If you are the sort of person who watches lots of cooking programmes on television, reads the food pages in the weekend newspapers, or maybe even (whisper it) follows the bizarre flights of fancy of food bloggers now and again, you may have noticed a significant increase of late in articles focusing on the big theme of the moment. Features such as "Recipes to make the most of your storecupboards", "Use up all those unloved spices" and "No flour? No problem! Alternative baking recipes" are popping up left, right and centre, and there has been plenty specifically focusing on tinned foods too. In the same day, I read one website's "Top 10 Tinned Tomato Tips" - providing ideas for those who panic-bought in the lead-up to lockdown and now don't know what to do with all their tins - and another site's article on "The Best Pasta Sauces that Don't Use Tinned Tomatoes", for those who've been less lucky and found the supermarket shelves empty.
It's no surprise really; all writers, commissioning editors and broadcasters want to make their work relevant and up to date, but it does feel like a slight jumping on the bandwagon. Both the tinned tomato articles mentioned above featured fairly standard, not particularly exciting recipes that just happened to include (or not include) a fairly common storecupboard ingredient - and you suspect that pretty soon the writers will be returning to more normal territory, where tins and so on don't get much of a look in. I have a lot of time for Jamie Oliver, but I feel his recent TV series "Keep Cooking and Carry On" at the start of the lockdown was a similar case in point. In the four weeks' worth of daily programmes, he offered up "incredible recipes, tips and hacks, specifically tailored for the unique times we're living in, and how to make the most of kitchen staples", but it didn't seem all that different to his usual output, aside from giving suggestions of what to do with leftovers, and alternative ingredients if you couldn't find the ones he specified. Even that was quickly parodied online though:
Perhaps I am looking at these articles and programmes from the wrong perspective. Having started cooking with tins, and from recipes specifically for tinned foods, largely because they were ignored by everyone else, it feels strange seeing this sudden surge in interest in them. I suppose I tend to look for the more interesting and unusual products and recipes for this blog, so a lot of the ones featured in the current swathe of articles aren't really going cut the mustard for me.
But I'm not alone in having been very much into canned food cookery before it was all the rage. Back in 2017, I wrote a post about the baked beans episode of the dcoumentary series Inside the Factory, which featured a short segment where a bunch of foodies were served up a meal made entirely from tinned foods, cooked by Jack Monroe. It was her blog, A Girl Called Jack, charting her struggle to keep herself and her young son fed while unemployed and relying heavily on handouts from foodbanks, that brought her to public attention, in the process making her an expert in cooking on an extremely tight budget, not to mention coming up with interesting ways to use tins.
Since then, Jack has gone on to phenomenal success: her sixth cookbook will be published later this month, she has won both the Observer's Food Personality of the Year Award the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Award, and most recently she co-presented Daily Kitchen, the BBC's answer to Jamie Oliver's Keep Cooking and Carry On, which also featured easy, thrifty recipes using storecupboard staples and easily obtainable ingredients. Unlike Jamie, she seemed the perfect person for the show, having never lost sight of her roots and values, with her recipes continuing to focus on how to cook simple, nutritious and healthy meals on a budget, many of which are available for free on her website for those who need them. A true force of nature, she has also campaigned tirelessly against food poverty and in support of foodbanks and charities like The Trussell Trust, who helped her so much in the past, as well as others focusing on mental health and LGBTQ+ rights.
It was a particular delight therefore to see the publication of her fourth book this time last year - Tin Can Cook - which focuses entirely on recipes using one or more tinned foods. It seemed incredibly timely even back then, with foodbank usage higher than it had ever been, and uncertainties over the Brexit process leading people to start talking about stockpiling staple items. Now, of course, it is more relevant than ever. I bought a copy straight away last year, and had been meaning to write about it then, but of course did not get round to it. (Jack has well and truly put me to shame by writing a further two cookbooks in this time).
It would be pointless to publish a cookbook aimed at helping those with a very limited amount to spend on their weekly shop if it was one of those glossy hardbacks costing £30, to show off on your bookshelf or coffee table. Tin Can Cook therefore harks back to a previous era of cookbooks with its small format and low-grade paper, printed completely in black and white aside from the cover, and with a handful of line drawings rather than photos of the dishes, all of which allow for the cover price to be an incredible £6.99. The book is divided into chapters giving recipes for Breakfast and Brunch, Soups, Beans, Potatoes, Pasta, Fish, Meats, and Puddings, with a section at the start that sets out to debunk the myth that tinned food is less nutritious than its fresh equivalents, brilliantly titled "Cansplaining".
Clearly Jack has had a lot of fun coming up with the recipes - I suspect that some of them are a little tongue in cheek, poking a bit of fun at the trendy food scene. The annelini con cacio e pepe recipe, for example, gives the simple but delicious parmesan and black pepper treatment - so often used these days for pasta in fashionable Italian restaurants - to a tin of spaghetti hoops, rinsed of its gloopy tomato sauce.
