"Now bring us some cut-price goodies..."

January is always a great time of year for picking up a few bargains in the supermarkets as they try to clear the shelves of the Christmas items they weren't able to shift. Now is the time to pick up excess boxes of mince pies for 50p or less (as long as you don't mind eating them well after the Christmas decorations have come down), or stock up ahead of next Christmas on things like mincemeat, marzipan and Christmas puddings, which might have Best Before dates during the summer, but will definitely still be fine come December.

You can also tell which of the weird and wonderful special edition Christmas foodstuffs failed to excite shoppers - last year, my local Sainsbury's was still trying to get rid of jars their own-brand Black Forest Mincemeat well into February, which were refusing to shift despite being reduced to just 20 pence a jar. I can't say that mincemeat with added chocolate appeals to me, so I didn't buy it even at that price. It looks like Tesco's Peanuts with a Pigs in Blankets-flavoured crunchy coating, and M&S's Turkey Gravy Mayonnaise are among the more unappetising items following suit this year.

Was £2.10, now 53p...but there's a lot to shift so there may well be further reductions

I suppose some of these limited edition products must be enjoyed by some, but you do have to wonder whether some of these flavour combinations have been dreamt up by teams who are either drunk, stoned, or just experiencing a massive sugar-rush from consuming all the leftover products from last year. Do they really think these creations are going to fly off the shelves before Christmas, when they are still at full price?

It's nice to see that this sort of thing isn't just a British eccentricity; in the USA, there seems to be the same, if not greater enthusiasm for special Christmas editions. One particular limited edition product  brought to my attention towards the end of 2022 was SPAM Figgy Pudding. This was not, you may be glad to hear, a Christmas pudding with SPAM in it, but rather tins of the famous pink meat, flavoured with "a blend of warm spices and seasonal ingredients that will be the star in many wintertime recipe favorites", which I think sounds marginally better, but not by much. It was, apparently, "born of a desire to reconnect diners with fond recollections of the days of Christmas yore", evoking "a sense of nostalgia and warmth", all of which sounds like complete and utter nonsense to me. 

The image on the tin appears to show it with a pudding-like shape and colour. In fact this is a clever circular assembly of slices of the stuff, presumably fried first. Pictures of it straight out of the tin suggest it is the standard pink block of meat you would expect from SPAM.

As it was only available in the States, I wasn't able to try it for this blog, but then it suddenly occurred to me that I could try to recreate it myself with a standard tin. You might ask why anyone would spoil a perfectly good tin of SPAM in that way. What I had in my cupboard however was far from a perfectly good tin. I'd got it massively reduced, from £3.25 down to just 81p - not because the supermarkets were trying to get rid of excess stock this time, but because it was quite severely dented.

I've tried many dented tins before, which have always been absolutely fine, so I had no worries about this one in advance of opening it. On doing so though, the SPAM inside did appear to have shrunk quite considerably, with some parts of it looking a bit less pink than usual. So I was slightly in two minds, but it smelled absolutely fine and looked normal when cutting into it, so I felt it was probably worth the risk of botulism.

According to SPAM's US website, the Figgy Pudding variety has "notes of cinnamon and nutmeg combined with fig and orange flavors", so that was what I needed to try to recreate. I always feel that SPAM is at its best when fried, so a few slices went into a pan over a medium heat (no real need for oil; the fat quickly leaches out of the stuff itself) and left it to sizzle. After it had started to brown, I sprinkled on a bit of cinnamon and grated on some nutmeg.

For the figgy element, I returned to a tin I had first tried back in the early days of this blog, when I attempted an entire Christmas dinner made from tinned products - Baldjis Green Figs in Syrup. I cut a few of these in half, and added them to the pan with the sizzling SPAM to warm through, and then squeezed over the juice of a clementine with a little more of the figs' syrup.

For the true figgy pudding experience though, you've got to add the 'wow' factor. So, just as I had done with my flambeed figs all those years ago, I added a slug of brandy and set light to it.

I hadn't been entirely sure how I was going to eat this bizarre concoction of ingredients I had cobbled together, but in the end I just stuck it all between two slices of toast for perhaps the world's weirdest Christmas sandwich. It occurred to me afterwards that I could have spread the toast with a bit of the brandy butter I had in the fridge, but maybe that would have been a step too far.

I had seen some reviews of the actual Figgy Pudding SPAM saying it was revolting, and I can see how that might true for a lump of pale pink processed meat with various spices and flavourings added in to the mix, which could easily have all the allure of a meat-based scented candle - or, as one reviewer in the Washington Post put it, "tastes like a hotdog fruitcake. Run away." 

Here however, with slices of classic SPAM fried to a deliciously porky crispness, and with the Christmas flavours added after, I think it actually worked reasonably well. The figs were less sweet than I remembered them being, and so didn't provide too harsh a contrast against the SPAM. The clementine juice had enough of a zesty zinginess to cut through the fatty pork. I had been deliberately frugal with the cinnamon to avoid it overpowering things, and as such avoided veering into Yankee Candle territory. The boozy hit from the brandy was obviously unique to my version, but was a welcome addition here. All in all, this was genuinely not bad. Certainly not offensive by any means.

For the remainder of my tin of SPAM, I had a different figgy treatment up my sleeve. This time it was a tin of Ripe Fig Jam from the South African brand All Gold. Jam in a tin seems quite an odd concept given how used to buying it in jars we are - to the extent that any empty jar could legitimately be called a jam jar, even if it had contained something like Black Forest Mincemeat or Turkey Gravy Mayo previously (give them a good wash though) - but it used to be a lot more common and seems to have stayed popular in certain parts of the world.  The odd thing about it though is that once you've opened your tin, you'll need to store whatever you don't use immediately in a different container with a lid, such as, oh I don't know, a jar, maybe? A jam jar, even. So why not just put it in jars from the start? Perhaps jars are more expensive to produce and transport. 

Initially I went for a similar treatment to the other figs, frying some slices of SPAM, adding spices and flavourings as before, and putting it between two slices of toast, which this time had been spread with the jam. The jam was a lot sweeter than the green figs, but had not muted the figgy flavour; if anything it seemed to have made it more pronounced. I was glad that they hadn't attempted to remove the fig seeds - I always strangely enjoy the crunch of them between the teeth. Again, the SPAM was sufficiently porky to hold its own against the sweetness of the jam.

I also tried making some little bite-sized snacks - plain crackers, spread with a little fig jam, a slice of fried SPAM on top (with just the nutmeg this time), and then topped with a tiny bit of stilton and a grating of orange zest. And lo, the Figgy Pudding SPAMapé was born. The stilton was particularly good here, an excellent foil to both the jam and the SPAM, but I had left out the cinnamon as I wasn't sure it would go so well with that flavour. These were actually pretty damn good.

Of course there are plenty of things you can do with your leftovers once you've finished your SPAM - the green figs are excellent split in half and stuffed with a little soft cheese and then drizzled with honey. Or the brandy butter would work well too. The fig jam is great on toast, on its own or with more stilton and some walnuts; it could be a fruity addition to a sausage roll; or even just as the filling between two layers of shortcrust pastry for an attempt at a homemade fig roll. The possibilities are endless.

I'm not sure if SPAM brought back their Figgy Pudding version for Christmas 2023, as it may not have proved all that popular. I wonder if many supermarkets were selling off tins at reduced price last year to get rid of them. I would certainly consider giving my version of it another try though, the next time I have a tin of SPAM on the go, especially with the fig jam, as it is particularly satisfying to find a food pairing that not only tastes good, but rhymes too. Dr Seuss would no doubt approve.