Interview: Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall

Published on Thursday 28 January 2010 14:39

Inspired by her son Hugh's passion for produce that's fresh, local And seasonal, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall makes the recipes of rationing work for today

It's lunchtime in the Cotswolds, and Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, is cooking me a meal straight out of the 1940s.

A box of mud-coated vegetables is on the table, the soup is on the stove and the pudding is in the oven. The only thing missing is Glenn Miller on the wireless.

A cosy, bespectacled but nonetheless formidable force on the Kitchen Front – more prim Marguerite Patten than potty Fanny Cradock – Jane is the perfect host. And of course, the perfect granny. When I arrive at her rambling house in Gloucestershire, in a taxi she insisted on booking, she marches me to the toilet immediately, makes me go again before I leave, and says things like: "Call me a crosspatch but I don't believe in letting children leave food on their plates." There isn't much chance of that today. Even the photographer leaves the Fearnley-Whittingstall home with a belly full of pineapple upside-down cake.

First Jane – the 69-year-old mother of TV chef Hugh, author of bestseller The Good Granny Guide, and proud winner of two gold medals at Chelsea Flower Show – makes the soup. Piles of onion, leek, and carrot are neatly lined up on a chopping board. A knob of butter froths in a casserole dish on the Aga. Jane's husband, Robert, ambles in to check on the chicken stock, made with the carcase from the Sunday roast. So far, so frugal.

"Cooking is a team effort in this house," she explains, sending him off to get the split peas that have been soaking overnight. "I'm always amazed by husbands who don't take part in the kitchen." They've been married for 47 years, are very sweet together (at one point she calls him "my petit chou"), and Jane is about to publish a guide to wedded bliss. Her secret to a successful marriage? Good manners, of course.

But we're here to talk about yet another area of this supergran's expertise – wartime food. That's the subject of her new book, The Ministry of Food. Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the start of rationing in Britain, it accompanies a major exhibition of the same name at the Imperial War Museum. It's a beautifully illustrated compendium of stories, national history, advertising posters, recipes and gardening tips. All of this explains today's rather austere but very tasty lunch menu and our discussion of why a world blighted by war and one blighted by recession, food shortages, growing populations and, erm, worthy celebrity chefs aren't that far apart. The difference is that today the wars we are fighting are against obesity, economic downturn and climate change.

"Morale is pretty low isn't it, even though we're not at war as we were," Jane says. "But it isn't just the recession. We're beginning to realise that it isn't right to eat imported food out of season that has travelled many miles. And we're tired of the consumer society we've created and want to start taking time to cook again."

Her kitchen shelves are full of spattered cookery books by her son but she isn't using one of those, or indeed, her own hugely popular Good Granny Cookbook. Instead we're having Potage Crme Ambassadeur, taken from the menu at London's Dorchester during the Second World War and included in The Ministry of Food alongside other British austerity classics that Jane has updated for the modern credit-crunched home. If it wasn't the dead of winter and her garden wasn't buried under snow, we'd be using homegrown vegetables too.

The soup may have a fancy French name but it turns out to be a wartime staple that would have been on most household tables under rationing. I'm just relieved to not be getting Spam, whale meat or chocolate truffles made with mashed potato.

"Potage Crme Ambassadeur does sound rather grand, doesn't it," says Jane, pronouncing the French in a de trop posh English accent. "I was amused because when I did some research, I found it was the split-pea soup my mother made when we came back to London after the war." She softens the vegetables in the butter, adds some chopped bacon, and smiles as the familiar smells from ingredients that would have formed the base of most meals under rationing rise from the pan. "Of course during the war it would have been margarine, not butter, and my mother wouldn't have put in bacon. She would have used chopped bacon rinds and taken them out at the end. And instead of double cream she would have used top of milk. But it's wonderfully thrifty food."

When war broke out Jane, then six months old, was sent from Kensington to her grandparents' farm in Wiltshire with her mother and elder brother. Her father signed up with the Rifle Brigade and didn't return until 1946. "I didn't know there was a war on when we were in Wiltshire," she recalls. "People in the country had a much easier time. My mother and her sisters brought their children and it was a wonderful childhood really, growing up in a big house surrounded by cousins. We didn't know there was rationing. We had easy access to unrationed meat like hares, rabbits and game birds. My grandparents dug up the lawn in their garden and turned all the flower beds into veg patches."

She remembers the shock of arriving back in London and seeing sheep grazing on long grass in Hyde Park. "A lot of city parks and racecourses were dug up for people to grow veg. It's funny because now it's happening again with the Landshare programme, which Hugh is heavily involved in, that encourages people with land to make it available to local communities to grow their own. Recession is very different to being at war, I know, but people are getting interested in being economical again and rediscovering the pleasures of cooking."

On January 8, 1940, butter, bacon and sugar were the first foods to go on the ration. Rationing happened fast, just four months after Britain tuned into prime minister Neville Chamberlain's sober address to the nation ending in those stark words: "Consequently this country is at war with Germany." The Ministry of Food, run by the charismatic Lord Woolton (after which an inedible pie, also included and tarted up in the book, was named), introduced a points system and a ration book for each person. For the next 14 years the Ministry of Food successfully controlled and improved the eating habits of an entire population. This extraordinary feat was achieved through daily radio broadcasts, recipe suggestions, cookery demonstrations by Marguerite Patten – who has written the foreword to the book – and a relentless propaganda campaign that urged people to "Dig For Victory", "Come and Help With the Victory Harvest", and "Let Your Shopping Help Our Shipping".

