The woman who taught Britain to cook on rations lived to 99, and the one thing she told the nation never to do was throw away the fat.
Marguerite Patten was 24 when the war started and had been cooking for her family since her father died when she was 12. The Ministry of Food hired her. Her job was to go out to the factory canteens and the market squares with a demonstration stove and show a tired country how to make a dinner out of what the ration book allowed.
Then she went on the wireless. The Kitchen Front, 5 minutes every morning after the news, with 7 million people listening. She was the voice that got a generation of mothers through the war.
Here is what she actually taught. Save every scrap of dripping and use it for everything. Render the fat off the bacon. Keep the bones for stock. Make the meat ration go round with suet puddings and pies. She loathed the whale meat the Ministry made her demonstrate, and said so for the rest of her life.
That generation came out of 14 years of rationing healthier than the one before it. The children were taller, the teeth were better, and nobody was fat.
After the war she became the first cook on British television and wrote 170 books that sold 17 million copies. She refused the words celebrity chef to the end. She was a home economist, she said, and would die one.
She died in 2015, aged 99, having outlived every diet fad of the century she had cooked through.
Her advice was never about restriction. It was that the fat is the food, and a country that pours it away is wasting the best part of the animal. She was right in 1942 and she is right now.
Mike
Marguerite Patten was 24 when the war started and had been cooking for her family since her father died when she was 12. The Ministry of Food hired her. Her job was to go out to the factory canteens and the market squares with a demonstration stove and show a tired country how to make a dinner out of what the ration book allowed.
Then she went on the wireless. The Kitchen Front, 5 minutes every morning after the news, with 7 million people listening. She was the voice that got a generation of mothers through the war.
Here is what she actually taught. Save every scrap of dripping and use it for everything. Render the fat off the bacon. Keep the bones for stock. Make the meat ration go round with suet puddings and pies. She loathed the whale meat the Ministry made her demonstrate, and said so for the rest of her life.
That generation came out of 14 years of rationing healthier than the one before it. The children were taller, the teeth were better, and nobody was fat.
After the war she became the first cook on British television and wrote 170 books that sold 17 million copies. She refused the words celebrity chef to the end. She was a home economist, she said, and would die one.
She died in 2015, aged 99, having outlived every diet fad of the century she had cooked through.
Her advice was never about restriction. It was that the fat is the food, and a country that pours it away is wasting the best part of the animal. She was right in 1942 and she is right now.
Mike
