Food in the Trenches of World War One

During World War I, British troops on the Western Front had limited options when it came to food in the trenches, but with a clever cook on hand they might be able to use their rations to make something like this potato pie made using a military recipe from 1914. So thank you to my Patreon patrons for supporting this channel as I cook for the Tommies in the trenches, this time on Tasting History. Food on the Western Front during World War I was pretty monotonous. It was pretty much a combination of bully beef and biscuits, that is canned corned beef and hardtack. But while some complained of the monotony, many soldiers were coming from a place where they were lucky to have meat one or two times a week, so a daily ration of meat, canned or not, was actually a step up. Like when the men of Stockport's Territorial Soldiers joined up with the Cheshire Regiment, they thought they were eating high on the hog. You should have seen the scramble. I thought mackinacke was great, but the good old potato pie wants some beating. Just fancy, potato pie being served to the Cheshires. And it turns out there is a proper military recipe for that potato pie. It comes from the field cooking section of the 1914 edition of the Manual of Military Cooking, prepared at the Army School of Cookery. Potato pie. Sixteen and a half pounds meat, twenty pounds potatoes, one pound onions, three ounces salt, one half ounce of pepper. Cut up and stew the onions with jelly from the meat added. Boil or steam the potatoes. When cooked, mash them. Line the sides of the dish with one third of the mashed potatoes. Place the meat and cooked onions in the center. Season with pepper and salt. Cover over the remainder of the mashed potatoes and bake till the potato cover is brown. As the mashed potatoes absorb the moisture of the meat and render it dry, about two pints of gravy prepared from the liquor in which the onions were cooked should be poured into the pie before serving. Now that is a mighty big pie, enough for 22 men serving in the army. So I'm going to cut this down to just eight servings, which still should be quite a lot of pie. So for this World War I potato pie what you'll need is two pounds or 925 grams of tinned corned beef. Now you may be tempted to use fresh meat for this, but the recipe is specific that it wants preserved meat and the recipe has you use the jelly or the gelatin that is inside of the can and attached to the meat. So you really got to get that real tinned bully beef. Then two and a half pounds or 1.1 kilograms of potatoes, two ounces or 55 grams of diced onions, one and a half teaspoons of salt, one teaspoon of pepper, and to make the gravy you'll need two tablespoons of butter and one tablespoon of cornstarch. So the first thing you want to do is make the mashed potatoes, and it's really up to you if you want to leave the skins on or peel them. I'm going to leave the skins on because I like them and frankly it's easier. Either way chop them into small cubes and put them in a pot and cover with water. Then bring it to a simmer and boil for about 20 minutes or until they're very soft at which point you can drain them and mash them up. This is really the simplest, most basic mashed potato that ever was. No butter, no cream, zip. Then we can simmer the onions and really you can do this while you're boiling the potatoes. All you do is gather up all of that gelatin that is attached to the meat and inside of the can and add that with the onions in a small saucepan, and then pour in about a cup and a half of water. Set that over a low heat and bring it to a simmer, and cook the onions until they're translucent. About 12 to 15 minutes should do. Then remove them from the stove and strain out the cooking liquid, but don't get rid of that because we need that to make our gravy. And now we can move on to the corned beef. This you should mash up like you would ground beef and then season it with the salt and pepper. Honestly there is a lot of salt in corned beef so I don't really think it needs more salt added, but the recipe says to do so so that's what I'm doing. Then we add the onions in and mix it all up until they're well incorporated. Now up to this point everything that we've done could be done in pretty much any field kitchen. These were horse-drawn stoves that were typically wood-fired, though coal and oil fired also existed. Like the Loon Valley kitchen that included not only a stove top for frying, and two 20-gallon boilers for preparing stews, but it also had two large ovens fitted with baking dishes. These kitchens were meant to cook enough food for 250 soldiers every single day, so let's just assume we would have access to one of those so we can go ahead and make this pie. So assemble your potato pie by taking one third of the mashed potatoes and pressing them around the edges of an 8x8 inch baking pan. At first I thought I would put them on the bottom too, but the recipe is pretty clear that it just wants them around the edges. Then add in your corned beef and onion filling into the center, and tamp it down to fill up all the corners. Then put the remaining mashed potatoes