REVISITING the times of food rationing was a logical step for Dorset’s unabashedly posh chef Valentine Warner.

The cook has already preached the benefits of eating with the seasons in his cookery programme What To Eat Now. He balks at the idea of throwing away any part of an animal, declaring he’s the ‘only person I know who eats tripe’.

So unsurprisingly he was at ease with recreating dishes from 1940s recipe books to mark 70 years since the start of rationing in Britain. “I am quite old fashioned in my tastes and I don't like to waste anything,” he says.

Aged 37, the TV chef was born well after the Second World War, but his family made him aware of the ethos of the period. “My mum grew up during the war in Cornwall and very much remembers rationing,” he recalls.

“My father used to talk about it a lot because he fought in the war, and I was so aware of what rationing did because of my grandmother.

“She had a very light appetite and when she used to eat chocolates, or a boiled egg, she’d put a bit of clingfilm over the boiled egg and put it in the fridge or she’d wrap half a chocolate up and eat it two weeks later – she didn’t waste anything.”

While it’s hardly practical or desirable to bring back rationing, Warner thinks we can learn from the people who lived through it.

“They seem to have a gratitude, a making do, a humility and modesty,” he says. “People didn’t complain, they were united by hardship and were fighting for their lives, so it was, ‘Let’s use what we’ve got’. Now we live in a very wasteful, fast time when things are very casually discarded.”

If you fancy rustling up some nostalgic dishes, why not try out these ration time recipes?

* Ration Book Britain starts tomorrow (January 15) at 5pm on the Yesterday channel.

Eggless sponge cake

Ingredients:

170g self-raising flour

1 level tsp baking powder

70g margarine

57g sugar

1 level tbsp golden syrup

150ml milk or milk and water

Jam for filling

Method: Sift the flour and baking powder. Cream the margarine, sugar and golden syrup until soft and light, add a little flour then a little liquid. Continue like this until a smooth mixture. Grease and flour two 7 inch sandwich tins and divide the mixture between the tins.

Bake for approximately 20 minutes or until firm to the touch just above the centre of a moderately hot oven.

Turn out and sandwich with jam.

Woolton pie

Ingredients: 450g King Edward potatoes; 900g carrots; 225g mushrooms; 1 small leek; 60g chicken fat; 2 spring onions; salt and pepper; nutmeg; chopped parsley; bunch of herbs made of 1 small bay leaf, 1 small sprig of thyme, parsley and celery.

Method: Peel the potatoes and carrots, cut them into slices of the thickness of a penny. Wash them well and dry in a tea-cloth. Fry them separately in a frying pan with a little chicken fat or margarine.

Do the same for the mushrooms, adding the finely chopped onions and leek. Mix them together and season with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg and roughly chopped fresh parsley.

Fill a pie dish with this mixture, placing the bundle of herbs in the middle. Moisten with a little giblet stock or water.

Allow to cool then cover with a pastry crust made from half beef-suet or chicken fat and half margarine. Bake in a moderate oven for an hour and a half.