Typical Meals and Foods in the TR

[Smananas]

Greetings,

I was wondering if anyone could recommend any primary or secondary source materials on typical meals and foods in the TR. For example, what did people commonly eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks? I searched the forums for "food" and "meals" but just came up with threads on German breads such as Brauernbrot and rationing. Also, if anyone has any photographs of food or meals, particularly meals set out on a table, or individual dishes on plates, I would greatly appreciate seeing them. I'd also appreciate hearing any recollections on meals from the period. One thing that I do find interesting that I've come across in many sources is the popularization of one pot meals, such as stews, that the were suggested be eaten once a week to help with the war effort and apparently foster a feeling of commonality with the troops. According to what I've read in Albert Speer's memoirs, Hitler himself enjoyed these one pot meals.

Thanks very much for any information. You folks are very helpful.

[Svetlana Karlin]

A Bundesarchiv photo of a maid, an Ostarbeiterin from Kiev, serving coffee in a Berlin home. Dated January 1945.

OstarbeiterinKiewJan1945.jpg (180.05 KiB) Viewed 5172 times

'Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945' by Marie Vassiltchikov has descriptions of typical food rations and restaurant fare in Berlin. For example:

January-December 1940.
Tuesday, 7 May ...
... Had a rather messy supper consisting of buns, yoghurt, warmed up tea and jam. Yoghurt is still unrationed and, when we are at home, it constitutes our main dish, occassionally supplemented by porridge cooked in water. We are allowed approximately one jar of jam a month per person and, butter being so scarce, that does not go very far. Tatiana suggests our hanging a notice over the kitchen table: 'breakfast','lunch', and 'supper', according to the time of day, as the menu remains by a large unchanged. I had struck up a friendship with a Dutch milkman who occasionally kept me a bottle of milk left over from the 'expectant mothers' stock...

Another book that mentions foodstuffs available in Berlin in early 1945 is 'A Woman in Berlin. Eight Weeks in the Conquered City' by Anonymous:

Sunday, April 22, 1945 (before the Battle of Berlin - Linkar)
... warmed some turnip soup on what gas there was, peeled a couple of potatoes, boiled my last egg...

....They're handing out what are officially called advance rations - meat, sausage, processed foods, sugar, canned goods and ertsaz coffee. I took my place in line and waited in the rain for two hours before finally getting 250 grams of coarse-ground grain, 250 grams of oatmeal, 2 pounds of sugar, 100 grams of ersatz coffee and a can of kohlrabi. There still isn't any meat or sausage or real coffee...

I will also look through my notes from interviews with Germans, whose relatives lived through the war, and post more information here. Since I'm researching this subject for my book project, I'd love to learn more from others, as well!

[Smananas]

Linkar,

Thanks so much for the photo and the helpful quotes. Interesting about the yogurt, I did not expect that would have been a common food. I will also post information I come across in my research on this topic, hoping to get to the library this weekend.

All best,

S

[Svetlana Karlin]

You're very welcome, Smananas!

Marie Vassiltchikov even quoted a week's menu from the canteen at her work in her book. She also noted that oysters were popular in restaurants because they weren't rationed.

Here some of the food notes provided by my German respondents. The questions are mine. Mostly I was interested in post-war Germany, but I think a lot of it applied to the wartime, as well.

3. What foods were most common in postwar Germany? I suppose it would be staples like potatoes and cabbage (sauerkraut). Any other options?

Potatoes in general

-Potatoes (peeled and boiled in saltwater) with herring sauce – the herring was cut up very finely and mixed with a simple sauce based on water and flour.
-Homemade Sauerkraut made and stored in a large pot made of clay, the cabbage was packed very tightly, then a plate was put on top and a heavy stone on top of the plate, to create a somewhat airtight space.
-Rutabagas with anything, mostly potatoes
-Bread Soup – made of wholemeal bread and stock and herbs.
-If meat was available, it was cut up finely and made into a sauce, so the taste would go a long way.
-A very common sight back them was women grinding grains (wheat or rye) in coffee grinders to make flour.


If there was milk - was it canned or powdered? Butter, cooking oil or margarine?

Fresh milk was available in the local shops, but you had to bring your own churn. Whey was available in the shops.

In the last year of the war, any kinds of fat was sparse, but in general butter was the usual fat, then margarine. Oil was not that common back then.

Meat/poultry - what would be most likely to be available at the time?

Rabbit was the meat of choice when raised by the people themselves. Chicken were raised by the people, as well, used as soup meat. Lard is very popular, but was also sparse. Canned beef [this means American canned beef after the war - Linkar] was sometimes available, but it was definitely the ‘posh’ sort of rations.

What's about fresh produce and grains?

Lettuce (with a dressing of sour milk and sugar) served with mashed potatoes and if available, scrambled eggs, green beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkin sometimes, people had berries: black berries, currants, raspberries, strawberries, (people went to the forests to collect blueberries and mushrooms), rhubarb, a lot of tobacco was planted wherever there was a bit of available land, for exchanging at the cigarette factories. In exchange they would get cigarettes, which in turn could be exchanged for other things. The tobacco leaves had to be dried and in many houses bundles of tobacco leaves were hanging from the ceiling.
[I'm not sure if the part on tobacco could apply to wartime Germany - Linkar]

Beets and onions were common, too.

