European portion sizes are not as big as US ones, but cafés sell HUGE muffins, and takeaway portions are often enormous. I wonder if people were hungry during rationing or whether normal portion sizes were smaller even before the war? There was much more manual labour in those days that had to be powered by this amount of food. The foods above that were normally not rationed must have been hard to find at times as well.
Most South African coffee varieties contain a lot of chicory, which Swedes used to drink as a coffee substitute during the war and found very weak. I find them very weak now too after living so long in the world’s second-highest coffee consuming country. What did the UK do for coffee during WWII, or was tea still the go-to hot beverage in those days?
I think it is only fairly recently (not in my lifetime but after the end of the second world war) that coffee became more popular here in the UK. We still consume a lot more tea than coffee (I enjoy the occasional traditional tea made with leaves rather than dust). However, I drink more coffee than tea because tea leaves make a mess.