A Ration Book Christmas
Page 37
Ox Heart
Preparing your ox heart
• Remove all the hard fat from around the top of the heart, then cut away the large blood vessel as near to the muscle as possible and discard.
• Soak the heart in cold, salted water to help remove all the blood clots from the upper chambers – use your fingers – then slice down through the lower chambers with a sharp knife and spread open.
• Clean out any remaining blood clots and cut out any large heart strings, then rinse again in cold water.
• Using a clean cloth, pat it dry.
• Set aside and make the stuffing.
The stuffing
170g (6oz) oatmeal
285ml (½ pint) water
2 large onions (or 1 leek can be used instead), chopped
225g (8oz) breadcrumbs, from stale bread
handful of dried sage
60g (2oz) lard or dripping
salt and pepper
• In a pan, boil the oatmeal in the water for 30 minutes.
• Combine the chopped onions with the breadcrumbs.
• Mix the oatmeal with the onions and breadcrumbs, and add salt, pepper and a handful of dried sage.
• Fill the empty heart cavities with the stuffing mixture and then fold the two sides of the heart together.
• Taking a large-eyed darning needle and some button thread, stitch the edges of the heart muscle securely.
• Melt the lard or dripping in a roasting tin and place the heart in the middle.
• Place on the centre rack of a moderate oven (160°C/Gas 3) for 20 minutes per 450g (1lb) of heart.
• Check halfway through the cooking time and add enough peeled and halved potatoes to fill the area around the heart.
• Put back in the oven and continue until the cooking time has finished. Baste the potatoes and return the roasting tin to the oven for a further 30 minutes.
• Remove tin from the oven when completely cooked then carve and serve with vegetables.
Having served up the main meal Ida would have presented her family with a traditional Christmas pudding.
In peace-time, Ida would have made this before she went hop-picking at the end of August. However, with dried fruit being in short supply all through 1940 she would have bought what she could on the market each week, until she had enough to make her pudding. Sometimes, however, as you will see from the recipe below, which was given to me by a 90-year-old recently, you had to improvise.
War-time Christmas Pudding with no eggs
300g (10oz) national plain flour
300g (10oz) sugar
300g (10oz) dried mixed fruit
300g (10oz) grated carrot
300g (10oz) grated potato
150g (5oz) suet
2 tbsp black molasses or golden syrup
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda, dissolved in 2 tbs hot milk.
NB: if golden syrup is used then the dark pudding is made by adding 1 tsp gravy powder.
(People sometimes substituted liquid paraffin for the fat in a recipe, which was not ideal if your lavatory was situated at the far end of the back yard.)
• Mix all the ingredients together and pour into a well-greased pudding bowl.
• Cover the top with greaseproof paper and secure with string.
• Boil or steam for 4 hours.
Lastly, when everyone had eaten their fill and turned on the wireless for the King’s Christmas broadcast, Ida would have made everyone a nice cup of tea and a slice of Christmas cake decorated with candied fruits, as icing sugar was practically unobtainable during the war.
This is a recipe for a war-time boiled cake which my Aunt Martha gave me when I got married. I’ve used it for years as my Christmas cake.
Christmas Cake
110g (4oz) brown sugar
225g (8oz) butter or margarine
285ml (½ pint) milk
450g (1lb) mixed dried fruit
3 eggs, beaten
340g (12oz) self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp mixed spice
• Place the sugar, margarine, milk and dried fruit into a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes then leave to cool off the heat for 30–40 minutes.
• Stir in the beaten eggs, then fold in the flour, baking powder and mixed spice. Mix well before pouring into a greased and floured 20cm (8-inch) baking tin.
• Place in a pre-heated oven at 160°C (Gas 3) and cook for 2 hours, then test with a knife. If it comes out clean, then the cake is ready to be removed from the oven. If not, bake for a further 20 minutes and test again.
• When cooked through, leave to cool in the tin before turning it out.
This is a lovely moist fruit cake which will keep for ages in an airtight container. It can be decorated with icing or left plain and can even be served as a pudding with custard.
I hope you enjoyed a little glimpse into the Brogans’ 1940 Christmas Day food. If you would like to try them, be warned: I suspect today you’d have to order your ox heart specially.
Acknowledgements
As always, I would like to mention a few books, authors and people to whom I am particularly indebted.
In order to set my characters’ thoughts and worldview authentically in the opening years of WWII, I dug deep into Wartime Britain 1939-1945 (Gardiner), The East End at War (Taylor & Lloyd) and London’s East End Survivors (Bissell). As Jo and Tommy’s stories are set during the first months of the Blitz, I also drew on London Was Ours (Bell), The Blitz (Gardiner) and The Blitz (Madden).
I delved into Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology (Sheridan), Millions Like Us (Nicholson), Women at the Ready (Malcolmson) and Voices from the Home Front: Personal Experiences of Wartime Britain 1939-1945 (Goodall). In addition, Living Through the Blitz (Harrisson) helped me to understand the various bomb shelters available and the rules within them.
I went back to Put that Light Out!: Britain’s Civil Defence Services at War 1939-1945 (Brown) and the illustrated guide The British Home Front 1939-45 (Braley) to ensure I had the right feel to Post 7, where Jo and Tommy were stationed. As much of the area in the story was destroyed during the war, I used The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps (Ward) for the locations.
I also drew on The Wartime House (Brown & Harris), A Wartime Christmas (Brown) and Ration Book Diet (Brown, Harris & Jackson) to underpin Jo’s mother’s daily struggle to feed a family during rationing and shortages.
For Reggie’s criminal activities I used The Secret History of the Blitz (Levine), as well as Doing the Business (Hobbs), which, although examining East London’s underworld a decade after WWII, perfectly sets out the hierarchy and unwritten criminal code that was developed during those dark days.
However, my greatest research find for Jo and Tommy’s story was The Forgotten Service (Raby), the diary of May Greenup, an ambulance driver during the Blitz. This not only enabled me to dress Jo in the correct uniform, but also to use many of the anecdotes and rules applied to driving in the blackout. The second was Heavy Rescue Squad Work on the Isle of Dogs (Regan-Atherton). This was the diary of Bill Regan who worked on the Heavy Rescue squad and was written throughout the war.
Again, I’ve sprinkled my Fullerton family wartime stories and anecdotes throughout A Ration Book Christmas and used several post-war photographic books including Memories of Wapping 1900-1960: ‘Couldn’t Afford the Eels’ (Leigh) and The Wartime Scrapbook (Opie).
I would also like to thank a few more people. Firstly, my very own Hero-at-Home, Kelvin, for his unwavering support, and my three daughters, Janet, Fiona and Amy, for not minding too much that they have a distracted mother whose mind is often in another time and place. I’d also like to thank the members of Facebook group Stepney and Wapping living in 60s early 70s, who this time helped me get the location of the Tilbury Shelter correct and shared their families’ wartime experience.
Once again my lovely agent Laura Longrig
g, whose encouragement and incisive editorial mind helped me to see the wood for the trees. Lastly, but by no means least, a big thank you to the wonderful team at Atlantic Books and to my equally lovely editors Sara O’Keeffe and Susannah Hamilton, who once more turned my 400+ page manuscript into a beautiful book.