Cooking through war: what people kept doing

This page is about kitchens, not wars. In each of the places below, ordinary people were left with the kind of food this site is built on, dried, tinned and long-life, and lost most of what it takes to cook it: gas, power, clean water, sometimes the pans. What they did next is worth knowing out of respect, and because the same lessons hold, at a far smaller scale, for anyone planning a store cupboard or sitting out a long power cut.

Every figure here is tied to its date and to whoever published it. Where a finding has been disputed, we say who made it and when, and leave it there.

The food was there. The fire was not.

In August 2025 the Famine Review Committee of the IPC, the international system UN agencies and governments use to classify food insecurity, classified famine in Gaza Governorate for the period 1 July to 15 August 2025. Its report has a section on how food was being used, and it says, almost in passing, the thing that matters most here: all food “except a very small amount of oil and canned food in GHF food packages require extensive preparation to make it digestible for humans” (IPC, August 2025).

It recorded “the complete lack of fuel and cooking gas”, with households “increasingly rely[ing] on burning rubbish”, 73% of them in Gaza Governorate. Lentils and wheat flour, it noted, “if poorly cooked are not well digested by the body”. Households reported access to 2.94 litres of water per person in July, down from 3.55 in May. In December 2025, FAO, UNICEF, WFP and WHO reported jointly that “no areas of the Strip are currently classified in famine” following the October ceasefire, while at least 1.6 million people still faced high levels of acute food insecurity.

The same pattern runs through every account on this page.

Sarajevo, 1992 to 1996. Stoves were built from the five-litre tins that food aid came in, and, as one history of the siege’s improvised design puts it, “made it possible to cook an entire meal on the energy produced by burning a single piece of parquet floor”. Šemsa Mehmedović, in the FAMA Collection’s oral history, listed what her family burned to cook lunch: “plastic and rubber objects, pieces of clothing and shoes, pieces of carpet, books that we could part with”. When that ran out, she sawed down the ash tree in the garden (FAMA Collection).
Leningrad, 1941 to 1944. Flats were heated with small home-made iron stoves, burzhuiki, and “people burned whatever they could in the stove, including furniture and books”. Water came from “urban rivers and street pumps” (Museum of the Siege of Leningrad).
Mariupol, March 2022. With heating, electricity and gas gone, the New York Times reported, “people are chopping trees for firewood to fuel outdoor cooking stoves shared by neighbours”, and “water is so scarce that people are melting snow” (NYT via NZ Herald).

For a cupboard: food is only half a stock. The other half is the fuel and water to cook it, and the cheapest way to stretch both is to choose food that needs little of either. Red lentils, couscous, bulgur, quick-cook pasta, and tins that are good eaten cold. See ways to make heat and water: how much, and how to carry it.

The fridge goes first

In Kyiv in the summer of 2024, on rolling blackouts, power was available “four to six hours a day, two hours at a time, in most areas”. The Kyiv Post’s staff wrote that food in the fridge spoils quickly, and that freezer meat had to be thrown away the day after a long shutdown. What they bought was “a portable gas stove with canisters” (Kyiv Post).

For a cupboard: a freezer is a stock that one long power cut can wipe out. A tin is not. That is the plainest case there is for keeping some of your food in a form that needs no electricity at all, before or while you rely on the freezer. See the store cupboard build.

The aid parcel is a long-life cupboard

Read the contents of a modern food parcel and it is very nearly a list of what this site cooks with.

Ukraine. WFP’s food kits “typically comprise wheat flour, pasta, buckwheat, oats, canned beans or meat, sunflower oil, sugar and salt” (WFP).
Gaza, November 2025. WFP’s family parcels “contain essential cooking items like oil, salt, lentils, sugar, pasta, tomatoes paste, canned beans”, one parcel to a family for ten days (WFP via UNifeed).
Sarajevo. FAMA records a citizen’s aid entitlement as 1,250 g of beans, 300 g of sugar, 300 g of oil and 1 kg of flour (FAMA Collection). UNHCR’s airlift ran from 3 July 1992 to January 1996, flew in 160,677 tonnes of aid, 144,827 tonnes of it food, and became “the longest-running airlift in history” (UNHCR, 1996).

What was missing is just as consistent. Mehmedović again: “We had, albeit in quite limited quantities - flour, oil, rice, beans, lentils. And to make the food tasty, everything was missing: spices, sugar, vegetables, not to mention eggs and meat.” She also remembered the tins of ICAR beef, which “we didn’t know whether it was wise to eat or not”. A pensioner in FAMA’s food history recalled being sick of rice and macaroni.

It is the same finding as in our treats and morale guide, reached the hard way. Calories keep you alive; it is flavour and variety that get the calories eaten. Mehmedović’s answer is the best line on this page: “somehow I managed to make the same meal look a little different every time. And I think those ideas for a ‘diverse’ diet were also a form of resistance.”

For a cupboard: a stock of staples is the easy part. The light, cheap things are what make it food: the spice kit, something sharp, something sweet, and tomato purée, which is in the Gaza parcel and which Alma Alić (below) used in Sarajevo “so that there would be at least a little flavor”. And if a tin worries you, our page on damaged tins says what to look for.

