The Ration List

In a nutshell, here's what 2 adults were (and in our case, are) allowed for one week:

200g bacon/ham
2s. 4d worth of meat (after some consultation with rather hazy historians, this roughly translates as £6.50)
100g butter
200g margarine
200g cooking fat
200g cheese
6 pints milk
2 eggs
450g sugar
100g jam (distributed every 2 months in larger quantities)
1 packet dried egg (every fortnight)
150g sweets
30 teabags

In addition, each month, you could use allocated points to choose from:

one can of meat or fish
900g dried fruit
3.6kg of split peas/lentils/dried beans

Things like potatoes, vegetables and bread were not rationed; bread was often quite scarce, however, and people were mostly encouraged to grow their own potatoes and vegetables. As our vegetable patch is really too small to support us for a significant amount of time, we've decided as long as it's seasonal, British produce we can have it (fortunately it is summer!). Also, 1 bought loaf of bread and 1 homemade batch of bread will constitute our bread ration for a week.

I'll also confess that for the first few days, we'll be having a few cheeky extras. It's perhaps not wildly unrealistic to imagine that when rationing began, people had a few bits and bobs lying around the pantry that were then used sparingly until they ran out. Well, we have half a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge, a few almost empty jars of salad dressing, horseradish sauce and the like, and a few lasagne sheets lying around that might just offer a welcome home for the first week's ration of minced beef... They're perishable things (barring the lasagne), so in the spirit of "making do", we're hardly going to let them go to waste!