on top, spreading them over the meat just like a very basic shepherd's pie. Then pop that into the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 205 Celsius, and bake until the top of the potatoes start to brown about 35 to 40 minutes, during which time we can make our gravy. Now there are a few recipes from the period in army manuals on how to make gravy. This is one of the more basic versions because we're using that water that we boiled the onions in. So you take that liquid and you heat it back up on the stove, and then you add in the butter, and let it melt completely, and then whisk the cornstarch into a little water to make a slurry, and add that into the simmering liquid, mixing it in and let it simmer for about 10 minutes or until it's thickened up. That should take about 10 minutes. Plenty of time to tell you that I am now uploading ad-free videos over on Patreon, and here on YouTube for memberships. So I'll put links in the description to where you can find those. They're these videos but without ads. And now I can tell you a bit more about what the British troops, the Tommies, ate in the trenches on the western front during World War I. So I wanted to start by recommending this book, Bully Beef and Biscuits. It is a wonderful overview of all things British food during World War I, both with the soldiers and on the home front, but today I am just talking about feeding the soldiers, the enlisted men because the officers ate very, very differently on the western front during the war. Now when the war broke out in August of 1914, Britain was not really prepared to actually go to war. So quickly the government called for any young men over the age of 19 to join the army. Many of those were actually younger than 19, but they joined up provided they lied about their age because it doesn't seem that there was a great system for actually confirming anyone's age. It was just kind of a year 19. Okay, sure, why not? So now you have hundreds of thousands of young men in their late teens and early 20s joining up to fight the Germans, but just as many young men today they were not adept at feeding themselves, let alone cooking for each other, and so the army had to very quickly train some of them as cooks. There were a few army schools of cookery in England, and they quickly set up more in France and other parts of the world, but before the war broke out, there was a four-month program to teach these people how to cook for the enlisted men and for the officers, but once the war broke out, that went from four months down to about two to four weeks, and most of that time was actually not spent in teaching cooking, but in teaching sanitation and how to make sure that everybody was not going to get sick. Also at the start of the war, it was hard to get volunteers to do the cooking because it seemed like an inglorious position compared to the glorious position of charging at a German army out in the open field, but very quickly people realized that war is not so fun, and so a lot more people wanted to become cooks after that, especially because it did come with some perks. For one thing, I was sent on a cookery course at an army cookery school in a village hall well behind the lines for a month. We were taught how to cook meat, vegetables, and the sort of puddings that could be made from the rations we got. For example if we were lucky enough to get currants we could make plum duff. We were also taught how to cut up quarters of beef, whole carcasses of sheep, and sides of bacon because that's how the rations came. So you were sent off away from the fighting, a definite plus, and even when you got back from cookery school you were placed along the supply lines which could be several hundred yards back from the front line. So a place of relative safety, and I say relative because there are numerous stories of shells coming and blowing up the kitchens just as well, but it was safer than the front lines. Though a lot of people working in the kitchens who were not necessarily the cooks still had to go to the front lines to take the hot food up to the men who were there. So hot meals were sent up regularly and included a hot supper issued generally about midnight. The meals being mostly carried up by the support company, and these hot meals could really vary in quality depending on the ingredients that you got. Mostly it was canned foods that were being used, but once in a while you had access to something else. Like in 1915 when a private from the Cheshire Regiment of the 6th Battalion wrote that we had a stroke of luck on February 16th. A group of cattle strayed near our trenches so we shot a young steer. We cut a leg off and in less than two hours men and officers alike were having a feed fit for a king. Fried steak with the Germans 200 yards from us. Of course it also depended on who was doing the cooking. Some cooks were obviously better than others. Like I would not want to be served a meal from the cook of the 22nd Field Ambulance. One of the men of the unit wrote, I must say we are living very well, plenty to eat. We had a jam roll for dinner the other day, and the only fault about it was the cook