I think the book works best as a kind of guide to using tinned foods, giving suggestions as to ways you can make a particular tin more interesting. Most cookbooks tend to work the other way round - tempting you with a recipe, then telling you the ingredients you need to go out and buy for it. If you came to this book from that perspective, you might be disappointed, or even slightly disgusted; you might quite fancy spaghetti Bolognese or a chilli, but are you going to go out and buy a tin of corned beef so you can make the versions Jack features here? Probably not - but, if you've got a tin of corned beef in the cupboard, those two recipes might appeal as things you could do with it that are more interesting than a sandwich or hash.
Similarly, some of the reviews I have seen on Amazon question the point of using a couple of tins plus other ingredients to make a soup, when you could just buy a tin of soup. I think they are slightly missing the point here - the soup recipes are more a suggestion as to things you could make if you happen to have, say, a tin of tomatoes, lentils, kidney beans and so on. If you happen to have a tin of soup, great - by all means eat that as it is - but you could also use it as the base for a sauce in one of the later recipes in the book. This is very much the approach that Jack has taken on Twitter (@bootstrapcook) in recent weeks, asking followers to let her know what random ingredients they have lurking at the back of their cupboards, and then offering ideas of meals to make with them (search for #lockdownlarder on Twitter for some of her ideas).
So, it is at times an eclectic mix of recipes, but I found there were a good number I wanted to try:
Pina Colada Bread
This sounded great - a standard bread recipe, but adding tinned coconut milk and pineapple to create that 'totally tropical' taste. I found that the recipe gave a very wet dough, so I had to add quite a bit more precious flour to be able to handle it and knead it, which I think might have dampened down the final Pina Colada flavour a bit. It was noticeable when I ate a slice when the loaf was still warm, and also when I toasted slices, but when trying it at room temperature the taste wasn't really very apparent at all. This was likely my fault though for having tried to scale down the quantities to make a smaller loaf - I may have got the amount of liquid wrong. Not to worry - Jack suggests spreading the bread with butter spiked with cinnamon and rum "for real Pina Colada authenticity". I combined this idea with a recipe I had seen for pineapple butter in a book of Del Monte pineapple recipes, mixing butter, crushed pineapple, a splash of coconut milk and a good slug of Malibu to create a full-on Pina Colada butter, which was superb. It didn't occur to me until after having had a couple of slices of the bread and butter for breakfast that it was probably a little bit early to be consuming alcohol on a work day. Still, these are unprecedented times, and when you're working from home, who cares anyway?
Carrot Cake Overnight Oats
Another recipe from the breakfast section. I quite often make overnight oats (or Bircher muesli, if you prefer) for breakfast in the warmer months instead of porridge, soaking them in milk in the fridge and sometimes adding fresh or dried fruit. This recipe does the same, but adds the flavours of a carrot cake with sultanas, cinnamon and "carrot milk" - not a weird new type of dairy alternative, but a tin of carrots blended together with milk. Sounds a bit bizarre, but it's actually delicious. Jack suggests an optional spoon or two of sugar if wished, which might make it even more cake-like, but with the natural sweetness of the carrots, and having slightly upped the amount of sultanas, I found it to be sweet enough. She also suggests serving with a splash of cream if you're feeling decadent, but it occurred to me that a dollop of mascarpone (or similar) might be even better, to emulate the cream cheese icing you get on a carrot cake. Maybe a sprinkling of walnut pieces too. I might have to make this one again...
Another recipe from the breakfast section. I quite often make overnight oats (or Bircher muesli, if you prefer) for breakfast in the warmer months instead of porridge, soaking them in milk in the fridge and sometimes adding fresh or dried fruit. This recipe does the same, but adds the flavours of a carrot cake with sultanas, cinnamon and "carrot milk" - not a weird new type of dairy alternative, but a tin of carrots blended together with milk. Sounds a bit bizarre, but it's actually delicious. Jack suggests an optional spoon or two of sugar if wished, which might make it even more cake-like, but with the natural sweetness of the carrots, and having slightly upped the amount of sultanas, I found it to be sweet enough. She also suggests serving with a splash of cream if you're feeling decadent, but it occurred to me that a dollop of mascarpone (or similar) might be even better, to emulate the cream cheese icing you get on a carrot cake. Maybe a sprinkling of walnut pieces too. I might have to make this one again...
