Part 3 of 4: Feeding the home front in the second year of the war
Rationing shaped the recipes that followed. Sugar was the first food rationed, in the spring of 1942, and by 1943 canned goods, fats, and meats all required stamps. Look at how Hazel Moreland’s pie works around those limits. Sweetened condensed milk brings its own sugar into the bowl, so no cup of rationed sugar is spent. Crushed vanilla wafers replace a rolled crust, sparing both flour and shortening. Three eggs and the juice of three lemons do the rest, and the whole thing bakes for ten minutes. A single tablespoon of bacon grease leftover flavors the pie crust, and every household kept a can of saved drippings by the stove. Cooking fat had become both a ration and a donation, and Bessie M. Gant’s recipes treat a spoonful of it as the valuable thing it was. A ration book guaranteed the right to buy, not the presence of goods on a neighborhood shelf or the wages to pay for them, and families confined by covenants and hiring practices to particular blocks shopped where merchants chose to stock and price as they pleased. Gant taught readers to cook well inside limits that other people had set, and she made the lesson pleasurable rather than grim.1
When resources tighten in your own community, who decides what is scarce, and who teaches people how to live well anyway?
[Side Bar]
The last of the three recipes Bessie M. Gant collected from Hazel Henry Moreland for her Pittsburgh Courier column of September 18, 1943, this icebox-style custard pie was engineered for a rationed pantry. Its principal ingredient, a can of sweetened condensed milk, carried its own sugar at a time when sugar had been rationed for more than a year, and a crust of crushed vanilla wafers spared the flour and shortening a pastry shell would have required. Gant printed it under the name of a Hollywood comedian who spent that autumn entertaining troops at segregated Army camps. Source: Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11.
Hazel’s Lemon Pie
Ingredients
3 eggs
Juice of 3 lemons
1 can Eagle Brand condensed milk
1 box vanilla wafers
Directions
Place the condensed milk in a mixing bowl, add the egg yolks, and stir well. Add the lemon juice and stir until thick. Crush part of the wafers and put them into a pie pan, standing the remaining wafers around the sides. Pour the custard into the pan. Beat the egg whites until stiff and place them on top. Bake 10 minutes. Serves six.
1. Bessie M. Gant, “Bess’ Secrets: ’Bout Good Things to Eat—Mantan Moreland Does His Share to Keep Up Morale of Service Men,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11; Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).