Now that we're into September we're looking at one of the best autumn harvests on record following a damp, warm spring and an exceptionally dry, sunny summer.

Beetroot, kale, turnip, squash, various beans, all kinds of cabbage, leeks, onions, carrots, potatoes, and the best Scottish ceps, apples, pears and plums. And of course grouse, venison, lobster and langoustine also come into their own at this time, with partridge soon to follow. It's our autumn larder at its most abundant.

There's no shortage of advice on how to cook it all. Mind you, the latest Jamie Oliver recipe for venison requires two large knobs of butter, and no doubt there will be similar examples of such relative luxury when our own magazine chefs Martin Wishart and Geoffrey Smeddle produce their own new-season versions for us to follow.

Which brings me neatly to thoughts of what it was like for home cooks 100 years ago, when the First World War had just begun and food became much less plentiful.

From the start of the war until rationing began in January 1918, there was a voluntary self-restraint campaign called the Patriotic Food League (PFL), which wasn't entirely successful because the better off could afford to pay higher prices on the black market, while the poor suffered from starvation. Long queues at shops were common and by the time people got to the front there was often nothing left because others had bought up the lot to hoard it.

Between 1916 and 1917 potatoes more than doubled in price, triggering a campaign for people to use turnips and carrots instead; cheese and eggs had increased by 45 per cent; meat, bacon and butter by 35 per cent; flour, milk and sugar by 25 per cent; bread, margarine and fish by 18 per cent, and tea by seven per cent. This was triggered by a combination of bad domestic harvests plus enemy attacks on merchant ships destined for the UK, severely affecting food imports.

The PFL was further developed by Dr Douglas Chalmers Watson, a nutrition expert and senior physician at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary who directed it in Scotland from August 1915. The document he produced in 1917 - found in papers left by Dorothy Melvin, principal of the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science - outlined his plans for the Food Economy Campaign (Scotland), commissioned because "the British race were the most wasteful that ever existed on the surface of this globe". Dr Chalmers Watson advised two things: that people had to be convinced of the necessity for eating less food, and that they be shown how to do it. It was effectively a precursor to food rationing. Teachers at the Glasgow and Edinburgh colleges of domestic science taught thrift cookery, and among the recipes were turnip scones and carrot pudding.

I was recently loaned a rare copy of May Byron's Rations Book, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1918 and praised by the Glasgow Herald at the time for "tackling the whole complicated economical problem that confronts the harried housekeeper of these days". Copies now sell on eBay for £65.

The book contains 650 recipes, an extraordinary achievement given the privations of rationing. Some of the less appetising sounding ones are raspberry jam containing cooked minced beetroot and sago, boiled cow-heel with parsley sauce, parsnip marmalade and oatmeal jelly.

The range of French, Flemish and Spanish recipes is interesting. There's a ragout of minced beef with clove powder and chestnuts, a tripe fricassee with lemon peel and eggs; French toast (of minced beef with breadcrumbs, tomatoes and egg, baked in the oven); Flemish fricandeau of fish; Dolmas (Spanish) beef or mutton wrapped in cabbage leaves; Jamaica fritters (fried cold meat and dried egg); Cairo eggs (boiled eggs coated with lentils and oatmeal and oven-baked and served with polenta); Palestine eggs (Jerusalem artichokes with chopped boiled eggs, tomatoes and cheese) and so on. Many echo the modern return to sourcing locally and reducing food waste: there's advice on how to make cheese from sour milk, and a foraged dandelion salad.

In her introduction, Ms Byron - a writer and poet - writes: "I am not going to minimise the difficulties which lie in wait for the rationed housewife … the concocting of palatable dishes with a deficiency of those ingredients which we were wont to use so freely is not at all an easy task. No amount of imagination will make baked haricots the least bit like roast mutton."

She adds, somewhat waspishly: "Of course professional optimists will say it is very good for you not to have this, that, or the other … and will declare that all you really need for health is to be found in split peas and sago. I have even seen tapioca recommended as a substitute for fat!

"In this book, however, there is no deception. I am not intent on assuring you that 'everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'; I am out to help you, frankly, to make the best of a bad job."

Plenty to reflect on, then, as we delve willy-nilly into the abundance all around us. Just saying.