Who cooked the meals during World War 1?

Answer 1

I don't know where you mean or what people group you mean. On the war front the soldiers ate rations or an army cook prepared food. At the home front the women went on cooking for families and restaurants and the men left behind. Any household that had a cook servant then that person did the cooking.

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Meals in the trenches were prepared by the troops themselves. They didn't have cooks in the trenches with them. When they were behind the lines, they had access to cooks houses and proper rations. In the trenches, it was much more haphazard. They often didn't get enough or what they got was awful.

The soldiers (on both sides) developed recipes to cope with the tedium and rather unappealing aspect of what they had. The biscuits and bread were stale and rock hard by the time it made it's way from the cook house to the trenches. Food shortages created other problems:

By the winter of 1916 flour was in such short supply that bread was being made with dried ground turnips.

Harry Patch, the last UK soldier who died recently said:

"Our rations - you were lucky if you got some bully beef and a biscuit. You couldn't get your teeth into it. Sometimes if they shelled the supply lines you didn't get anything for days on end. There were five in a machine-gun team, and everything we had was shared amongst us. I used to get a parcel from home. My mother knew the grocer pretty well."

If it weren't for the parcels from home, many a soldier would have gone hungry.

Most of the food came from packages or tins, very little fresh food made it that far forward.