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WWII recipes for today's cooks

As an antidote to over-fussy modern cuisine it could not be better, and as a source for sensible, healthy and economical recipes it could not be improved.

In the pinched austerity of 1944 The Daily Telegraph appealed to its readers to send in their answers to the problems posed by rationing for the contemporary cook.

The newspaper's "Home Cook", a reassuringly anonymous figure, wrote in the foreword to the appropriately lean volume - now being republished by The Daily Telegraph: "Cookery, always influenced by wars and social changes, has come to one of its greatest turning points.

"It is to the home cooks rather than to the food specialists and the scientists that we must now look for the most practical and pleasing solutions of new problems."

The Home Cook's weekly column offered a prize of 10/6d - about £40 at today's values - for the best recipe of the week. And what solutions did these "painstaking, purposeful" kitchen toilers come up with?

Well, it was meals such as Corned Beef and Beetroot served up piping hot by Miss Evans of East Horsley in Surrey, or Curried Tripe, to be served with boiled rice.
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)