Week Thirty-Nine: 40s/50s

We’re back into my history realm now! I usually base my recipes on older ones, but there were a lot of interesting things happening with food in the 40s and 50s, with wartime rationing being the basis for my ice cream this week.

Rationing in the UK was strict and lasted for a long time. To state an obvious fact, we are an island, a lot of our food was brought to us via the sea - there was a good potential for the Axis to just starve us out. There were a series of studies conducted on how little food a person could survive on, and it says a lot about our biology that rationing was never as harsh as the bare minimum - even under threat, we didn’t need to go that far. We should be cautious about glorifying paleo diets because it’s not like people lived long and healthy lives in prehistoric times, but the human body is capable of surviving scarcity, it was honed to live for long periods of time on foraged berries with the occasional mammoth steak to shore up the fat supplies; the problem we now have, at least in the western world, is every day is mammoth steak day and we’re never using up those fat supplies during the foraged berries weeks and months because they don’t happen now. 

I’ve gone on a tangent; I do that a lot, you may have noticed. Back to wartime rationing in the UK: the exact amounts that different food items were rationed to varied over the years, and what might be the lowest time for one food wasn’t necessarily the lowest time for another. Regarding ice cream making, at its lowest sugar was 8oz (227g) per week, milk 3 pints (1.7L) per week plus a tin of milk powder a month which added another 8 pints (4.5L) so effectively 5 pints a week, one egg per week (or this could be substituted for a packet of egg powder that when used made the equivalent of twelve eggs, but this was for a whole month, so the equivalent of three eggs per week.) There was also a separate points system, with 24 points a month to spend on dried goods like flour. Cream as far as I can tell wasn’t rationed but also wasn’t widely available. You still had to use money to buy food, and just because you had a hypothetical ration didn’t guarantee a supply, but for the most part people didn’t miss out on food and let’s assume for our purposes that the hypothetical food available was available. On the face of it, that isn’t bad for an ice cream maker - you can easily make an ice cream from these ingredients - but remember, this is all the food for a week. If you use 160g of the sugar to make an ice cream, that only leaves 67g for everything else for that week. It’s hard to imagine planning a week’s eating based on these rations, and I did consider actually doing it for a week but honestly that seemed like more effort than I was willing to go to, plus I didn’t have to; I bought a book with reprinted Ministry of Food recipes and guides which gave a good idea of what kind of foods were actually being made and eaten.

Which is how I ended up ice cream cornflour mould - basically warm milk and cornflour mixed together and left to thicken. Like the carrageen moss disaster this is one for compressor machines, if you left this mixture to chill it would also harden, but also like the carrageen moss disaster I wouldn’t bother.

Cornflour mould ice cream

Ingredients

I made 800g of mixture, I might suggest make more to actually fill a tub.

640g whole (4% butterfat) milk

40g cornflour

40g caster sugar

80g glucose (the original recipe doesn’t have glucose; trust me, it needs glucose)

Flavouring - I used peppermint extract, which felt a little more on theme than a vanilla pod, plus I had it on hand

Method

1. Mix the cornflour and sugar into a smooth paste using a little of the milk - I did this on a saucepan

2. Boil the rest of the milk and mix it into the cornflour paste, whisking until smooth

3. Continue boiling the milk cornflour mixture whilst whisking for five minutes, also add the flavouring

4. Transfer to the ice cream machine and churn until mixture is no longer turning over, it took about fifty minutes

5. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours

Unlike the carrageen moss disaster, this does actually ice cream, mainly because I learned my lesson about trusting myself on sugar content. But it is not worth it: the cornflour thickener does not make up for the lack of cream, the lack of fat content gives nothing to hold on to the flavour, and overall it’s just not worth it.