On the run-up to Christmas in 1944, the Tribune published a recipe for fruit-candy gifts, above which was a list that, at this distance, seems encrypted.
“Sugar stamps 30 through 34 [book 4], 5 lbs each, good indefinitely.”
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During World War II, a homemaker needed to know not only the ingredients of a holiday dish, but also what it took to get them. Food was rationed. Americans were allotted a specific amount of many food products and given coupons and stamps entitling the purchase of, say, 2 pounds of meat a week, or 5 pounds of sugar, as specified in that mysterious recipe preface.
This year’s Christmas handicap is rampant inflation, with the price of a turkey up by as much as 28%.
During the war in the 1940s, the challenge was finding alternatives for traditional dishes whose makings had vanished from grocery shelves.
Homemakers found ingenious ways to make do with what was available. Several Tribune readers touted watermelon, a warm weather fruit missing from Charles Dickens’ vision of Christmas. The hurdle was keeping it from going bad before Dec. 25, but Tribune reader S.T. Kimbell wrote in with a solution:
“Seal the stem end of a good size watermelon with sealing wax or paraffin, then coat the melon with shellac. A few days before needed, plug a hole in the melon and pour in a bottle of your favorite wine. Replace the plug and chill the melon.”
“This is a rare delicacy for a Christmas dinner,” Kimbell wrote. “It never fails.”
That and similar kitchen gymnastics were dictated by the country’s wartime burden. In 1942, the Tribune cited the dire warning of the “Food Field Reporter.”
“Before the end of 1943, the American diet will be little above the sustenance level,” the trade paper wrote. “Reason: Feeding the world isn’t just a by-word in Washington; it’s a definite policy of President Roosevelt, tied closely to his global war policy. The fat we furnish our allies and Europe’s starving will come from us.”
That didn’t prove literally true, although American GIs in German prisoner of war camps did receive food parcels delivered by the Red Cross. The World War II Museum in New Orleans has a collection of recipes soldiers scribbled out upon receiving those parcels.
One was for bread pudding. “The instructions say to eat it if edible, and if not, eat it anyway,” said a curator at the museum.
Christmas in 1941 came less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into war. “A huge dinner with lavish displays of rich and traditional foods would be grossly out of place,” the Tribune noted. “Here is a ‘patriotic’ Christmas diner.”
The centerpiece was a smoked picnic ham or a pot roast cooked in cranberry sauce. Turkey was periodically in short supply during the war because of the military’s determination to serve GIs, even those on the front lines, a turkey dinner on Christmas.
On Christmas Eve of 1942, Mary Meade, the Tribune’s food writer, was contemplating shortages: “Perhaps the time will come when we’ll have to include in our dinner invitations: ‘Please bring your ration books for coffee, sugar, meat, butter, etc.'”
Two years later, she reported a spiraling demand for substitutes for butter substitutes; “So many families have turned to fortified margarines in the butter shortage, that margarines are rationed a pound to a customer at most groceries.”
Peanut butter was not rationed, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches became a staple of GI rations during the war. The Tribune printed recipes using peanut butter “to stretch the fat” for any number of items, including one from Meade for “Jiffy Peanut Butter Cookies”:
Blend one can of sweetened condensed milk, 1/2 cup of peanut butter, and a cup of chopped nuts. Drop spoonfuls on a baking sheet. Bake in a 375-degree oven for 15 minutes or until brown.
Girls in the home economics classes at Cicero’s Morton High School brought 30 quarts of “Morton Relish” to Chicago’s U.S.O., a hospitality center for GIs. The tomato relish was created in a 1943 class on what to do with leftovers, a vital wartime skill. The Tribune provided the recipe.
“We will not be making any fruit cake this Christmas season because it requires too much butter and fruit,” said Estella Uehren, a home economics teacher.
The exigencies of war required Americans not only to limit the oils that went into their mouths, but also to conserve cooking oil. Oil powered tanks and Jeeps and lubricated their engines, and much of the world’s supply had been cut off from the Allies. The Japanese controlled Indonesia’s oil wells. Petroleum-rich Romania was Hitler’s ally. Nazi armies overran the Soviet Union’s oil fields.
To make a dent in America’s short supply, homemakers were implored not to flush cooking oil down the drain after frying chicken or hamburgers. As an incentive, the government paid 2 red rationing points and 4 cents for a pound of grease.
Rationing was, in effect, a psychological whiplash, since it began just as the Great Depression, when Christmases had been bleak for millions of Americans without paychecks, seemed to be ending.
In 1936, Russell Lee, a photographer employed by the federal government, spent Christmas with Earl Pauley, an Iowa tenant farmer. His pictures show Pauley, his wife and four children eating a holiday dinner of boiled potatoes and cabbage.
That same year, wealthy Chicagoans were festively marking the holiday, as duly noted in the Tribune’s society pages.
“Mrs. John Kellogg is presenting her younger daughter, Joan, at a tea dance at the Racquet Club at 5 o’clock, and the junior Carter Harrisons are giving a dinner-dance for their debutant daughter, Edith, at the Ambassador East Hotel,” the Tribune reported.
By 1940, America was rearming for a war that other countries were already fighting. Factories were hiring. The mood was optimistic.
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“The war has blocked out Christmas lights in many lands,” the Tribune noted. “But in America there is peace. Christmas boards will groan under their load of foodstuffs.”
With the country’s entry into the war, lean holiday seasons resumed the next year. But by design, the belt-tightening of World War II was more equitably shared than the hardships of the Depression.
War requires sacrifice, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt explained in a 1942 “Fireside Chat,” one of his periodic radio broadcasts to the nation. Soldiers and sailors sacrifice their civilian careers and family life, he noted. Some make the supreme sacrifice.
So it was only right for civilians to consume less food, and the key to make sure that all did so were those rationing coupons. Without them, a plutocrat had no better chance than a pauper of getting scarce foodstuffs or consumer goods. Unless he stooped to buying counterfeit coupon booklets.
Before he concluded his broadcast, FDR paused to correct the historical record of the homefront during World War II:
“As I told the Congress yesterday, ‘sacrifice’ is not quite the right word to describe this program of self-denial. When at the end of this great struggle we have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no ‘sacrifice.'”
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