Letter to Arthur Mee from a London caterer
The Food Value of Brewer’s Malt
Malt flour can be used to make excellent cake with 50 per cent. wheat flour. It is sweet and pleasant to taste without the need of any sugar. Good scones can be made with 25 per cent. of malt flour. Its use in bread made with yeast causes too much fermentation in the bread, but it has no effect on baking-powder. The Food Controller’s Department is aware of the practicability of using malt flour, but the sale is restricted in order to limit its use for making beer. Brewers and maltsters are too patriotic to wish to use for beer what could be applied to food in case of a serious shortage, and the large stocks of barley and malt can supplement the supply of wheat flour.
Letter from a Brewer in the “Times,” April 11, 1917
Yet we have seen our Government holding up sugar for brewers; we have seen our Food Controller refuse to release a caterer’s sugar unless it were sold to a brewer; we have seen a Government short of food-ships bringing in brewers’ vats and casks of rum; and we see the Government still holding up this malt that would feed a people asking for more bread.
The Tunes They Play
Strange tunes we hear the fiddlers play, but their music does not charm away the troubles of a famine-threatened land. From morning till night the prayer of the people rises, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but the heart of Downing Street is hardened, and the nation’s bread goes day by day to the destroyer.
But all the time we see the measure of the courage of our rulers on the hoardings in the streets. We know their posters by heart.
Defeat the enemy’s attempt to starve you, by—not by stopping the destruction of food, but by joining the National Service, and probably helping to pick hops. There was a man in a co-operative store who volunteered for National Service, and last month he received instructions to leave the grocery store and take up duty in a brewery.