Apples, pears, cherries, sometimes peaches, whatever fruit trees were on the land from before the war. Also walnuts and hazelnuts.

Vegetable oil - what kind of oil was common?

Cooking oil was not so common in Germany. Sunflower oil was not available.

Bread - what kind of bread was typical? Rye, wheat, or a mix of different grains?

A mix with rye as the base. Sometimes also a mix with wheat as the base. In any case, most of the bread had a light brown colour. During the war, saw dust was mixed into the bread because there was not enough flour.

4. What would be the most common dishes at the time? For example, potatoes - how were they cooked? I do not think there were many seasonings available - probably just onions, garlic, salt and maybe parsley/dill/pepper?

Potatoes were mostly boiled either peeled or in the skin.

Seasoning: Onions, salt, pepper, parsley, dill, marjoram, chives, lovage (garlic not so much)

Food was sparse. Berlin people would cycle into the surrounding countryside to ‘Hamster’ somehow ‘organise’ potatoes or other food from the farms there.

[Smananas]

Thanks Linkar,

This is great information!

S

[Heimatschuss]

Hello Smananas,

perhaps a one-week diet plan for a unit of female Army signals auxiliaries stationed in Riga (Latvia) that I once posted here http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 1#p1284861 can give you a very general impression of how average nutrition looked like. At that time even rear-echelon military units were already supplied quite scarcely to make food stocks last longer.

Best regards
Torsten

[Smananas]

Thanks Torsten,

That list is very interesting! I had completely forgotten about the cheese known as quark. That Quarkauflauf sounds yummy. Very intriguing that the auxilliaries were eating it. I believe that in Germany quark is frequently used in desserts, combined with berries or made into cheese cake. I wonder what went into the Quarkauflauf, if it was just quark and maybe some sugar or if some other the other rations mentioned like the berries and honey went into it. Also, Kunst Honig, artificial honey? I had to look that up. Seems like it was made with sugar, water and vanilla, from what I can gather through Google.

Thanks again for posting.

All best,

S

[Teamtunafish]

You might want to asked your Friendly Neighborhood used book store if they have any WWII cookbooks. The local library might also be a help, they can usually get you an interlibrary loan on something like this. I've also found recipies at http://www.3pgd.com/recipes.htm

Time-Life has a great series of cookbook, The Foods of the World, which includes The Cooking of Germany http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Germany-F ... 175&sr=8-6 and The Cooking of Vienna's Empire http://www.amazon.com/FOODS-WORLD-COOKI ... 75&sr=8-11, both with traditional foods.

[Sewer King]

Recently here we discussed the German whaling industry in the 1930s. By the early 20th century whale oil had become important in an urbanized northern Europe -– as a basis for margarine.

• From before World War I margarine began to be used more widely, because the Continent’s dairies could not meet the demand for butter. In America butter was relatively abundant but expensive. But while American margarine makers could rely on coconut oil and lard, the powerful whaling factory ships of Germany, Japan, and Norway were thinning the world’s whale population for its oil -– with margarine as a chief end product.
  
  Soybean oil saw increasing use for margarine in wartime Germany, especially with the idling of the German whaling fleet by 1939. I have never been able to find more about reported German experiments on coal as a starting point for margarine, and so came to doubt it.

Wartime always drives down food standards anywhere, such that late-war German civilians would likely have looked up to margarine as they once had done to real butter.

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It might be interesting to compare German civilian food rationing of World War I to that of World War II.

• Weren’t several of the same food substitutes used? Such as, unfortunately, turnips. The German home front of 1917 endured a notorious “Turnip Winter," but I have not heard any such single names for the worsening food situation from 1944-45.
  
  I am not sure, but I expect that police enforcement against black-marketeering was harsher under the Nazi regime compared to the Kaiser’s.
  
  The yield of Russian supplies after Brest-Litovsk in 1918 would have afforded some relief to the Army, but maybe not so much to the late-war home front? From 1939-42 did the conquest of western Europe improve civilian German food supply?

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Here is a collection of some German wartime civilian food ration cards. Note the possibility of British-made counterfeit coupons meant to disrupt and confuse the German rations distribution, a trick better known and feared with paper currency.

One of S. L. Meyer's compiled reprints of the German pictorial SIGNAL: Hitler’s Wartime Picture Magazine includes a pictorial feature of a soldier returning home on leave. His coupon entitlement for certain foods at this time is shown along with a description of their amounts and kinds.

• In Signal it is meant to show how well provisioned an ordinary soldier is, on leave at least, but would be worth comparing to a proportional civilian ration scale. For 14 days he was entitled to:
  
  • 10lb bread and cake
    2 lb meat
    1 lb butter
    1 lb provisions, macaroni, etc
    ½ lb jam
    ½ lb legumes
    1 lb sugar
    1½ lb coffee mixture
    ½ lb pure coffee
    2 oz tea
    ¼ lb each of nuts, chocolate
    2 eggs
    4 pieces of cheese
    sundries of soap, shaving
  With the mention of coffee substitute, it might be presumed that “butter” was actually margarine, or even lard.

