The Kitchen Front

During the Second World War, millions of people listened to an early morning five-minute BBC radio programme, The Kitchen Front. With the assistance of domestic teachers, dieticians, school-meal-organisers and hospital caterers, the Public Relations Division of the Ministry of Food gave the public lasting guidance about the healthiest way to feed themselves and to make the best use of their rations.

When Company of Cooks learned about The Kitchen Front, we couldn’t think of a better way in which we could transform the Museum café during the exhibition, and thus the Kitchen Front café was born. We hope to showcase a selection of food items, recipes and different methods of how people adapted their cooking styles during the war.

 As a cook on this project, I didn’t want to just pull out a load of wartime recipes and cook them; I wanted to understand how rationing affected the way people ate. So, I read some cookbooks from the years before the war to get an idea of the sort of food people were used to eating and cooking. I also went through The Times archives looking for recipe columns and food facts published by the Ministry of Food.

One big challenge was thinking like a wartime cook, and I constantly had to remind myself about which foodstuffs were rationed, in short supply or even unavailable – for instance, learning to replace the instinct for butter with the instinct for margarine (known in wartime as ‘Maggie Ann’) was quite difficult. But it’s a good lesson for the modern day; we are too used to having everything available all year round.

We didn’t want to limit ourselves just to food, though. Throughout the café we are showcasing pictures of cooks throughout the Second World War, including a Cecil Beaton portrait of a cook in the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service), a picture of Royal Army Catering Corps cooks preparing stew in the kitchens at Aldershot Barracks in November 1939 and an official Royal Air Force photograph showing cooks making a meal in a mobile field kitchen in France in 1940.

The Kitchen Front café is open from 10.00am to 5.30pm daily, so come in for lunch, afternoon tea or just a light snack and experience The Kitchen Front first hand.

Prior to joining Company of Cooks, Daniel was Sous Chef at River Cottage in Dorset from 2006–2009. He is the author of River Cottage Bread Handbook and continues to teach bread courses at River Cottage.