In recent months, as we’ve adjusted to chiller economic times, some of us have looked to the 1970s for lessons on austerity cuisine. A few brave people, however, have looked farther still, to a period that makes the winter of discontent appear like one long happy banquet in a season of plenty.

Second World War cookery provides the ultimate in back-to-basics cuisine. When Delia Smith went back to basics she taught people how to boil an egg, which seemed very basic indeed. But seen from the perspective of war cookery, egg boiling seems an outrageous luxury. Eggs were rationed and the Ministry of Food’s War Cookery Leaflet 11 taught citizens how to use dried egg, but warned them not to go crazy: “Do not reconstitute more egg than necessary for immediate use.”

Moves to recover the lessons of the war can be seen on the forums of MoneySavingExpert.com, where various contributors have begun to offer tips salvaged from wartime cookbooks, or on Amazon, where the works of that great wartime cook Marguerite Patten are displayed beside books by Gordon Ramsay. But cooks seeking a thorough grounding in wartime cuisine could do worse than to visit the Guildhall Library.

There, in a vault three floors beneath the City of London, are 10,000 cookery books, including a splendid range of wartime pamphlets and guides disseminated by the government and various writers to help to win the war on “the kitchen front”.

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The books are small, probably because of the shortage of paper. In place of the shiny, fat sheaves of a Nigella cookbook, we have manuals printed on something concocted from wood pulp and straw.

The order of the day was convincing the British public to consider vegetables not just as bit players on the plate but as the main act. In Vegetables for Victory, Ambrose Heath, the cookery writer who spent the war churning out books like flapjacks, asks: “How long will it take us to realise the superfluity of the meat and to dine, even in times of plenty, on a vegetable dish alone?”

There follows a quick march through vegetable cooking, in alphabetical order. C is for cabbage. There are three variations on “Cabbage and Bacon”; then cabbage cake, cabbage mould, cabbage pie and hot slaw — a “queer American dish made with raw cabbage”. After 20 cabbage recipes and a brief nod in the direction of calabrese, Heath tackles carrots.

Here too, like a housewife with a dried egg, he makes a little go a long way. His 15 carrot recipes include another queer American dish: “Carrots with peanut butter”. “The war will have made many of us more familiar with peanut butter,” he writes. Readers are told to make a white sauce, stir in peanut butter, heat it up, stirring in diced carrots and “see what you think of it”.

The greatest of all the vegetable propaganda campaigns was fought on behalf of the potato. The government wanted people to grow them in their gardens, but also needed to sell the idea of eating them regularly. Step forward, in knee-length boots, Potato Pete, a happy fellow who remains so despite the fact that his body is a potato. Potato Pete’s Recipe Book demonstrates that if man cannot live on bread alone, he can manage quite nicely on tubers.

One can start the day with potato bread or potato on toast and have baked potatoes or champ (mashed potatoes with cabbage) for lunch. There are even potatoes for tea: the book carries recipes for potato drop scones, potato oven scones, and potato sandwich spread. “Doctors advise each of us to eat at least 12oz and if possible 1lb of potatoes each day,” notes the introduction. “Incidentally, potatoes help save both fat and flour in pastries, puddings and cakes.”

Such substitutes feature throughout. Carrots could sweeten dishes in the absence of sugar. The prolific Ambrose Heath published a recipe for sugarless jam, involving dates and lemon jelly and water, boiled together for half an hour. He also offered “mock” dishes, which, like mock Tudor houses, look jolly nice from afar.

Mock fish could be made with milk, ground rice, butter and (inevitably) potatoes. Covered in breadcrumbs, who was to say that it had not been caught the day before yesterday in the Irish Sea?

Much energy was also directed at the problem of the eggless cake. The soprano Eva Turner, of all people, offers a recipe for “an excellent cake for the troops” that needs no eggs. A rich, moist texture does not seem to have been as important as durability. The recipe book notes that: “A slab of this cake was sent to the Front, travelled round France, chasing the owner, missed him and came back. Other things in the parcel were spoilt but this cake was good after ten weeks. It finally went out again and was much appreciated.” Whether this slab was eaten or used in hand-to-hand combat is left to speculation.

Ms Turner’s recipe appeared inside A Kitchen Goes to War, a book in which “Cabinet Ministers or their wives, authors, actors, sportsmen [and] famous chefs” gave their favourite recipes. The foreword noted that “using our food supplies to best advantage will help to win the war”.

Neville Chamberlain was still Prime Minister, and his wife offered her recipe for “Fish and leek pudding” — though nothing, it seems, to ensure peas in our time. The actor John Gielgud made public his habit for “Roman Pie”, containing meat, spaghetti, white sauce and a pastry topping that sounds quite disgusting. Marie Stopes, who had done so much to bring sex education to the masses, now offered “an irreproachable way of cooking potatoes”. Agatha Christie offered “Mystery Potatoes”. There is a disappointing lack of misdirection in her recipe, and even the red herring has been replaced by anchovies.

The only time that the book strays to places the ordinary reader cannot reach is when Sir Kenneth Clarke, the Director of the National Gallery, offers his “Ham Roll Salad”, which turns out to contain “One jar of pâté de fois”. It does not say what Sir Kenneth thought the masses should eat for dessert, though he would probably have been content to let them eat cake — with eggs fresh from their country estates.

The war may not have been Britain’s finest hour in the kitchen, but the diet was fantastically nutritious. Dr Peter Ross, a librarian at the Guildhall and a specialist in food history, points out that “scientists were looking at what we should be eating and they were pretty successful. Some of the best books in the history of food would later come from these people.”

During those years the foundations were laid for the recovery of British cooking. Magnus Pyke, the prominent and later somewhat eccentric scientist, was working for the Ministry of Food, Marguerite Patten was on the radio, and afterwards, at the height of postwar rationing, Elizabeth David returned to Britain and introduced the middle classes to Mediterranean food.

Dr Ross believes that the thrust of their efforts to teach Britain to cook has been undermined in recent decades by the arrival of celebrity chefs who demonstrate restaurant food rather than home cooking. By contrast, wartime cookbooks offer practical and economic recipes.

Occasionally, in a word or a phrase, a glimpse of how difficult it was appears through the cheerful make-do patter, like a bleak sitting room seen through the frayed curtains. Those who make “Pink and Green Purée” with potatoes, carrot and watercress are advised to add “a small piece of margarine or dripping, if it can be spared” — a frequent phrase in the books.

Ambrose Heath instructs spouses separated and impoverished by war on how to cook meals on “a single gas ring, an electric boiler, or even an oil lamp”. The answer is with a tiered steamer, but those without can cook vegetables, main course and dessert in jam jars in a large pan of boiling water. If one does not have a large pan, one should take a wooden box, stuff it with rolled-up paper and place one’s cooked dishes inside it, in jam jars, to “cook”.

It is all there, in Cooking for One, just waiting for the author of a student cookbook to alight upon the methods and suggest them to a new generation.

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