Grandma's Wartime Baking Book

Learn to Make Classic American Pies, Cakes and Tarts

It is dawn of the 1940s and America is in the midst of a difficult war. The women of the Home Front are dealing with shortages of sugar, butter, canned goods and a host of other pantry supplies. Yet even resourceful cooks managed to create some of the most delicious baked goods we still love today.
Grandma's Wartime Baking Book captures delicious anecdotes and recipes from the home bakers who found a way to boost morale during World War II with favored staples and treats for their loved ones at home and on the front lines.
The result of extensive research, interviews and recipe-testing, this comprehensive guide delivers beloved recipes for muffins, breads, cookies and more. These classic recipes are accompanied by anecdotes and baking tips from magazines of the time and illustrated with U.S. Government posters from the period.

Lovers of traditional American fare will also want to check out Joanne Lamb Hayes' companion cookbook, Grandma's Wartime Kitchen (ISBN 978-1-63561-786-3).

It is dawn of the 1940s and America is in the midst of a difficult war; the women of the Home Front are dealing with shortages of sugar, butter, canned goods and a host of other pantry supplies, yet even so managed to create some of the most delicious baked goods we still love today.
Joanne Lamb Hayes has been writing about food for various national magazines since 1965. Her 14 years as Food Editor of Country Living Magazine gave her the opportunity to explore and share her passion for food history and fresh local foods. She holds a PhD from New York University's Department of Nutrition and Food Studies and is the co-author of eight other cookbooks including Grains, The Weekend Kitchen, and Recipes from America's Small Farms.

Joanne Lamb Hayes offers a sentimental collection of recipes for baked goods created during World War II in Grandma's Wartime Baking Book, her follow-up to Grandma's Wartime Kitchen. Because butter and refined sugar were hard to come by and rationed, and the thousands of married women who joined the work force were still expected to continue running their households like tight ships, these recipes for cookies, tarts, cakes, and breads are low in fat and refined sugar, very quick to throw together, and couldn't be any easier to make.
Expected to work all day, serve fresh, hot, nutritious meals on beautifully set tables, keep lush victory gardens bursting with nutritious fruits and vegetables for eating and canning, and always present themselves impeccably dressed and coiffed, there were not very many free moments in the day. So just a few minutes is all it took to get an Apple Coffee Cake into the oven, and the result is a remarkably tender, upside-down apple cake, dripping with a warm brown sugar and spiced apple syrup. Other desserts such as rich Peanut Butter-Chocolate Cupcakes and Butterscotch Squares thrilled families back then as much as they do today. Even the most old-fashioned of these recipes fit nicely into today's lifestyles. The ingredient lists are short and inexpensive--you probably already have most of the ingredients in the house. The results are comfort food at its best, and none of them take any time at all to put together. Taking a stroll down Memory Lane with Hayes is surprisingly delicious.
--Leora Y. Bloom

What might have been merely a reminiscence of mediocre WWII-era foods is instead an interesting, thoughtfully rendered collection of comforting recipes for baked treats-from Butterscotch Squares and Banana Dumplings to Huckleberry Pudding and Apple Pandowdy. Many of the recipes in this volume exist because of shortages of certain ingredients such as sugar, shortening, butter, eggs; others employ ingredients to save them from being wasted. Hayes (Grandma's Wartime Kitchen) explains the background for each recipe-"Government warnings about waste made it a real necessity to use up those bananas that would soon be overripe"-in a manner that is educational without being preachy, and serves as a subtle reminder to appreciate the abundance that now exists in the U.S. Images from wartime posters and excerpts from advertisements of the day enhance the homey, nostalgic feel of this book and make it a fun read for those who lived through the war.
--Publishers Weekly