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Product Description
Anyone who loves great American desserts will delight in Grandma's Wartime Baking Book. The result of extensive research, interviews, and recipe testing, Joanne Lamb Hayes's follow-up to Grandma's Wartime Kitchen delivers beloved and still irresistible recipes for cakes, pies, cookies, cobblers, muffins, breads, and other baked treats created by women on the Home Front during the challenging days of World War II.
Faced with rationing of sugar and butter (as well as canned and frozen goods, coffee, and more), calls for better nutrition, and waning morale, home bakers found clever ways to make quick and delicious desserts, for their families at home as well as their loved ones on the frontlines. Many of these recipes are collected in this volume, along with quotes, anecdotes, and baking tips from magazines and home bakers from the period, and illustrations and advertisements that capture the spirit and concerns of the era.
Recipes include:
* Sweet Potato Victory Cake - originally made with sweet potatoes from the backyard Victory Garden
* Apple Coffee Cake - a World War II favorite, with a twist
* Strawberry "Long" Cake - making the most of a quart of precious berries
* Apricot Peach Pie - with flavor and sweetness from dried apricots and heavy syrup
* Tea Party Tarts - easy to make, and morale-lifting after a sparse wartime meal
* Peanut Butter Cookies - Nutritious, butter- and sugar-free, and great for shipping to the troops overseas
* Mrs. Nesbitt's Whole Wheat Bread - a favorite recipe from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's White House cook
These delicious, quick, and easy recipes are perfect for today's busy bakers, and they offer a long-overdue salute to the resourceful, inventive, and patriotic women who created them.
Amazon.com Review
Joanne Lamb Hayes offers a sentimental collection of recipes for baked goods created during World War II in Grandma's Wartime Baking Book, her follow-up to Grandma's Wartime Kitchen. Because butter and refined sugar were hard to come by and rationed, and the thousands of married women who joined the work force were still expected to continue running their households like tight ships, these recipes for cookies, tarts, cakes, and breads are low in fat and refined sugar, very quick to throw together, and couldn't be any easier to make.
Expected to work all day, serve fresh, hot, nutritious meals on beautifully set tables, keep lush victory gardens bursting with nutritious fruits and vegetables for eating and canning, and always present themselves impeccably dressed and coiffed, there were not very many free moments in the day. So just a few minutes is all it took to get an Apple Coffee Cake into the oven, and the result is a remarkably tender, upside-down apple cake, dripping with a warm brown sugar and spiced apple syrup. Other desserts such as rich Peanut Butter-Chocolate Cupcakes and Butterscotch Squares thrilled families back then as much as they do today. Even the most old-fashioned of these recipes fit nicely into today's lifestyles. The ingredient lists are short and inexpensive--you probably already have most of the ingredients in the house. The results are comfort food at its best, and none of them take any time at all to put together. Taking a stroll down Memory Lane with Hayes is surprisingly delicious. --Leora Y. Bloom
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