by Bee Wilson
Some of the foods considered ersatz at the start of the war were later accepted with gratitude. Jam was one. In 1915 and 1916, jam was loathed, because it was urged by the government as a substitute for meat fat and butter. Bread and jam as a main course! To a population used to meat, this was a wretched thought. You could hardly feed a family with bread and jam. In August 1916 women rioted in Kattowitz, screaming “Bread! Bacon! Fat! Potatoes! Away with jam!”8 Little by little, however, as deprivation increased, people became happy to dine on jam. It no longer seemed ersatz, but a substance in its own right.
The great problem was the shortage of meat and fat. Pork and Butterbrot were the staples of the German diet. The war saw “unpleasant scenes” in front of butcher’s shops as housewives battled each other for the last morsel of pig. The meat shortage led to disgusting attempts to make ersatz fats, of which margarine was perhaps the least horrible. With lard and dripping in short supply, Germans wondered in desperation if fats could be rendered from other animals. There were experiments with producing fats from rats, mice, hamsters, crows, and even cockroaches. There was even a plan to extract protein from the wings of dragonflies.9 These crazy schemes are not so far removed from the insane substitute foods that get cooked up in the trenches by Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth, such as coffee (mud) with milk (spit) and sugar (dandruff), or filet mignon in sauce béarnaise (dog turds in glue). The difference, of course, was that the German ersatz creations were real and were eaten not just in the trenches but in normal civilian homes.
Ersatz food was a concoction sanctioned by war, in which the most fanciful adulterations were not merely legal, but even encouraged, as a patriotic means of conserving resources. Ash could be dolled up in a nice packet and labelled “ersatz pepper.” To drink an infusion of ground walnut shells and call it “coffee” was not a sign of madness but of good citizenship. A new illness sprang up: “substitute sickness,” where consumers were made ill from a combination of hunger and eating dire surrogate foods, many of which included the “indigestible remains of animals.” Ersatz food contributed to the air of insubstantiality in wartime Berlin, where everyone lived in a state of suspense waiting for it all to end. People started applying the term ersatz to everything, even themselves. An Ersatzmensch was a substitute person, a simulacrum of a human being, who was no more real than the Ersatzbutter they spread on their Ersatzbrot.
This culture of fakeness continued during the deprived years of Weimar and lingered on into the prewar Nazi regime, whose propaganda promised mouthwatering visions of mass consumption, but whose shops held empty shelves and ersatz junk. Sugar continued to be advocated as a replacement for fat. The production of the once loathed jam trebled between 1933 and 1937. People were forced to use ersatz soap, which did not wash properly. The German taste for coffee and cakes had to be abandoned: in 1938 all cream cakes were banned as wasteful. Coffee was available only intermittently. Goebbels was scornful of those consumers weak enough to complain of the coffee shortages—these “pathetic old biddies” as he delighted in called them. “In times when coffee is scarce, a decent person simply drinks less or stops drinking it altogether,” was his considered view.10
For all its pretence of newness, the Nazi regime offered the same old fantastical substitutes. All that was new was the propaganda, which reached fresh heights of nonsense. At one point, the lemon supply dried up, and the regime announced that it would be replaced with rhubarb. Apart from a general acidity, it is hard to see what lemons and rhubarb have in common. You cannot squeeze a stick of rhubarb over a piece of fish; or put a slice of rhubarb in a drink; or make lemonade from it; or use its zest because it has none; or, for that matter, use rhubarb in any of the ways that you might use lemons. Never mind. The Nazi information machine announced the substitution of lemon with rhubarb as a triumph, because lemons were imported and rhubarb was not: “Only through the German soil are the finest vibrations transmitted to the blood . . . therefore, fare thee well, lemon, we need thee not. German rhubarb will replace thee altogether.”11 The continued reliance on ersatz foods brings home graphically how Hitler’s Germany had never recovered from the horrors of the First World War.