"Part of the fun of looking at the Ministry of Food recipes was that they made me remember the food I grew up with," says Jane. She used the Imperial War Museum's collections, the archive of Mass Observation – made up of ordinary people's diaries during the war – and her own experiences growing up under rationing to write the book. "By the time rationing ended I was a teenager and my mother had been cooking under those conditions for 14 years. British cooking was pretty low standard before the war, very unimaginative. It was divided along class lines. Those who could afford it would eat meat every day. Under rationing they were lucky if they got two chops a week. That's why the Ministry of Food had this big thing about potatoes. They were the most nutritious, energy-giving vegetable and an alternative to the national wheatmeal loaf, which people were very suspicious of. I was going to use a potato recipe but it was always soup my mother cooked. I've been eating this soup for as long as I can remember."

During the war, eggs, tea, cheese, meat and sweets were added, one by one, on the ration. Meanwhile, fruits such as bananas disappeared altogether and tinned food and fish became scarce. It wasn't until 1954, almost a decade after peace was declared, that the last foodstuffs – meat and bacon – came off the ration. Britain was irrevocably changed and in terms of nutrition it was for the better. The gap between rich and poor narrowed, children were taller and healthier than they had ever been, and infant mortality declined.

Jane was one of the generation of healthy war children, brought up on a diet she says was much more varied and tasty than Spam, Spam and more Spam. She took her free spoonful of cod liver oil ("disgusting") and rosehip syrup ("delicious") daily, got extra milk and egg rations and free orange juice. "Rationing was a great social leveler," she says. "People who were undernourished through poverty were much better off. It turned into this great social engineering project. The fact is, people in Britain have never been as well-fed as they were under rationing."

She whizzes the soup up in a blender, a job that would have taken infinitely longer when she had to push it through a sieve until it was smooth. Now she's on to the pineapple upside-down cake, which uses up the weekly, sometimes fortnightly, egg ration in one fell swoop. As she boils up butter, brown sugar and syrup from the pineapple tin on the stove, we talk eggs. "We would only get this pudding as a treat," she explains. "It uses a whole egg and you really celebrated when you got your hands on tinned pineapple. Usually we ate eggless cake. We also preserved eggs in this great big bucket of slimy stuff called isinglass, which is apparently made out of the swim-bladders of fishes. It was yucky to touch, like liquid jelly, and you lowered the eggs into it and stacked them up so they were submerged and the air cut off." It didn't always work and Jane was often tasked with the job of fishing the eggs out of the grey gloop, cracking them into a bowl, and sniffing them before use.

Did food at home change when she returned to London after the war? "I don't really remember the difference because even though it was thrifty, the food was always tasty. My mother used to cook rabbit in such a way that my father thought it was chicken. I never knew, either, until she revealed the secret of her chicken casserole years later."

She tested most of the recipes supplied by the Ministry of Food while researching the book and was particularly offended by beetroot pudding and Mock Fish Pie, in which Jerusalem artichoke masquerades as flakes of cod.

The book is full of lovely stories, from the boy who made his Mars Bar last a fortnight by shaving off a sliver each day, to Auberon Waugh's recollection of the day bananas returned to Britain. Each child was allowed one, and he had to look on, salivating in horror, as his father munched their family's entire allocation of four of these exotic fruits he had never seen or tasted. There are stories of the Land Girls who left cities and towns across Britain to plough the fields, an all-female force of 117,000 replacing the 98,000 farm workers who had been called up. Jane particularly enjoyed the diaries of a Lancashire housewife called Nelly Last, who vividly brought to life the drudgery of queuing for hours at the grocers', the joy of waiting for the seasons to change to get different fruit and vegetables, and the art of shopping with a ration book.

"It was all about befriending the butcher so he would keep meaty bones back for you or the grocer so he would save you an egg under the counter," says Jane, pressing pineapple rings into toffee syrup and pouring cake batter over them. "What I loved finding out about were the parties and weddings. Icing sugar was practically unobtainable so wedding cakes were made with cardboard and plaster of Paris sculpted to look like icing. It would all be lifted off to reveal this rather sad, small piece of cake. One woman made ice-cream for her child's birthday by cooling thick custard and beating it over and over again."

After the war all sorts of domestic advances started to arrive, from freezers to blenders. The kitchen and women's role in it was starting to change and by the time Jane had her own children, Hugh and his older sister Sophy, Britain's love affair with frozen and convenience food had begun.

Although Hugh experimented in the kitchen with peppermint creams and fudge that he would sell to her friends (he also asked his mother for a sugar thermometer for his birthday), Jane was busy revelling in the joys of Angel Delight. "Frozen food came into the country, and everything changed," she recalls, looking sheepish as we sit down to eat. "I'm ashamed to say I brought up Hugh and Sophy on fish fingers and beef burgers. My generation were rather bowled over by the magic of the supermarket. I stopped cooking the way my mother had done under rationing."

It was when Hugh began as an adult to cook "real food", championing fresh, local, seasonal produce, foraging in the wild, and making stews, roasts, and soups that she recognised the food of her own childhood coming back. "It's the same spirit, the same attitude to food returning," she says. "Making the most of ingredients, respecting them, growing your own. The other day Hugh made me a stew with lentils, beans, bacon, herbs and lots of veg from his fields. He was improvising at home and just throwing a few things together. It was delicious. And you know what? I ate it and thought, 'This stew would have been made under rationing.'"

The Ministry of Food: Thrifty Wartime Ways to Feed Your Family, by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 4 February, 18.99. The accompanying exhibition runs at the Imperial War Museum from 12 February to 3 January, 2011, adults 4.95, concessions 3.95, children 2.50, family 13. Visit www.iwm.org.uk/food for more information.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, January 31, 2010