Trench Stew – Recipe No 137

1940strenchstew1

This recipe dates back to WW1, from the trenches, where food was often not hot by the time it came from the field kitchen to the front line. Soldiers would often throw together whatever they had to hand to make a hot meal and cook them over a little stove in the trenches.

Trench stew is the order of the day, here on Remembrance Sunday…

Ingredients

  • 1 turnip or large potato
  • 1 parsnip
  • 2 carrots
  • ½ tin corned beef
  • ½ stock cube
  • 1 or 2 biscuits or stale bread
  • 1 pint of water

Method

  1. Chop up the vegetables, carrots into small pieces, other veg larger pieces and add to pint of boiling water with stock cube in.
  2. As the veg becomes tender mix in 1/2 can corned beef (I didn’t as I’m vegetarian) and crumble in the stale bread or biscuits/crackers and simmer for a few more minutes.

Serves 2

1940strenchstew2

1940strenchstew

The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke

Poppies (2)

The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/59798/twelve-great-first-world-war-poems#ixzz3IYhGNBkt