What people cooked

Sarajevo produced its own cookbooks. The Sarajevo Survival Guide, put together in the city and published in 1993 by FAMA, had a section of war recipes. Two of them are displayed at the National Museum of the US Air Force, next to a stove made from a tin, and we have adapted both:

A meat pie, the Bosnian pita, which the guide opens with the line “Once upon a time you would use fresh beef or lamb meat… Today, look for the meat in the cans from the humanitarian aid.” Our version: Sarajevo siege meat pie.
“Cheese à la Olga Finci”, made from milk powder, oil and lemon. It is not cheese, and the recipe knows it. Ours: Olga Finci’s milk powder “cheese”.

In the suburb of Dobrinja, Alma Alić kept a handwritten book of recipes that neighbours tested and passed on to each other. “The point was to make something as big as possible, from just a few ingredients,” she told RFE/RL in 2012. Her own invention was a cake of UN-issued wafers mashed with beans and sugar.

Mehmedović made a pâté “from boiled beans and any spices we could find”, which is a dish this cupboard already does well: try sun-dried tomato bean mash or white bean and tuna mash. Her family’s favourite was a pie of rice left to ferment until it tasted of cheese. We have not adapted that one, because home fermenting is one of the areas where improvising is a real risk: see fermenting vegetables safely.

In Ukraine, WFP described a woman on the front line who “in the mornings … bakes traditional pancakes, known as mlyntsi using WFP-supplied flour” (WFP). Ours: mlyntsi from the store cupboard.

Knowing what is safe to eat

The two older sieges show what happens when the cupboard is empty, and none of it is a recipe.

In Leningrad in November 1941, according to the city’s siege museum, “the bread only contained 40–50% flour; the rest was oil cake, bran, cellulose, malt, soy flour”. Bricks of wood glue were sold in the shops as food (Museum of the Siege of Leningrad). To fight scurvy, the city collected pine needles on an industrial scale: “about 16 million doses” of pine-needle drink were consumed in 1942. But when researchers at the University of Tartu measured it, they found the vitamin C in pine needles “rather low if compared to other natural sources of vitamin C” (Raal and others, 2017). It was the best they had. It is not a plan. For what is, see scurvy and the long-life cupboard.

In the Netherlands in the winter of 1944 to 1945, rations fell from 1,400 kcal a day in October 1944 to 500 kcal in January 1945, and people ate sugar beet and tulip bulbs (Vorstenbosch and others, 2017). The government’s nutrition council published instructions: peel the bulbs, cut them through to remove the sprout, boil them in a little water for fifteen minutes, and never eat them raw (NOS). Few people seem to have read them. Of 78 survivors and relatives interviewed in 2017, only three knew the wartime cookbooks and leaflets. Most said “everybody suddenly knew that products like tulip bulbs were edible”. Tulip bulbs contain tulipin, a protein that inhibits DNA synthesis, and the ailments people remembered were sore throats and stomach ache from sugar beet and tulip bulbs.

For a cupboard: knowledge travels by word of mouth in a crisis, and word of mouth is where the confident, wrong advice lives. The time to learn how to prepare something safely is before you need it, from a source you can check. That is why the safety pages on this site are written the way they are.

Cooking together

Almost every account has one fire serving many people. In Sarajevo a journalist remembered that in June 1992 “my neighbours started making fires behind our building to cook food. It was a collective fire” (Works That Work). In Mariupol, people cooked “on improvised brick stoves in the courtyards of their apartment blocks”. In Gaza in April 2025, OCHA counted “about one million meals a day through some 170 community kitchens”, and as gas ran short “many kitchens turned to burning donated wooden pallets for fuel to keep operating” (OCHA).

For a cupboard: one pot for a street uses a fraction of the fuel of ten pots for ten flats, and the company matters too. If the power goes for days, cook with the neighbours.

What the stories do not tell you

These accounts are about getting through. They leave out what it cost, and some of it is exactly what this site’s safety pages exist for.

Cooking indoors. In Sarajevo and Leningrad, people burned furniture, books and anything else they could find in stoves inside their homes. In Ukraine, the Ministry of Health recorded 868 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, 215 of them children, in November and December 2022 alone. Ukraine’s emergency service and UNICEF warned that gas burners are “designed for heating food and only in small dishes”, that it is dangerous to run them for a long time, and to use them “outside or in a room with ventilation” (UNICEF Ukraine). Read carbon monoxide before you light anything indoors.
Water. Every city here had to take water where it could find it: rivers, pumps, snow. For how to make water safe to drink, see water treatment.
The first meals after hunger. After five days or more with little or no food, eating normally again can be dangerous in itself. See refeeding, and get medical help.

What a cupboard can take from this

Plan fuel and water with the food, and favour food that needs little of either.
Do not rely on the freezer. One long power cut can empty it.
Stock flavour on purpose. Spices, acid, tomato purée, something sweet. Everyone on this page who had calories without them said so.
Make the same food look different. It is a skill, and it is what keeps people eating.
Learn safe preparation in advance, from a source you can check.
Cook together when you can.