By comparison with Germany, the British home front was relatively comfortable during the Great War, apart from the ubiquity of margarine. Rationing was only introduced in 1918. Even so, cooks did find themselves reduced to using humbler ingredients, and less of them, than they might otherwise have done. “My Tuesdays are meatless / My coffee is sweetless,” as the popular song went. Cookbooks of the era are replete with “mock” dishes, peculiar doppelgängers of luxury goods. Mock food had been a feature of the British kitchen since the seventeenth century, the most famous being mock turtle soup (hence the “mock turtle” of Alice in Wonderland). Real turtle soup, using turtles from the West Indies, was prodigiously expensive. Serving it was a sign that yours was the most upper class of households. Eating “mock turtle soup” enabled middle-class homes to ape their “superiors.”12 It was made from a boiled calf ‘s head and seasoned with ham, sweet herbs, madeira, and cayenne, the same seasonings as for real turtle soup.13 Almost certainly, it tasted nothing like real turtle, except for a certain glueyness of texture. But how would those eating it know, since they had never tasted the real thing?
A 1928 advertisement for Campbell’s mock turtle soup—the most famous of all the mock foods.
The Great War saw a resurgence in mock foods. Our Grandmothers’ Recipes, a cookbook of 1916 by Lady Algernon Percy, included recipes for Mock Meat Pie (made with haricot beans, bacon, and onion) and Poor Man’s Goose, a dish of liver with sage and onions. Another cookbook of the time advises making leg of pork “to taste like turkey” (because turkey was a more prestigious meat than pork), mock oyster patties (which are really salsify in cream), mock hare (minced beef and pork), and mock crab sandwiches (shrimps and herring roes).14 Reading these mock recipes, the obvious question is, why did they bother? No one eating them can have been fooled by these dishes; and anyway, the word “mock” prevented any deception from taking place. Often, the “mock” made little attempt to resemble the real. Food historian Colin Spencer has come across a Victorian recipe for “a boiled salad, made from potato, celery, brussels sprout and beetroot,” which “with a superhuman effort of the imagination pretended to be a lobster salad.”15 Mock food is the adulteration of make-believe. Enthusiasts for mock dishes were like children making mud pies, pretending they are cakes with cherries on top, the difference being that most children know better than to eat mud pies. But then most children don’t have to keep up appearances.
Make-believe food became still more common during the Second World War, when fantasy at the table seemed a good way to maintain morale. There was a change, though, in that the taste of these creations became less and less important, with more emphasis placed on “visual effect.”16 Mock chops (grated potatoes, soya flour, and onions), mock cream (evaporated milk mixed with gelatine), mock toad-in-the-hole (made with no egg in the batter): all of these recipes put more energy into looking right than tasting right. Ambrose Heath, author of More Kitchen Front Recipes, gave a recipe for “mock fish,” consisting of ground rice, milk, a little onion or leek, and a seasoning of anchovy essence, all cooked into a kind of polenta-ish porridge which is then moulded into fish fillet shapes, fried until golden, and served with parsley sauce. Mock apricot flan was made of carrots and plum jam; mock oyster soup from fish trimmings.17 Then there were the “mock goslings” of Josephine Terry, which turned out to be nothing but apple slices in potato pastry, served with gravy.18
Almost certainly, these mock foods were more written about than made. It is a dangerous business, inferring what people ate from the evidence of recipe books. If cookbooks were a perfect record of what the general population ate, then Britain today would be a nation where everyone sat down at night to immaculate meals of Nigella fish pie and Jamie Oliver roast beef. We know this isn’t true. Still, written recipes can tell us something—they can tell us w
hat people aspired to eat. And a world in which anyone aspired to eat mock gosling is a world in which kitchen substitutes had become commonplace.