Like that of the soldier on leave, were there any propaganda-type features or photos of how a dutiful family coped under food rationing? Of course, they would look cheerful doing so.

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From Charles Whiting and the Editors of Time-Life Books' The Home Front: Germany, a volume in the World War II series (Time-Life Books, 1982), page 59-63:

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”Hamster! Shame on You!” declares a poster that uses a pun on the similar German words for [female?] hamster and hoarding -– “Hamsterin” and “Hamstern” -– to make its point. To combat hoarding, German police raided cellars and confiscated caches of food. Eventually even the booty sent home by soldiers was counted against their families' ration cards

This poster illustrates packaged foodstuffs, although I don’t know if they are drawn this way simply so they are clear to the viewer. If not I don't know how accurate they were. Propaganda illustration works best with small but well-chosen exaggerations.

German grocer.jpg (173.34 KiB) Viewed 4788 times

A grocer scoops sauerkraut into a dish brought from home by a customer. By 1940, a scarcity of paper for bags and packages forced shoppers to carry their own containers.

Homemakers in Imperial Japan used ceramic containers made for the same purpose, since canned goods were reserved exclusively for military and naval use. Didn't shoppers in wartime Britain also have to do this to some lesser extent?

... Much of the [civilian] routine centered on food. There was enough to keep a person healthy – bread and potatoes were plentiful – but shortages of some items made for an intolerably monotonous diet. Fish and chicken were available only at certain times. Fruit remained a rarity, and coffee was worth its weight in gold. The quest for a varied diet began to possess the German housewife, and gave birth to the phenomenon “standing in snakes,” as the food lines were popularly known.

“On market days I had to be out as early as possible,” recalled Christabel Bielenberg, the Englishwoman who was married to a German and had recently arrived in Berlin. “If one didn't know a grocer, cows suddenly had no liver, no heart and no kidneys, and chicken had disappeared from the face of the earth. Suddenly hoarding became a time-consuming occupation –- for some people their main activity. Posters such as 'The good of the community goes before that of the individual' and 'German woman, your Fűhrer depends on you' could be seen on every second billboard in Berlin, but they made absolutely no impression on the brave housewives out rummaging for food.

… On the edges of the flourishing domestic black market, the smuggling of foodstuffs into the Reich form neighboring countries developed on a large scale, and for good reason. By 1941 a pound of coffee smuggled from Holland or Belgium brought $20 in Berlin. With wartime inflation, coffee became more valued than the Reichsmark; the Germans called it coffee currency, and it became the most acceptable form of payment.

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… I had completely forgotten about the cheese known as quark. That Quarkauflauf sounds yummy. Very intriguing that the auxilliaries were eating it. I believe that in Germany quark is frequently used in desserts …

Any genuine dairy products, whether or not whole or fresh, would seem to have been an appreciable treat in many circumstances.

Quark has some health-food advocacy here in the US today. it is available from some dairies, but would probably make no more larger sales than that. It was also an item of Allied postwar food relief in Germany.

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You might want to asked your Friendly Neighborhood used book store if they have any WWII cookbooks …

Do you mean period German cookbooks from the war years? I have a few booklet-type ones from the US home front, but I haven’t heard of comparable ones from the Third Reich before. Are any still known?

Are there wartime mentions or even particular recipes of Eintopf (Germanic one-pot meals, as shown in these contemporary photos)? Although they did not originate with the Third Reich, enough was made of them as patriotic Opferessen (sacrifice meals) that I would expect to find surviving reference to them. Here is some contemporary German mention of wartime Eintopf, along with related propaganda posters.

In the above link there is the common photo of an Eintopf meal served at Hitler’s table, with Goebbels in attendance. Albert Speer also mentioned the same in his Inside the Third Reich: a Memoir.. He added that after Eintopf was served there, attendance at the Fűhrer’s dinners dropped away noticeably -- much to the latter’s disdain.

• It might be expected that some propaganda was devoted to the simplicity of Hitler’s dining table, beyond this photo alone. It would be a natural angle that, as Speer also wrote, Hitler could count on being talked about in Germany. Moreover, this simplicity was already there before the campaign for Eintopf meals.
  
  But as it turned out, was there was relatively little such publicity? Enough is known about Hitler’s vegetarian leanings and health-food notions, but he probably knew not to push them more widely as any real policy –- whatever his wish to do so. What he actually ate was never promoted to the general populace as example, was it? And never could have been?

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Some of the ideology behind diet in the Third Reich as it originated (or not) with some of its leading figures is examined in

• Proctor, Robert N. The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999).

From page 123, the following promotional poster for whole-grain bread:

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The life rune “seal of approval” for Volksgesundheit (People's Health) is prominent here. What other products might have had it? There is no mention of how long any such campaigns survived the outbreak of war.

-- Alan