Wartime Kitchen

Times are bad now and many people have to lower their salary expectation in order to increase their chances of getting a job in the competitive market. However, this is still not the worst scenario... Imagine you are one of those who stayed in Singapore during 1942-1950, your resume (if you ever wrote one) would look like this: "...my expected salary is x number of katis of rice...". i.e. Instead of negotiating wages in terms of currency, people chose rice or other food like eggs since the authenticity of banana notes was in doubt!

Wartime kitchen : food and eating in Singapore, 1942-1950 / Wong Hong Suen (ISBN: 9789814217583) describes the issue of food scarcity during and after World War II and how people went about sourcing for food to meet their basic needs. As food and many other household essentials were scarce, people then had to be creative in using the available ones or the substitutes to optimize their resources.

Wartime Kitchen

Besides mentioning about the use of rice as the exchange currency, the author also shared with us other interesting information, some of which I will highlight below:


1. Unpolished rice (糙米) which are more nutritious (contains more minerals and fibre) than polished rice, were available during that period but many people thought they were unfit for human consumption and fed them to pigs and poultry! [However, nowadays many people switch to eating unpolished rice for health reasons. ;)]

Red Cargo Rice (Unpolished)

2. Besides eating tapioca (a rice substitute), people also extracted concentrated juice from boiled tapioca and used them as fish poison and threw the juice into rivers to catch fish.

Tapioca

3. A creative housewife improvised an oven by placing heated sand around a kerosene tin. She used the oven to bake a Christmas cake!

4. People made soaps using a mixture of coconut ash, palm oil and lime. [Considering now we are so fortunate to have a variety of fragrant soaps, shower creams, shampoos and dish & laundry detergents. The oldest type of laundry soap which I can identify in a supermarket is made of vegetable oil.]

Laundry Soap

5. Nineteen wartime recipes and their modern adaptations are also presented in this book. These include papaya jam, sweet potato pudding, lemak sweet potatoes and kang kong (water convolvulus), coconut ice cream and pineapple cake. The main ingredients which are used to prepare these 5 dishes are shown below.

Ingredients