In Swedish restaurants, payment was required in both money and ration coupons during the rationing. Rationing started in March 1940 for tea and coffee and were trade political in nature - the government wanted to reduce the imports during a critical time when exports were harder to make. After the German occupation of Norway and blockade of the North Sea, meant that rationing for more and more goods were introduced.

Milk was reduced to 3% fat as a standard to free milk fat to make butter, cream and cheese. Still, one person only got 4 grams of cheese per day when rations were at their lowest during Summer 1942.

However, as wild game was unrationed, as was milk, berries, local fruit (as opposed to colonial fruit such as grapes, pineapple, oranges and bananas) potatoes and vegetables, restaurant kitchens got very creative in creating dishes that were coupon-free - sausages especially became a 'don't ask, don't tell' part of a dish served at a restaurant, and city veterinarians inspected animals such as badger, crow, fox, squirrel and magpie for diseases and parasites before they were used in coupon-free dishes. During 1942, the city veterinarian office in southern Stockholm inspected no less than 2 500 foxes.

Fish and rabbit were not rationed, and both dishes became more common - however, outside the port cities, fresh fish were often only available once or twice per week.

In July 1941, the classical Swedish smörgåsbord was banned as a waste of food - however, the lack of demand had almost killed it already, as few were willing to spend that much of their ration - especially meat was harshly rationed, dropping to 150 grams per person and week during Summer 1942 for a normal person (people with heavy physical labour got larger rations, children and women slightly smaller).

Apart from sausages with questionable ingredients, various birds were commonly served at the restaurants and coupon-free dishes. Juniper berry fried gull, whole-fried jay and ragout of pigeon showed up on the menues of Swedish restaurants.

One must also remember that at this time, you were required to order food to be allowed to order spirits, and the 'paragraph sandwhich' was a dish that was unpalatable, as cheap as possible while still fulfilling the legal requirement of cooked food and seldom touched and often served again and again to unwilling but compelled patrons. It was common for people to put out their cigarettes in the food when they were less than pleased with the staff, and towards the end of the evening, you could get a cold plate of unpalatable food that had been in and out for hours and could have scores of cigarette butts in it.

Confectionaries and patisseries were not under rationing and you could freely buy your favourite pastries and other cakes or buns there if you had the money - however, the shop itself was restricted to its pre-war amount of flour, sugar, eggs, butter and so on, so they often ran out.

In Britain from 1940 restaurants received supplies of food in proportion to the general rations at the time (e.g. if the meat ration was one shilling and twopence for a fortnight then restaurants would receive one penny per meal served, for hotels and boarding houses it was based on the number of residents). The meals themselves were not rationed, intended as a 'buffer' (along with unrationed bread and potatoes) to satisfy the different energy requirements of different people without making rationing too complex.

High-end dining continued through the war and attracted ill-feeling, such as William Connor writing in the Daily Mirror as Cassandra who launched a 'Gutskrieg' against lavish eaters. Luxury foods were not part of rationing or price control so were available at exorbitant prices to those who could afford them, and restaurants were well placed to take advantage of the black market. In 1942 the government took action but restaurant meals were still not rationed, merely limited to a maximum of one main course and with a price limit of five shillings, though this was flexible for establishments with high overheads (such as, entirely coincidentally, favoured haunts of cabinet ministers) and quite easily circumvented through high priced drinks or increased service charges.

At the other end of the dining scale the number of works canteens greatly increased, from 1,500 before the war to almost 18,500 in 1944, and they received greater allowances of meat, cheese, butter and sugar per meal than normal restaurants (those for heavy workers had greater allowances still). For the general population a number of British Restaurants were set up by local authorities from 1940, by 1943 2,160 of them served over 600,000 subsidised meals daily. The meals were cheap, 10-12p, and a self-service system kept costs down. Even with subsidised dining, though, the vast majority of food was consumed at home during the war. A national food survey found that on average between 2.5 and 3 of 27 meals per person were consumed outside the home.

See:

Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska

The People's War, Angus Calder

Super interesting! Thank you for all the information. I regularly watch tv and movies set during this time period and have always wondered about the dining aspect, especially when it came to upper classes and their fancy restaurants.

Does anyone know how it worked in America?