wrapped it in the towel that we wiped the patient's feet with. But he said he washed it well before he cooked the pudding. Of course we could not answer for the truth of that, but anyway it went down all right. Those little trifles don't amount to much out at the front. Even something as simple but as precious as tea could be ruined by a negligent cook. Having found the battalion cooks and their wagons, little time was lost in making tea, which all ranks had not tasted for five days. By the time it was ready to be served darkness had fallen. The men with their canteen tins formed up and filed past their respective company quartermaster sergeants who ladled out the precious liquid. Alas in the darkness salt instead of sugar had been put into the tea. Not great but I'm guessing they drank it anyway. Tea was after all one of the most important part of the enlisted man's ration. They drank it with pretty much every meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided you were able to get three meals a day. But regardless of how many meals you got you were given a set number of calories each day in theory, and that was about 4,200 calories though this did drop a bit as the war went on and food became scarce. The calories mostly came from a daily ration of biscuits and bully beef, plus some bacon, vegetables which were almost always dried, then some tea, sugar, cheese, a very small amount of rum, butter, and jam. And the jam was ticklers plum and apple, and it was actually very important not just because it satiated one sweet tooth but because the canisters could actually be used to make makeshift hand grenades. They were called jam jar bombs or jam tin bombs and were a specialty of the ANZACs or Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. They were made by filling the can with shrapnel embedded in resin and then fitted with some explosive, a detonator, and a fuse and then sealed. And it wasn't just jam pots they also used condensed milk cans and bully beef tins which had once held the frae bentos corned beef. This corned beef required no cooking and was an ideal food for those men who were in areas of the trenches where the hot meals from the kitchens just couldn't make it. It was actually rather common for men to have to cook their own rations because they were in areas that were either too dangerous or just too difficult to get the food from the kitchens to them, and so for those men there were a few options. One was to just eat your rations cold and that would be fine for the bully beef. Not delicious but you could eat it cold. It didn't need to be cooked as well as the jam and the cheese, and of course the biscuits or hardtack. There were a few companies that made these biscuits but most famous was Huntley and Palmers who produced the army biscuit number four which was a 4x4 inch square of flour, salt, and water, sometimes a little sugar but often not, that was dried into a biscuit so hard that they needed to be broken up with a rock before eating, and even then they couldn't be eaten dry. The army biscuits suit me. Of course they are too hard for my poor teeth but hot tea and patience helps one past all. These biscuits which were the staple of military food for the last 2,000 years in one form or another were so hard that it was said that the goat mascot of the 5th Canadian battalion couldn't even eat them. I've chewed on decks of cards. I've dined off nails. If this was a sardine tin I might risk it, but this is where my goatish courage fails. I simply can't digest this HT biscuit. Really the best way to eat these biscuits was to cook with them. Either include them in a soup to make it thicker like a stew, or to mash them up and mix them with hot water and jam, and that would make a sort of sweet porridge that you could have for breakfast. But to do that, that meant that you needed to be able to cook and have a source of fire, which was not something so easily done in the damp and muddy trenches of World War I. One option men had was to create what was known as a mess tin kitchen or mess tin stove, and this is where a group could put food in their mess tins, then stack them in a way that created a small cave of sorts. The stack would be set on a piece of metal or something else that wouldn't burn, and then a little fire could be put into that cave and it would heat the food around it. Unfortunately it was hard to find heat sources that really lasted, so often the food was still just lukewarm at best. One way that they would create heat sometimes was to tear a bit of the burlap off of the sandbags, dip it into either lamp oil or candle wax, and then light that on fire. So it would stay on fire for a little while, but not great that you're taking apart the sandbags that are protecting you from German gunfire. So instead the army started supplying the men with tommy cookers or campite. Then these were essentially mini camping stoves that came with solidified fuel, something that could be lit and burned for a good 15 or 20 minutes. They were water resistant and they wouldn't go out in windy weather, and this allowed for a single soldier to heat up their own rations in a can whether it was a