After rationing began in January 1940, the public was also exposed to a new phenomenon: powdered substitute foods. Jack Drummond at the Ministry of Food introduced numerous dehydrated foods to the public, in particular, dried milk and dried egg. One London girl remembered wartime ice cream as being “an appalling mess, yellow and lumpy like scrambled eggs, with gritty little lumps of ice embedded in it,” which sounds as if it was made with both dried milk and dried egg.19 Still, rationing was more or less democratic. It affected grand restaurants as much as individuals. Mario Gallati, the manager of The Ivy in Covent Garden, remembered the foul “mayonnaise” that he invented during the war from flour and water put in the mixer with vinegar, mustard, and a little powdered egg. “It made me shudder to serve it, but everyone took this kind of ‘ersatz’ food very much in their stride.”20 In the same spirit, the nation embraced spam fritters, jam made with carrot, and eggless cakes.
More of a problem to the British consumer were the natural foods brought in under rationing as replacements for scarce proteins. Horse meat and whale steak were regarded with revulsion, even though both are nourishing and wholesome foods, considered delicious in many cultures. Most notorious of all was the tinned snoek or baracouta introduced after the war (in 1947) as a replacement for tinned sardines. As the historian Colin Spencer has pointed out, “One would think that at a time when the butter and meat ration had been cut, the bacon ration halved and after a winter and spring of catastrophe, a new tinned fish which was cheap and unrationed . . . would be greeted with delight.”21 The Ministry of Food bought millions of tins of the stuff and published eight recipes for snoek, the most celebrated being snoek piquante, involving spring onions and vinegar.22 Still, the British regarded snoek with deep suspicion. By 1949, more than a third of the snoek stock was still unsold. The ministry was forced to sell it off quietly as cat food.
The snoek affair showed how fed up people were with having their food choices dictated by the central government. Nutritionally speaking, the British ate better during the war than ever before or since: more wholemeal bread and vegetables, fewer sweets, small but regular amounts of meat and fish. In 1946, the chief medical officer reported that the “vital statistics” of the nation for the war years had been “phenomenally good.” Thanks in part to rations for children of orange juice, milk, and rosehip syrup and better diets for pregnant women, child mortality rates dropped, even taking into account the deaths of seven thousand children in the Blitz. There were many fewer anaemic women and children, and many more children had perfect sets of teeth. Rationally, people ought to have felt well fed after the war. But they didn’t. They felt deprived and dreary, fed up with broken biscuits and endlessly making do. As the food writer Marguerite Patten said, when people looked forward to victory, one of the things they were looking forward to was more variety in their food.23
Nevertheless, the postwar attitude to substitute foods in Britain remained confused. On the one hand, there was a yearning to escape the stifling yoke of the Ministry of Food and enjoy once again the joy of choosing real foods for oneself, especially foods that were rich or exotic or imported: cream, bananas, fresh tomatoes. On the other hand, the years of rationing had acclimatized many housewives to using substitutes that they would once have considered shoddy. When Elizabeth David returned home to England after the war (having spent much of it in Cairo, where she ate delicious spiced pilafs, olive oil, ripe apricots), she was struck by the contents of her friends’ pantries. “Everyone else had hoards of things like powdered soups and packets of dehydrated egg to which they were conditioned.”24 Such things were now completely normal and not even seen as cheats (whereas Elizabeth David found them cheerless, heartless, and dismal compared to the Mediterranean food she had come to love). Instead of turning away from processed and substitute foods after the war, the British public began to eat more and more of them, for they offered the illusion of freedom at a low cost. In the 1960s, a sign was spotted outside a village shop selling fresh fruit: “Lovely Ripe Pears—Good as Tinned!”25
Imitation Foods in the United States
Across the Atlantic, despite the absence of the privation conditions experienced in Europe, ersatz foods were taking over the grocery store too, though not without a fight from the manufacturers of “real” foods. The legal position of “imitation foods” in the United States was starting to change. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Congress and the states had generally used the law to protect basic American agricultural products from competition from novel processed foods. The Oleomargarine Act of 1886 (see chapter 4) was a case in point: margarine was taxed to prevent it destroying the market in dairy butter, and also to prevent the consumer from being misled. Similarly, the “Filled Milk Act” of 1923 prohibited interstate commerce in any milk to which nondairy fats or oils had been added, on the grounds that the sale of such products “constitutes a fraud upon the public.”26 The idea behind these laws was a familiar one: that basic, traditional products needed to be safeguarded against newer, fabricated substitutes.
