The unfair stereotype of British food was first spread by American soldiers who were over during rationing.

Yeast extract . Marmite would be for vitamin b12 because of the lack of meat available.

Fun fact.  Marmite has a strong, salty, savoury taste.   Butter was rationed as were cheese, most fats, meat, sugar, eggs, just to name a few.

I don`t want to sound superior  JJ, but  can you imagine living through your wild fire evacuation danger for 6 YEARS !
I know the time known as `the Blitz' is a limited period but what we were living through was bombed cities and a constant fear of our little country being invaded by the Nazis ,like those countries just a short hop across the channel .
How would you like that for 6 years?
I know because I lived through it.

The man who NASA recruited to send Buzz Aldrin & co to the moon in the 60s was the same man who designed the V1 & V2 rockets that attacked London in the war. Von Braun.

Not just babies crying at night, babies were born there- and conceived there, too

My grandmother lived in the north of |England. Her husband was killed at war and she was left with three small children. As no social security was available she had to get a job and worked as a welder in an ironstone mine. It was a 2 mile walk each way to work and if no one could look after the children (my mum was one) she took them to work down he mine with her. Sometime that had little to no food and if the bombing started while at work they where allowed to stay in the mine otherwise it was just on the surface. The street they lived in was bombed and the neighbours a few door down blown to bits. So not all people had the security of the underground.

Yeast extract is Marmite, beef extract was Bovril, very similar appearance. Both these items would have been in 99% of kitchens. There was no butter, marge only available. Honey was used because it was produced locally. Sugar came from the West Indies nad highly rationed

July 4, 1954, nine years after the end of World War II. Rationing ended Glad you found it funny

The soup would have been well cooked because it had to go into thermos flasks and be drank rather than eaten. I doubt that many people would have had access to a blender.

that was a great wee video.  appreciate that a young guy in the usa would even take the time to see what was going on over here.  Anderson Shelters was something.  I remember one still being in the back garden of my great grandparents. The bombing happened all over. london was hammered, as was coventry, Clydebank etc, and aye, that war time spirit of the people then is something to behold and admire. for sure.  So sad there's people going through the exact same thing, and worse now.

In New Zealand we use Marmite in our recipes for meat gravy. Marmite goes well with meat.

One story from my parents: They had gone out on a date and dad was walking mum home when suddenly a German fighter aircraft came overhead and start firing at them. They both ran, dad found out that mum was faster than him!

My Mother worked in a factory during the war making uniforms for the Army etc , She’d go to work which was often interrupted by air raids , She did a twelve hour shift go home have some dinner then back to work for two or three hours on fire watch during Air raid putting out incendiary bombs with buckets of sand, Then home for sleep and back to work at six in the morning, She said the shelter and work was deep but cramped full of other workers, At home was an Anderson Shelter which as the war went on was used less and less, A fatalistic attitude set in as every day could be your last so there was no point in worrying about it she said.

The Bliz cookery book came out in the blitz oddly enough.

The blitz was intense but bombing continued throughout the entire war.  There were also flying bombs known as doodle -bugs and towards the end of the war there were the V1 and V2 rockets.

Anderson wasn't worried that people would not go underground --- he was worried they could not continue a PRODUCTIVE existence from underground - ie that they would not be an effective and productive workforce.  He was in fact worried that people would be too happy to go underground and then stay there

If you would like a more first hand account of the blitz there is an excellent BBC documentary called 'Blitz Spirit' narrated by Lucy Worsley.  Be warned, though, there are bits of it that might stay with you for a while.

The yeast extract will be Marmite, the meat extract will be Bovril.  Both staples, bought in jars, with a really long shelf life even after opening, and concentrated, so you only need a tiny amount.  And yeah, at one point it was 2oz of butter a week.
The shorter day longer night thing - remember, in December it can be dark from 4pm to 8am in Britain.  

If you want to look into The Blitz (short for Blitzkrieg - Lightening War), Lucy Worsley did an excellent documentary using the diaries of six people who'd lived through it.  The Tube wasn't completely safe.  There are instances of stations full of people being killed when water mains took direct hits, flooding the stations.

The absolute BEST film that shows what it was like to  live through the London blitz is called “Hope and Glory” from 1988 and in full colour - it was the biggest British production made in England  for years at the time and I remember being blown away (pun intended) at how they had literally built a full scale british street of 1930s semi-destatched houses - the kind you STILL find in every single borough today - and then as the film goes on  more and more houses are blown to smitheries - and becaue it looks so similar to London today you can get a feel for how terrifying but also how exciting it would have been - weirdly.

The house I grew up in was first lived in by the architect who designed the building development in the 1920s, in 1938 it was doubled in size and a cylindrical air raid shelter built at at the  rear - its walls are two feet thick concrete - even if a bomb had hit it directly the curves were designed to make it bounce off and it’s still standing there today however on a cold night it’s like being inside a fridge so if the the bombs didn’t get you the cold did although in the days before central heating the cold didn’t bother people as much as is does now.