A Wet Day.

The weather was pretty miserable today, there was plenty to do, but not a lot worth recording, either as a diary entry or as a photograph, so today‘s blip is of my old, half-used, ration book which I discovered after many years while tidying up a week ago; it is part of history, part of my history, and has been waiting patiently for "a wet day."

I was a little surprised to realise that rationing had lasted so late into my life, I shouldn't have been; my most recent memory of the reality of it was of a couple of my friends, after Sunday school, saying that they had some sweet rations and were going to use them; but I have no recollection of actually using the coupons myself.

Before I started school - before the days of refrigerators - I used to have to accompany The Old Lady on her daily shopping expedition. Ration books were very much in evidence then, particularly at the butcher’s.
TOL's mother was an expert in making the most of what-ever food there was available; since then I have tried to recreate some of the foods she conjured up; I can remember the basic principles which seem easy enough, but I've had no success.

There were “potato huffkins,” a suet crust pastry with mashed potatoes folded in, the dough cut into shape and then baked; they were eaten hot, cut in half and spread with butter. After rationing had finished we used lashings of butter, most of which dribbled down our chins, I can still taste them. Google hasn't helped with finding a recipe; I've discovered that huffkins are a Kentish bread and my grandmother was from Kent, but there seems to be no reference anywhere to a potato and suet creation.

We also had "fatty cakes," a sweetened short crust pastry with embedded currants, again cut to shape, but this time fried - probably in dripping - and, again, eaten hot. From there on, the stories are the same, no recipes, not a shred of evidence they ever existed other than in our family memories. If I ask TOL, she just says that her mother was a good cook but that she never measured anything or wrote anything down; she just cooked.