The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan

This past spring when the shortage of toilet paper and cleaning supplies had everyone in a mad dash to locate them and stock up, people had one very tiny look into what the British faced during the war and several years beyond with food scarcity and rationing.  This is the central theme of Jennifer Ryan’s (The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir and The Spies of Shilling Lane) new book The Kitchen Front, which is coming out from Ballantine in February 2021.

“The Kitchen Front” was an actual BBC radio show during the war, which helped housewives and cooks manage their food supplies and cook interesting and nutritious meals with what little they had.  In the novel, author Ryan imagines what would happen if the radio show looked for a woman who would join male broadcaster Ambrose Hart on air.  To select that person, there would be a cooking contest with three rounds featuring a starter, a main course, and a dessert, open to cooks with some professional cooking experience in Ambrose’s small village of Fenley.  

The four entrants are fierce competitors and all for varying reasons.  Baker Audrey Landon is a war widow who is just barely keeping ahead of loan payments for the house where she is raising her three sons; her estranged sister Lady Gwendoline Strickland, who is serving as a demonstrator for the Ministry of Food, is attempting to appease her demanding husband; kitchen maid Nell Brown is encouraged by her mentor Mrs. Quince, a revered but elderly country house cook whose health is failing; and Zelda Dupont, a displaced London chef who is trying to work her way back to the city and to a position as a head chef.

As each woman plans and prepares the three courses, readers are introduced to the immense challenges facing them with finding food, using substitutions, putting seasonal products and local harvests to use, and not exceeding the weekly rations.  Some of the recipes, included at the end of each cooking chapter, are mouth-watering, and Ryan describes the tastes, textures, and smells in loving detail.  Audrey’s Mushroom Soup and Fruit Scones are a couple I would want to try, but I would give a hard pass to Chef James’ Whale Meat and Mushroom Pie, and I almost gag even thinking about The Ministry of Food’s Sheep’s Head Roll.

One of the best things about the book is how the women choose their recipes, which come from a wide-ranging set of sources—like an ancient country house cookbook, a young Italian POW, or secretly enlisting a well-known London chef—and then how they go about finding their ingredients, which opens up a wonderful look at foraging for mushrooms, raising bees, buying from local vendors, and even making use of the black market.

The four women in this small village showcase varying degrees of status and experience of wartime Britain, and their personal lives bring challenges and strong rivalries.  How these are all worked out falls into the best traditions of homefront stories with small acts of courage and budding friendships.  

Jennifer Ryan is an impeccable researcher and works her wide range of WWII knowledge smoothly into the novel.  Inspired by many of her grandmother’s stories, she also has collected information from BBC archives, published histories, Ministry of Food pamphlets, cookbooks, recorded interviews, and diaries of daily lives in the Mass Observation project.  In addition, she consulted with home economists and cooks for testing the recipes and sharing details.  

This is a heartwarming story of female friendship, the strength of community, creativity driven by necessity, and overcoming odds during the worst of times.  

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an advance copy.