Found in the Stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library: Victory Vittles (1941-1945)

Do you enjoy perusing cookbooks for new-to-you tasty recipes? I often get lost in the aisles for quite a long time browsing the culinary collection at the Central Library. With food prices on the rise I thought back to stories my grandmother would tell of ration books, shortages of sugar and meat, and her dislike of butter substitutes. Butter substitutes aside, maybe World War II era cookbooks could offer up some tips for stretching a food budget.

The library has a large selection of cookbooks from 1941-1945 to choose from. Some are only available for use at the library but it was very easy to ask at the Science and Technology reference desk on Lower Level 2/LL2 for them to be pulled. [And don’t forget, the cookbooks you see on the shelves are just a fraction of the cookbooks available, there are even more in the library’s closed stacks that can be pulled upon request.] Many of the cookbooks I looked at gave recipes featuring foodstuffs unaffected by rationing, substitutes for sugar, tips on what to pack in a factory worker’s lunch, and information on growing your own food in a victory garden. Reading the recipes was fascinating, especially the ingredient pairings and recipe formats. Although some dishes such as Peanut Butter Loaf, which included lima beans and cooked carrots mixed with breadcrumbs, were best left as reference only. And yes–whether you call it dried beef, chipped beef, or frizzled beef– many of the cookbooks include variations on the popular SOS dish. There are also numerous World War II era cookbooks available to check out. I was pleasantly surprised by one particular book published in Hollywood in 1943 titled Coupon Cookery, A Guide to Good Meals Under Wartime Conditions of Rationing and Food Shortages by Prudence Penny. In addition to food substitution information, there were several pages of money-saving tips (e.g. how to jazz up leftovers, root-to-stem cooking), fun illustrations, and regionally-named recipes such as Los Angeles Pot Pie and Balboa Summer Salad. Prudence Penny, the pseudonym used by food column/home economics writers in Hearst newspapers nationwide, was in this case (according to local newspaper accounts) Lucile Martens who wrote for the Los Angeles Examiner from 1941-1944. Another former Examiner Prudence Penny, Pauline Saylor Patterson (aka Polly Patterson), had a radio show on KFAC. In 1942 she put the call out to her listeners to share their own recipes of “foods for defense.” The recipes were gathered and published as Victory Vittles. Visit the library to learn more about those vittles.

The library offers books that explain the hows and whys and ins and outs of rationing. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America by Harvey Levenstein offers a great overview on the food shortages, nutritional values, and government agencies that affected cookery during World War II. But whatever you do, don’t miss M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf (1942). Ms. Fisher described what it was like to set food on the table during World War II, and in a revised edition in the 1950s, reflected on her original book in retrospect. There was something to take away from each of the books I looked through, and more than one something to leave right where it was….

Photo captions- Photo 1: Lunch for the factory worker from Wartime Canning and Cooking Book by Josephine Gibson Photo 2: Illustration from Coupon Cookery (1943)