2 Frugal (Friday) Recipes from another Era

The other era is actually the early 1940s, when food rationing in the UK was in full swing and frugality tested the talents of the UK’s housewives, and hopefully a few househusbands as well. These two recipes follow the needs for those days. Those needs were for meals that were nutritious, tasty, quick and easy to make using a small number of readily available fresh ingredients and as little power as possible.

Savoury Cheese Bake
1 cup of grated cheese
1 ½ cup of breadcrumbs
1 cup of milk
1 egg
Pepper and salt for seasoning, but go easy with the salt as the cheese will already have some in it.

Warm the milk in a saucepan and add the cheese and breadcrumbs, season and allow it to soak for two minutes. Beat and add the egg, mix the ingredients well and pour into an ovenproof dish. Cook in a moderate oven until the mixture is a set golden brown.

Corned Beef Hash
1 small tin of corned beef
1 onion (sliced)
1 carrot (sliced)
1 beef stock cube dissolved in ¼ pint of water
4 potatoes

Dice and boil the potatoes for mash
Heat up some cooking oil in a frying pan and brown the sliced onion and carrot, mix the corned beef well into the stock mixture and add to the frying pan and simmer until reduced to a thick liquid. Mash the potatoes and serve pouring the hash over them.

For even greater frugality you can thinly slice the potatoes, brown them with the onion and cut down on power by not having them as mash. If it’s a meal for one, (half ingredients) and you want to be even more frugal, you can eat it straight out of the frying pan and cut down on the washing up!

These two recipes will provide meals for around 80p $1.2 per person. Nouvelle Cuisine they are not, but for those on limited budgets and ingredient availability they were perfect, and so will still be perfect.