No. 276 - Woolton Pie

I'm reading The Report by Jessica Francis Kane. It's a historical fiction novel set in 1943 London and I've encountered a few words unique to the period and geographic location. Today I came across another one when reading the following:

Laurie ate a cold Woolton pie that night with Armorel.

Later on the same page, I read:

Armorel shook her head again and picked up her spoon. "This is just soup with a crust. Do you think Lord Woolton eats it?" Laurie smiled. Like most of their friends, they'd dismissed their servants for war work and now managed on their own. Woolton pie was supposed to count toward making your main dish a potato dish three times a week, according to the Ministry of Food's Potato Plan.

I learned that Woolton pie, at first known as Lord Woolton pie, was a dish of vegetables recommended to the British public by the Ministry of Food during the Second World War to enable a nutritional diet to be maintained despite shortages and rationing of many types of food, especially meat.

It was named after Frederick Marquis, 1st Lord Woolton (1883-1964), who became Minister of Food in 1940.

The recipe involved dicing and cooking potatoes, cauliflower, swedes (turnips) and carrots with chopped spring onions and oatmeal. The dish was topped with a crust of potatoes or wholemeal pastry and served hot with brown gravy. It was basically a pot pie sans meat. The recipe could be adapted to reflect the availability and seasonality of ingredients.