trench stew that they made themselves or one of the pre-made canned stews known as mackinacchi. This could refer to most any canned stew but it got its name from the original mackinacchi army ration which was a stew of beef, turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, and green beans in a broth that was once described as an inferior grade of garbage, and it was purported to give the troops flatulence of a particularly offensive nature. And it was a divisive meal to say the least. Many soldiers said that it was next to inedible especially when it was cold, but when you were really, really hungry it definitely did the job. As Lance Corporal Henry Buckle wrote in his diary, A round tin containing meat, spuds, carrots, beans, and gravy. Enough for two in a tin. This is the first time we, the poor infantry, have seen one. Had a real blowout. Must try and get another. They are the goods, believe me. It was a plain stew but a hearty one and a welcome change from months and months on end of nothing but bully beef and biscuits. Now there were times when the rations or the food that the soldiers got was much more elevated. Mainly at Christmas time and I did a whole video on what the World War I soldiers were eating at Christmas. Specifically foods that were sent to them from their loved ones like they would send them boiled puddings for Christmas. Then there was the occasional bar of chocolate. In 1914 the city of York sent a nice sized tin of chocolate to all of the soldiers from the York area and a gunner Henry Bailey was so grateful that he felt it necessary to write the city a thank you note. I feel that I ought to send my very best thanks for the nice box of chocolate I received so unexpectedly. I am proud to be able to say that I am a York lad and am looking forward to a speedy termination of this cruel war. I shall prize the box as long as God spares me. I wish I could do that in a York accent. I love the accent in and around York. It's absolutely wonderful. Anyway Christmas puddings and chocolate while wonderful were definitely not the daily fare. Typically if you wanted to get something other than your usual ration you had to depend on a scrounger and this was the name of a person in your unit who was good at scrounging around and getting extra things whether that was a bit of extra fresh meat, or tea, or alcohol, sugar, anything really but the term scrounger is just a really nice way of saying a thief because that's what they were. Now there was one more ration that all the soldiers carried with them but was pretty much never opened and that was the iron ration and that was meant to only be eaten in case of an emergency. This typically included about 12 ounces of biscuits, a pound of corned beef, two ounces of sugar, and five-eighths of an ounce of tea or enough for a few cups, and as it was meant to be used for emergencies only there were periodic checks to make sure that each man had his and printed on the box were the words not to be opened unless instructed by an officer. Fortunately for me there is no officer around to order me to open up my iron ration and eat that so instead I get to eat something slightly fancier and that would be my preserved meat potato pie. So once the potatoes have browned a little on top remove the pie from the oven and serve it up pouring a bit of the gravy on top, and here we are potato pie from the trenches of the great war. I have to say it doesn't smell that horrible, kind of like just corned beef really, but let's see how it tastes. Here we go. That's very salty. You don't need to add salt. I wish it had more onions. There are just so few onions. You'd use more onions, but the flavor ain't half bad. It's just that the canned corned beef is so salty it really doesn't need to have more added, and old canned corned beef was actually usually even more salty. That's where the name corned beef comes from. It has nothing to do with corn like on ear corn. It's that they would use big kernels of salt and pack it in that to give it the salty texture or salty flavor and preserve it, and those corns of salt became corned beef. That is actually where we get the word corn as a piece of a kernel of corn, kernel of wheat, all of those. It's all Anyway, something that many, many troops had access to was this. Not this modern bottle, but it hasn't really changed much, and that is HP sauce. It was very common during World War I with the British army. They would put it on absolutely everything, so I'm going to try a little bit of that. Let's put a dab on there. Here we go. Yeah, it makes it much, much better. That's actually delicious now. I love HP sauce. I don't know how to explain it. It's a brown sauce. It's not ketchup, but it's kind of sweet like ketchup, but it's also there's like a zing to it because it has malt vinegar in it. It's just delicious. It's still really, really popular in Britain. And I wish it was more popular here because it's absolutely good. So make this. It's worth making. Just trying it out, and if nothing else it'll make you grateful that you are not a Tommy in the trenches during World War I, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.