A Life to Remember

Cooking

By the time I got home, my mother was home from work and ready to make supper. I always helped my mother make dinner. I loved to cook and bake. My mother was awful at cooking, but it was still fun. I walked into the kitchen with the groceries and started to put them away. We didn't have as much as we would like, but with rationing, no one had a lot. A lot of items were considered luxury items when the rationing kicked in, "butter, eggs, spices, bourbon, meat, sugar, cooking oil, coffee, canned goods were tough or impossible to get." The most difficult thing to get, was butter. During the war we had margarine, and I dreaded making it. "It came in a white block, and it came with a package of yellow stuff." I'm not sure what it's called, but I hated it! My mother, of course, always made me make it. "Barbara, please make the margarine so I can get dinner started."

"Yes mother," I droned. I got a small bowl out and placed the white greasy block in it. I took the yellow powder and poured it in. I stuck my hands in it and mixed it up for a few minutes until it became margarine. That's the closest we could ever get to having butter. After I was done, I had to pick the chunks of margarine stuck to my hands off and into the bowl. I then excused myself to go to the bathroom to wash my hands because my mother was busy using the kitchen sink to wash vegetables. I was in the bathroom for what felt like forever trying to get the grease off of my hands. It was awful, but I always had to help out my mother, that was just what you did.

With the rationing in place, you had to live within your means. Everyone had to survive off what they were given. People made their own clothes, they only bought what they needed and they lived off of what they already had. Since gasoline was something that not a lot of people had, not a lot of people could drive. We never had any buses to get to school; we walked everywhere. The night of my prom I had to take the trolley car. I felt so embarrassed getting on the trolley in my evening gown. But I wasn't the only one on there so I felt much better once some of my friends joined me.