GREAT BRITAIN: Macaronic Soup

“A quart of soup and two pounds of potatoes,” wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, “will enable you to pass the night without great impatience for your breakfast. . . .”

Forced to make do on a meager three pounds of potatoes a week during the long nights of rationing, patient Britons could find small comfort in the advice of the great epistler, but last week a clutch of lesser literary lights were doing their best to make up for Britain’s lack of spuds with a bumper crop of digestible macaronics. Sample from the Evening Standard:

Behold this Government of duds

Reduced to rationing of spuds;

Now we must go short of chips

And have to live on fish and Cripps.