While the challenges of Covid and those of the world wars are fundamentally very different, there are parallels we can draw between them. Wartime cookbooks can teach us so much about the thrift we’re re-learning now.
Reduce waste? Look to your grandmother
“Today, people may think of eating “waste” as a novelty exercise or a passing culinary trend, but really it’s the basis of cuisine – codifying a way of farming, cooking, and eating that responds to the demands of a landscape. How do we make these traditions accessible for everyday eaters? The first step is simple:
A few dusty onions
“If you ever find yourself longing to cook a good vegetable but there is none in sight, get a deep pot and dig eight to ten plain, big, dusty onions from your pantry, or the cold, dark onion bin at your nearest store. Then caramelise them.” …how Tamar Adler starts the chapter, How to Find
Bean broth, made good
Bean broth, bean juice, bean liquid. Whatever appetising name you like to call it (there aren’t any), that murky liquid from a tin of butter beans or the cooking water from a tender chickpea, is liquid gold. Liquid gold! Especially, when saved for a rainy, bare-fridge kinda day. That day was yesterday. A jar of chickpea cooking
Uses of a yoghurt pot
Whenever we’d make the annual trip to Cambrai – a very average town in Northern France – my grandmère would have a yoghurt cake in the oven. Not because we were coming, it’s just something she did every week, the remains of which would be stored on a china platter in a locked cabinet. Her