after the first wave, in March 1940. Tea wasn't rationed until July 1940, and jam (and marmalade) in March 1941. Neither potatoes nor bread were rationed during the war, although bad weather in 1946 and the severe winter of 1947-48 meant they were actually rationed after the war. Coffee was never rationed, as it wasn't widely drunk in Britain at that time.

3. The amount of food available on the ration changed throughout the war as goods became more or less available but which of these was a typical weekly ration for one person?

Answer: 1 fresh egg, 2 oz butter, 2 oz tea, 1 oz cheese, 8 oz sugar, 4 rashers of bacon, 4 oz margarine.

Ration books were issued for every person and stamped by a local shopkeeper when the goods were collected. As well as the ration each person had so many points per week to purchase other items such as cereals, tinned food, biscuits and dried fruit. Fruit was not rationed, but supplies were limited and lemons and bananas became unobtainable for most of the war. Oranges continued to be sold but greengrocers tended to reserve them for children and pregnant women. Game meat such as rabbit and pigeon were not rationed but were not always available and fish was not rationed but the price increased considerably as the war went on.

4. Eggs were first rationed in June 1941. If you had the room, then keeping chickens was the obvious answer. However, if you kept chickens, you lost your egg ration, but this was offset with a grain allowance for feeding the chickens. Another problem was how to preserve eggs when the hens were laying well to cover the times when they weren't laying. Which of these was NOT a method housewives used for preserving eggs during the war?

Answer: Putting them in the refrigerator.

Refrigerators were not widely known in British households during World War II. Waterglass is a sodium silicate solution that supposedly sealed the pores in the egg shells to stop them going bad. The waterglass was mixed in water until it looked like cloudy grey liquid wallpaper paste.

The waterglass would be poured into a large container and the eggs added one by one. When an egg was needed, it was simply lifted from the liquid, washed (they felt slimy), and used in the normal way. In this way, eggs could be stored for 4-6 months.

5. The Dig For Victory Campaign encouraged people to grow as many of their own vegetables as they could, with people digging up prized lawns and flower beds to create vegetable patches. Which of these famous places was NOT dug up to support the Dig for Victory campaign?

Answer: The garden of No 10 Downing Street.

The British public were encouraged to grow as much as they could and allotments appeared in some very unusual places. The dried up moat of the Tower of London provided vegetables for the Beefeaters, and the Royal Family and their household used the produce from the vegetable gardens planted in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Hyde Park not only grew vegetables, but also had its own piggery.

As far as I'm aware, the garden at 10, Downing Street was not used to produce vegetables until 2009 when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife Sarah, were encouraged to start their own garden by Michelle Obama.

6. In 1941 Francis Latry, the head chef at the Savoy Hotel, London, created a special wartime pie. It was meat free and designed to be adaptable, using a mixture of whatever vegetables were available in a sauce with a pastry or potato topping. It was named after the head of the Ministry of Food. What was the pie called?

Answer: Woolton Pie.

The wartime Minister of Food was Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton, the ex-managing director of a store chain in the north of England. His job was pretty unenviable, but it was vital to the war effort. The meat-free Woolton Pie was not popular with the meat pie loving British public, but Woolton took his role in promoting it very seriously. An editorial in 'The Times' in 1944 commented:
"When Woolton pie was being forced on somewhat reluctant tables, Lord Woolton performed a valuable service by submitting to the flashlight camera at public luncheons while eating, with every sign of enjoyment, the dish named after him."

Much of Woolton's success as Food Minister was due to his budgeting skills. He only rationed items of which he was certain he had enough to go around. This built up a sense of fairness and trust among the general public. He also believed that the public should be educated and helped, not just instructed and this was done by means of advertisements starring 'Dr Carrot' and 'Potato Pete', by broadcasts and 'Kitchen Front' spots on the radio and 'Food Flashes' in the cinema.

7. People were encouraged to eat plenty of home-grown potatoes in place of bread, which used imported wheat. The Ministry of Food created a character who gave helpful advice and recipes to enable housewives to make the most of the humble spud. What was his name?

Answer: Potato Pete.

The Song of Potato Pete:
"Potatoes new, potatoes old,
Potatoes (in a salad) cold
Potatoes baked or mashed or fried
Potatoes whole, potatoes pied
Enjoy them all, including chips
Remembering spuds don't come in ships!"

Spud is a British slang word for the potato, and my father (b. 1937) still sometimes calls them butchers' enemies.

8. As many foods all but disappeared during the war years, the word 'mock' often cropped up in recipe titles. Mock oyster soup contained artichokes, mock crab was a mixture of scrambled egg and cheese and mock cream was a mixture of margarine, sugar, dried milk powder and milk. What sweet root vegetable was often mashed, given a few drops of banana flavouring and pressed into service as mock banana?

Answer: parsnip

Although beetroot and carrot are both sweet (as root vegetables go), their bright colours could not have been passed off as banana, even to children who had never seen a real one! Some children who were not old enough to remember pre-war food did not believe bananas actually existed.

9. Although some foods vanished during the war years, from time to time new foods appeared on the market, and this was true of snoek, which turned up towards the end of the war. What was snoek?

Answer: A type of snake mackerel from South Africa.

Despite its relation to the mackerel and its popularity in South Africa today, snoek was not a popular addition to the wartime diet. The Ministry of Food did its best to promote the fish, but a large proportion of the tins that were imported remained unsold and towards the end of the war they were relabelled and sold as cat food!

10. When did food rationing come to an end?

Answer: 1954

Ten years after the D-Day landing and after fourteen years in total, food rationing in Britain ended at midnight on 4 July 1954, when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were lifted. Many people who lived through the rationing period, like my parents, will tell you that in spite of the shortages, they never really went hungry and at the end of the war most people were healthier and slimmer than we are in Britain today!

Source: Author alex_april

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor WesleyCrusher before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

The efforts and ingenuity of British housewives to cook interesting and tasty food for their families under rationing in World War II has always interested me and led to this, my first quiz.

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