22nd February 2023
I started the day with two mugs of tea, made with the same teabag. I don’t know why I am economising this way, because I have 140 teabags in my monthly ration, but I did it anyway, to get into the spirit of rationing myself.
Breakfast was a compromise between 2023 and 1943. I have some foods that need to be eaten or wasted which would not have been available in 1943. Thus breakfast was a bowl of the last of my muesli with fruit yogurt instead of the period porage oats (sic) with milk.
For lunch I had two tomatoes, locally grown, sliced with pepper and vinegar. Later I treated myself to three slices of home-made brown bread to use up the loaf * as what my father would have called “Bread and Scrape”. Butter (or in my case vegetable spread) was spread across the bread and then scraped off again, leaving a thin covering.
*I later discovered “Wheaties”. Stale bread baked in the oven and served with milk in place of breakfast cereal. That’s an experiment for later.
In the evening my wife (who is not joining in to the letter, but in spirit), and I each had a jacket potato. Mine with a small tin of mackerel (counting one point on my ration table of the six allowed for this week), hers with some delicious cheese and onion mix from Sainsburys. I overindulged in the fish, which should have been enough for two meals, but the oil they were packed with saved the use of butter on the potato.
I then enjoyed a pint of alcohol-free “Doom Bar” bitter, which was most satisfactory.
A note on another compromise between 1943 and 2023. I am making use of my freezer for this project, but with the justification that in one session I cook several meals for one person, not one meal for several, as would have been more normal in 1943.
General Whiskers' semi-historical wanderings 