Baker’s delight

Four home cooks go head to head in this World War II version of My Kitchen Rules!

Acosy read about England in wartime seems a contradictory idea and yet somehow Jennifer Ryan keeps managing to write exactly that. She focuses not on men in battle, but on the women left at home, pluckily carrying on as their worlds change in ways they can’t hope to control. At times her stories are a bit too cutesy for my personal taste, but still they are engaging reads about the social impacts of war and the strength of women when they band together.

This latest novel is all about the challenges of food rationing. It is two years into the Second World War and German U-boats are disrupting the food supply, so British housewives are having to get creative with ingredients like potato peelings, whale meat and sheeps’ heads.

A radio show called The Kitchen Front launches a cooking competition with the grand prize being the chance to be the programme’s first-ever female presenter.

The challenge for the four participants is to cook a stand-out starter, a main course and a dessert with their rations.

Each woman has a very different cooking style. Impoverished Audrey, widowed by the war, is a natural cook, using foraged foods and homegrown ingredients. Nell is a kitchen maid at the local manor house and gifted at creating fancy food but is very shy. Gwendoline lives in the manor house but her life isn’t happy and, while she never cooks for herself, she is desperate to win the contest and launch her radio career. Zelda is a cordon-bleu-trained chef, aiming to work in the male-dominated restaurant world, and harbouring a secret that she won’t be able to hide for much longer.

The four are pitted against

by Jennifer Ryan (Macmillan, $34.99)

each other, trying to dream up brilliant ideas and rustle up ingredients, but very soon it becomes obvious there is only one way any of them is going to succeed.

This is a feel-good story about food, friendship and family, a relaxing read designed to charm and warm the heart, but also a reminder of how previous generations did it tough and managed to survive.