LEA BEBEK / War Recipes

During the war recipes were a useful part of surviving. The human imagination during those hard times was also helpful in a lot of cases. Old traditional meals with ingredients like healing herbs, and different kinds of weeds and roots helped us. Some of these healthy herbs included marigold, acacia, nettle and dandelion. Food was very expensive, so if you wanted to eat you had to imagine a meal and use totally different ingredients to cook it.

Examples of food prices during the war (DM = Convertible Deutsch Mark):

1kg kofee-140 DM
1kg sugar-80 DM
1lt oil-70 DM
1 box of cigarettes-10 DM
3 eggs -10 DM
1kg onion-25 DM
1 bar of chocolate-10 DM
2 kg butter-120 DM
1 can meat-10 DM
1 kg flour-10 dm
1 kg potato-20 dm
1 kg meat-140 dm
1 kg powder milk-50 DM

We got a humanitarian aid every month. Sometimes we got lunch packages from the French and American armies. One person was given:

100 grams rice
100 grams beans
100 grams peas
100 grams biscuits (for American soldiers in Vietnam, marked 1967)
1 dl. oil
0.5 kg flour
250 grams of cheese

We had a grill in front of our building and we were always waiting for our turn to cook something on it. We had no wood so we burned everything, including old shoes, clothes, furniture, and some people even burned books to cook a meal.
In the beginning of the war I was 8 years old and growing all the time so I always needed bigger shoes. We gave my old shoes to other children and the older children gave their shoes to me. One day I came home and my aunt had just cooked my lunch on my shoes. I said, "Why my shoes?" And she said, "You are growing and they were old shoes." I liked those shoes because they were from before the war. I liked them, and she cooked my lunch on them! It was funny. It was like "my shoes are cooked!"

In the spring and summer we made cookies and pies with nettle, herbs, and weeds. We didn't have coffee so we made it from dandelion roots. Out of dandelion leaves we made salad and out of the flowers we made honey.
Some people ate pigeons; they said that they tasted like chicken. Cats caught pigeons and brought them to the their masters. In the streets cats and dogs were starving and it was sad sometimes to see people and animals looking for food in the trashcans together.

I didn't like the food in the war so when it was lunch time I used to run somewhere else, and later when I came back I would take a cookbook and although I was eating war food I would imagine normal food as I looked at the pictures in the book. Sometimes it was fun to give some French names to nettle pie. Everybody knew I didn't like the food and I was just 'skin and thin'.

Electricity was in reduction so we had two days a month to do everything like wash clothes, clean, watch tv and sometimes just warm up. The best times were holidays when we were waiting for electricity and having fun if it came on. For me it was interesting to read first aid books and books about cave people because we were like them in some way.

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