Christmas on the home front
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 | 12:43 PM ET
By Elizabeth Bridge, CBC Digital Archives writer
In my job at the CBC Digital Archives project, I come across some real gems from the vaults. Among my favourite clips are those dating from the Second World War, an era when the corporation really began preserving radio broadcasts for future generations.
From the distance of 65 years, the wartime imperative of food rationing seems romantic and sometimes even comical.
My mother tells a story about her great-grandmother who, before one Christmas during the war, asked everyone to save up their sugar rations for the traditional family fruitcake. The ingredients gathered and the precious cake baked, she then placed it in a trunk in the vestibule to age a few weeks. But when the clan retrieved it on the big day, an overpowering scent made it quite clear they wouldn't be enjoying Christmas cake that year. Due to an accident years earlier, this ancestor had no sense of smell and therefore no idea her hard-won fruitcake had been marinating in toxic naphthalene fumes, otherwise known as mothballs.
Wartime rationing of sugar and butter made Christmas menus extra challenging in 1943. (The Gazette/Library and Archives Canada/PA-108300).
As evidenced by a 1943 radio show called Food Facts and Food Fashions, my forebear's advance planning for Christmas was quite normal for the time. In a clip from the Digital Archives website called Christmas on the home front, host Dorothy Batchellor advises wartime homemakers on how to pull off Christmas dinner in the era of rationing.
With two weeks to go before the 25th, she assumes your mincemeat, pudding and fruitcake are already made. She then outlines an ideal schedule leading up to Christmas Day, which fell on a Saturday that year. Here's the week:
Weekend before Christmas: make cranberry jelly, bake (and then hide) cookies, make salad dressings
Monday: Finalize menus and shopping lists, but be flexible as some foods may be unavailable.
Tuesday: Do as much shopping as you can, except for perishables.
Wednesday: Finish your baking, prepping pastry dough and cheese straws so they're ready for rolling and baking.
Thursday: Make your bread for stuffing.
Friday: Wash salad greens and place in crisper, stuff the turkey, make pudding sauces.
Saturday morning: Prep your vegetables early, but not too early, or you'll destroy the vitamins.
Apparently this plan, faithfully followed, will prevent you from being a nervous wreck during the holidays and allow you to enjoy yourself instead. And I thought I was on the ball for getting in on Tara's cookie exchange. Clearly, I've got some work to do if I want to pull off a successful Christmas dinner.
Tell us about your holiday meal planning. What tricks do you use to make everything go more smoothly on the big day?
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From trends and culture to politics and nutrition, Food Bytes serves up tasty tidbits about food and the issues surrounding it that flavour our everyday lives.
About the writers
Amber Hildebrandt writes for CBCNews.ca in Toronto. Growing up on a farm in Manitoba, she acquired an insatiable appetite, but it was during a stint in Japan that she developed her discerning tastebuds and "foodie" ways.
Andrea Chiu is an associate producer at CBC Radio Digital. Though she loves to eat, cook and discuss food,
don't ask her to bake. It never turns out well. She tweets as @TOfoodie on Twitter and organizes food and wine events in Toronto called FoodieMeet.
Tara Kimura is the consumer life reporter for CBCNews.ca, covering a wide range of issues that range from rising food costs and the growing organic movement, to new trends in the marketplace.
Andree Lau is a CBC web reporter in Calgary. Her journalism career includes seven years as a CBC-TV reporter. Her own blog called "are you gonna eat that?" chronicles her eating adventures (including sampling snake and camel hoof tendon).
Jessica Wong is a CBCNews.ca writer who loves to eat and cook, as well as discuss, read and watch programming about food, sometimes all at once.
Kevin Yarr, CBCNews.ca's writer in Prince Edward Island, wrote about food and beer for national and regional magazines before joining the CBC. He acquired a desire for new tastes on his first trip to Europe, and an appreciation of eating locally and in season when he finally settled down on P.E.I.
Elizabeth Bridge is a writer with the CBC Digital Archives in Toronto. She first ventured into the kitchen as a child to indulge a sweet tooth by baking cookies and making fudge. A student budget compelled her to be a vegetarian (for a while) and instilled in her an ongoing curiosity about food and cooking.
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