Creamy "Chicken" Soup
From the soup section, this recipe caught my eye largely as it uses a tin of Pease Pudding, which I happened to have in my cupboard. It is made by a company called Foresight (which seems quite an appropriate name in this age of stockpiling), and has a lovely retro label which can't have changed much in years - the 'serving suggestions' photos on the back genuinely look like they might have been taken in the 1970s. Jack uses the pease pudding to create a "convincingly creamy chicken soup - with barely a snifter of chicken in it". I had actually had pease pudding quite recently, at a very old-fashioned cafe called Ivy's (not to be mistaken for The Ivy restaurant, though given that it is a small shack at Chrisp Street Market in Poplar, I doubt anyone would) where they make it from scratch, boiling the yellow split peas for hours to get the right consistency, and then serving it in a big dollop alongside a faggot and a saveloy - once a traditional East End meal to rival pie and mash or fish and chips, but now largely unheard of. Ivy's pease pudding had a similar texture to dhal, so it was quite a surprise to open up a tin of the mass-produced stuff and find it to be so incredibly firm you could stand a fork upright in it. It really did need to be prised out of the tin, as Jack says, but did begin to slowly break down in the saucepan when hot chicken stock was added - plus a bit of elbow grease with a wooden spoon to break up the lumps.
Once smooth, you slowly add in some milk to increase the creaminess, and it's ready to go. It was actually remarkably chickeny, given that it only had chicken stock in it, though admittedly I had made mine quite strong from a stock cube and less water than I would usually use. The familiar, slightly musty lentil-like smell of the pease pudding was still noticeable though. It reminded me of the tinned soups we used to have at home when growing up - my favourite was always Pea and Ham, and my brother's was Chicken and Sweetcorn, and this managed to remind me of both at the same time - an unexpected hit of nostalgia. If only this recipe had been around then - my mum could have made this and saved the two of us arguing over who was going to get their favourite soup for lunch and who would have to wait until next time.
Dog in a Hole
This time it was the wonderfully inelegant name that attracted me to the recipe. It is of course a version of toad-in-the-hole, but using tinned hot dogs instead of standard banger-style sausages. In the introduction to the recipe, Jack says she sometime adds a tin of carrots or beans as "a nod to virtue", and that reminded me of a Nigel Slater recipe I'd once seen, where he made a brunch version of toad-in-the-hole, with black pudding, bacon and mushrooms along with the sausages. He shied away from adding tomatoes and baked beans though, saying the former would be too watery and the latter "would just look disgusting".
Seeing as I still had leftover black pudding from the tin I opened to go with my scallops, this seemed like a good opportunity to combine Jack and Nigel's recipes. So into my roasting tin went the hot dogs, black pudding, tinned mushrooms and tinned tomatoes (both of which I briefly flashed in the oven first to get rid of their wateriness), a rasher or two of bacon, and as I don't much care how disgusting or not my food looks, a light sprinkling of baked beans. In went the batter, and then it all went into a very hot oven for 40 minutes.
The Yorkshire pudding didn't puff up as much as I was expecting, but I had gone against the recipe's advice and opened the door to check how it was doing after about half an hour, which could have caused it to deflate a bit. And I suppose the baked beans, somewhat shrivelled after their time in the oven, did look a little unappetising. No matter - it was very tasty nonetheless, though that was largely thanks to the additional ingredients; I am not sure the dogs really benefit from being roasted for that length of time, as they had shrivelled up to a turgid, almost Peperami-like texture. Being a bit flatter than normal meant that the leftover portion I had the next day could be rolled up into a sort of all-day breakfast Yorkshire pudding wrap, which is a superb way to start your day.
There were various other recipes I was quite tempted by but haven't got round to trying yet: two featuring cannellini beans, in a sweet-sour pickle from the Beans chapter, and with a decadent-sounding beurre blanc from the Pasta section; the "Something Like a Feijoada" beef stew, and pretty much everything from the Puddings chapter (but the Peanut Butter and Jam Crumble sounds particularly intriguing) - so I will certainly be returning to the book here at some point.
While it may not be a cookbook that will be to everyone's taste, or take pride of place on the kitchen shelves of the more serious "foodies", I think Tin Can Cook has a lot to recommend it, and the recipes certainly succeed in their aim to elevate a few uninteresting tins to a meal worth eating. I just hope it does prove to be a useful and inspirational resource to those for whom cooking from tins is an everyday necessity, and will continue to be so long after we return to a sense of normality once the Coronavirus crisis is over.
Oh, and finding that I had a couple of faggots in the freezer, with the remaining pease pudding and hot dogs, I was able to make an attempt at recreating my lunch at Ivy's Cafe, with the dogs standing in for the saveloy. Sadly it was not possible to replicate the experience of having an elderly, nearly toothless East End lady sat at the next table tell me the life stories of her various dogs and cats, one of whom she claimed had lived to the age of 23, which was bizarre but quite lovely at the same time.
Tin Can Cook by Jack Monroe is published by Bluebird, £6.99.
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