The market had changed during the twentieth century, though, especially during the Depression years. As one cynical consumer of mock goslings and pear-nanas said, “there never was a product made but some gosh darn fool could make it worse and sell it for less.”27 Substandard versions of regular goods posed a dilemma for government. Technically, they were not allowed to be sold under the 1906 act. But without them, much of the already hungry population would starve. A compromise was reached in 1931 in the so-called Canner’s Amendment, under which substandard but wholesome canned goods, such as blemished, split, or underripe peaches and pears, were permitted to be sold, but only if they bore an off-putting black crepe label, announcing the low quality. This move was welcomed as “an immeasurable help” to the hard-pressed housewife.28
The question of imitation as opposed to substandard foods was harder to resolve. During the early 1930s, countless new foods had been produced, with often ingenious advertising. The market was flooded with cleverly marketed, new, cheap imitation products, most with “fanciful” names such as Salad Bouquet, an imitation vinegar, Peanut Spred (a peanut butter with only modest peanut content) and Bred-Spred, a kind of jam with a lot of pectin and not much fruit. Real homemade jam needs the pectin in the fruit to make it set, but new technology enabled manufacturers to use refined pectin. They could now achieve a set consistency using nothing but sugar, water, and colouring: a kind of fruitless jam, though the law did not allow it to be called that. The problem was that the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act did not prevent such worthless products being marketed because of the “distinctive name proviso.” This permitted foods to be sold that would otherwise have been considered adulterations of traditional products. So long as Bred-Spred did not call itself “jam” or “jelly,” it was entitled to contain as little fruit as it liked.
This was galling—both to the manufacturers of real jam, whose product looked artificially expensive next to the likes of Bred-Spred, and to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose job of maintaining food quality seemed undermined by these fabricated products. How was the ordinary shopper expected to know what was meant by their fancy names and gleaming packaging? At the height of the Depression, the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, complained that “the various qualities of goods require a discrimination which is not at the command of consumers,” adding that “they are likely to confuse outward appearance with inward integrity.”29 Integrity was very important to Roosevelt. His New Deal programme of economic relief depended on hope, and hope was eroded by dishonesty. Roosevelt’s White House was famous for its lacklustre, but always frugal and healthy food, overseen by his formidable wife Eleanor.30 In a message to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt insisted that “honesty ought to be the best policy, not only for one individual or one enterprise, but for every individual and every enterprise
in the nation.”31 Honesty, said Roosevelt, required that “the strict exclusion from our markets of harmful or adulterated products” and “the careful enforcement” of food standards.
In these Depression years, there was waning public confidence that harmful products really were being excluded from the market. In 1933, a best-selling book was published by a pair of consumer advocates, Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink, suggesting that the American population was essentially just 100 000 000 Guinea Pigs, on which new food and drugs were constantly being tested, without any real guarantee that they were not poisonous. The book was reprinted thirteen times during the first six months after publication. Kallet and Schlink painted a scary scenario in which nothing was what it seemed and hidden poisons lurked in every package in the grocery store and pharmacy. The fact that the poisons were not all immediate in their effects—like the Victorian red lead and copper—made them no less sinister. “If the poison is such,” they wrote, “that it acts slowly and insidiously, perhaps over a long period of years . . . then we poor consumers must be test animals all our lives.” It is a chilling image. As for the food on the shelves, much of it was not really food at all, in Kallet and Schlink’s view. Packaged pineapple pie, they argued, should for honesty’s sake be relabelled as “corn starch-filled, glucose-sweetened pie made with sub-standard canned pineapple, artificial (citric acid) lemon flavour and artificial coal tar color.”32