Learning Week Task

As part of this brief we are asked to document a recipe that we decide to use for our final double page spread. We were provided with a list made up of recipes from World War One, asked to purchase the ingredients, undertake the recipe, noting each key stage with photographs. We were then asked to put together a portrait A4 sheet showing our experience making our chosen recipe step by step.

I chose to make the bread and jam pudding mainly because I'm a sucker for bread and butter pudding (or should I say, pudding in general), and I couldn't stand the thought of how some of the other recipes might have tasted. The dish was incredibly simple to make as there were only a few ingredients and the steps were really easy to follow.

I'd say that with the amount required for the recipe, it would comfortably feed four people after a meal (I think my husband and I were ambitious to try and polish it off between ourselves in just one sitting) and would cost about 20p per plate of food served. It took roughly about half an hour to make, about ten minutes to measure all the ingredients out and complete the first few steps and about twenty minutes in the oven. Obviously with anything practice makes perfect, so if I attempted the recipe again I think I could prepare the ingredients much quicker and get them in the oven much faster. On the grand scheme of things though, this wouldn't make that much difference to the overall time it takes to make the pudding as it would still need the same amount of time in the oven. 

As for improvements, I forgot to buy butter so the pudding welded itself to the dish while it was in the oven. Next time, remember butter. I also didn't have breadcrumbs so improvised using oats instead to add a different texture which I think worked pretty well. If I was doing things differently next time, I'd like to experiment with different jams or maybe a combination of jams, possibly try mixing the jam into the bread rather than just dolloping it on top, and also try using stale bread as the recipe originally stated to see whether this would make a difference to taste as the bread I used was fairly fresh.

The recipe definitely made me reflect on the narrow choices available to those on the home front in England during World War One. With food shortages caused by panic buying and food hoarding, less food being imported from other countries and also food rationing being introduced, I can imagine that using scraps and leftover food became a part of life and I'm surprised that people managed to get by on so little. Compared too modern day it really makes you think about how much food is made available to us so conveniently and also about how much food we so willingly throw away.