​Revisiting the times of food rationing was a logical step for Valentine Warner.

After all, the unabashedly posh cook, who went to Beaudesert Park School in Minchinhampton from the age of 13, has already preached the benefits of eating with the seasons in his cookery programme What To Eat Now.

He balks at the idea of throwing away any part of an animal, declaring he’s the “only person I know who eats tripe”, and even admits to eating leftover fat from other people’s plates.

So unsurprisingly he was at ease with recreating dishes from 1940s recipe books to mark 70 years since the start of rationing in Britain.

“I’m quite old fashioned in my tastes and I don’t like to waste anything,” he says.

“What was so surprising about the cooking though was we thought it was all going to be quite hard to put in the mouth but it was all quite tasty.

“I’m sure if you’re eating it for 14 years you’d want to pick it off your plate and hurl it across the wall but things in their own right, made with care, were actually perfectly respectable things to eat.”

Even the notorious dried eggs, of which few people have fond memories, were palatable, Valentine enthuses.

“We had to do dried eggs which smell disgusting when you mix them, but they’re ok once they go in the mouth, and the famous Woolton Pie – which was a well-known vegetable pie – was seriously helped out by a bit of Bisto.”

Aged 37, the TV chef, who now lives in west London, was fortunate enough to be born after the World War II, but his family made him aware of the ethos of the period.

“My mum grew up during the war in Cornwall and very much remembers rationing,” he recalls.

“My father used to talk about it a lot because he actually fought in the war, and I was so aware of what rationing did because of my grandmother.

“She had a very light appetite and when she used to eat chocolates, or a boiled egg, she’d put a bit of clingfilm over the boiled egg and put it in the fridge or she’d wrap half a chocolate up and eat it two weeks later, and the egg sometimes four days later. She didn’t waste anything.”

His admiration for the ‘waste not want not’ generation does not extend to members of today’s society, who he thinks would struggle if rationing suddenly had to be introduced.

“There would be a lot of moaning, a lot of complaining but it might do a bit of good,” he says.

While it’s hardly practical or desirable to bring back rationing simply to extol the virtues of economical cooking, Valentine thinks we can still afford to learn a thing or two from the people who lived through it.

“They seem to have a gratitude, a making do, a humility and modesty. People didn’t complain, they were united by hardship and were fighting for their lives, so it was like, ‘let’s use what we’ve got and quietly go about our thing in a very thoughtful way’.

“Now we live in a very wasteful, fast time when things are very casually discarded. Then there was a meticulousness and a real kind of strength that you don’t see so often in people now,” he says, demonstrating his point with staccato arm gestures.

Nothing unlocks memories like smells and tastes, and Valentine said cooking the recipes for a group of World War II heroes at the end of the programme was an emotional experience.

“They were talking about the war and, as I served them the dishes from the Ministry of Food book, there was a bit of emotion, and listening to them gave me a lump in my throat as well,” he says.

“There was one guy who had done an enormous amount of bombing runs over Berlin, far more than the average pilot lived for. He took out a little metal frog and put it on the table and he said, ‘I never took off without this and I survived and everyone but three of us in our squadron died during the war and I’ve never taken it off my person since’.

“That was amazing. Time does go by and you move forward but it is good to remember because it wasn’t that long ago,” he says.

It is his feeling for people which has partly contributed to Valentine’s success.

After spending seven years working with inspirational chefs and mentors including Alistair Little and Rose Carrarini and freelancing for other kitchens, Valentine set up his own catering business cooking private dinners. Soon the company had secured clients such as Yves Saint Laurent, Working Title and Gucci.

He then sold his share and spent a year fishing in Central America and on his return, launched Taqueria Café in Westbourne Grove, London.

In his last successful food series What To Eat Now he combined his own favourite dishes with those of other people, seeking out the secrets to precious family recipes.

“I just shut up and listened to them. If you’re filming with a farmer or the guys that pull up the oysters, they have so much to tell you,” he says.

Valentine grew up on a farm in the wilds of Dorset where his first 12 years were spent outdoors learning to fish, shoot and cook. He admits spending his time at boarding school daydreaming and being reprimanded for poaching from the local trout farm.

He is a nature enthusiast – he names Sir David Attenborough as one of his heroes – and is hoping to make a programme which combines his love of food with his love of animals – strange perhaps for someone so pro-hunting.

And while this stance has caused him to be harassed in the street on one occasion, he remains steadfast.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” he states. “I respect people who don’t want to eat meat. If you have your opinion, fine, but don’t tell me I’m wrong. We’ve hunted for thousands of years. Maybe we don’t need to shoot stuff anymore but I like to go out and get my own food. I know it at every stage from going out with my gun over my shoulder to falling in the grass and taking it home and eating it so I’ve been responsible for the whole thing, whereas when you take something off the shelf at the supermarket you have no idea about how it’s been treated.”

Valentine is generally against the idea of supermarkets (“it’s not the way I’d choose to shop”) but he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have one guilty pleasure, would he?

“I have two guilty pleasures,” he replies, with a mischievous glint in his eye.

“Bacon Frazzles and pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch. It’s a nostalgic thing. Pretty much every long car journey I go on I will have a few packets of Frazzles.”

Ration Book Britain will be repeated on factual TV channel Yesterday next month.