Time for Beans

In a post last year I showed you some of the random tin-themed items I've purchased, mainly from eBay, but with the odd find from charity shops, car boot sales and so on.

I'd like to say that I've been making better use of my time and money this year. But with life still severely restricted by the virus, what else is there to do with it?

This explains why I have ended up with an egg timer in the shape of a tin of Heinz Beanz - which doesn't actually keep time very well, frequently just stopping before the desired time is over. I emailed the buyer to return it, but he just refunded me instead, so now it just sits there gathering dust on a shelf.

A window into the world of trendy tinned fish

One of the more unexpected food trends of recent years has been, believe it or not, tinned fish. We're not talking your bog-standard tins of tuna and salmon here though (so unless my last post goes viral, I can't see Nigel's salmon bake becoming the next big thing). As with most food trends, we're talking the fancy, artisanal posh stuff. And if it comes in a beautiful tin, so much the better.

There seem to be a number of Instagram accounts dedicated purely to tinned fish and seafood from Portugal and Spain - @tinnedfishclub, @tinned_fish_gazette and @tinned_not_canned to name but three - some concentrate solely on the tins themselves, but for others it's more about what's inside.

The hits and misses of a culinary hero

I've mentioned several times before on this blog that I'm a big fan of the writings and recipes of Nigel Slater. While I've enjoyed cooking for as long as I can remember (I even had a toy kitchen in my formative years, subjecting my family to having to pretend to eat and enjoy plates of plastic food from whatever restaurant, cafe or hotel I imagined myself to be proprietor of at the time), it was only when I was into my 20s that I started getting really interested in trying out recipes, collecting cookbooks and reading about food. Nigel Slater's columns in the Observer, with their elegant yet conversational prose, describing simple but satisfying dishes, were a huge influence, and I'm fairly sure his work makes up more of my cookbook collection than any other single writer. 

After more than 25 years writing for the same paper, his articles are still very much the backbone of the Guardian and Observer's renowned food content, all of which I follow fairly religiously. It was a great delight therefore to see Nigel featured in an article earlier this year as part of a series by critic Jay Rayner, when lockdown had imposed a hiatus on his usual restaurant column. In each article, he looked at an influential cookbook and its writer, examining the influence they have had on how we cook and eat in the UK today. 

Alongside such classics as Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food, Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating and Yotam Ottolenghi's eponymous first book, Jay gave equally high praise to one of Nigel's earliest books, Real Fast Food from 1992. He admired not just the simplicity and unfussiness of the book's recipes, which seem to just work with the minimum of time and effort, but the words too, sharing "the joy of eating and living well" and making you feel as if Nigel is there speaking directly to you. It's a sentiment I share, and while his more recent books are the ones I have tended to turn to of late, this article prompted me to bring down my copy from the shelf and flick through the pages again for inspiration and remind myself of what I'd tried before.

Have a souper Christmas with Heinz

I was doing so well last year, wasn't I? 20 blogposts in 2020 (even if the last few were a bit rushed in the dying days and hours). This year: less success. Or rather, no success. A downright failure really. I have had various posts half-written for months, but somehow I just haven't got round to finishing them. I am determined to pull my finger out and do so before the end of the year though, and get a few unfinished posts up, and maybe a few additional shorter ones too. But seeing as it's 1st December, we might as well cut to the chase and talk Christmas right away.

It's the time of year when food brands bring out their festive editions in an attempt to boost sales, whether that be simply a change in packaging to include a snowman or reindeer, the addition of some Christmassy flavours or colours to an existing product, or something entirely new. Heinz have this year managed to create a social media sensation by releasing an incredibly limited edition new product to its Big Soup range: Christmas Dinner. In soup form.

Let it snow (crab), let it snow (crab), let it SPAM

 A final, very quick post for 2020 here - one of my frequent trawls of the supermarket shelves recently revealed that despite its reputation for being the upmarket choice for your grocery shop, Waitrose really does cater to all tastes and budgets when it comes to tins. 

On the top shelf in the tinned aisle, you'll find petite cans of Atlantic Snow Crab, which works out at £10.45 per 100g, and a King Crab and Atlantic Snow Crab mix for a staggering £15.50.

Culture Canned by Lockdown: SPAM, Beans and Soup

While 2020 has been a fairly terrible year, we must look for the positives.

None of us were able to travel very far this year, but thankfully I hadn't made any travel plans in the first two months of 2020, so didn't have to make any disappointing cancellations on that front. I didn't venture any further than the Sussex coast for a few days' cycling in August, but that was very enjoyable in its own way. Last year, I made it as far as Lake Superior (not by bike, obviously), to visit a friend I hadn't seen for a decade, on the northernmost part of border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. If Covid had happened last year, I would have had to cancel that, which would have been downright depressing.

Despite being in Minnesota, I didn't make it to what must surely be one of that state's best loved attractions - the SPAM Museum in Austin. Yes, that's right - an entire museum devoted to SPAM. Austin is in the very south of the state, and as I quickly discovered, distances on maps of the US can be quite deceptive. It's a big old place (Lake Superior alone is a similar size to Austria), and hence just 'nipping down' to Austin and back for the day to look at some tins of SPAM really wasn't feasible. But having had such a brilliant time anyway, I wasn't fussed at all.

More Spiced and Tinned Treats from a Tier 4 Christmas

Spiced fruit like the plums in the previous post can, of course, by enjoyed at any time of the year, but it definitely has a particularly Christmas feel about it. And it doesn't have to be a solely sweet thing - they can be a fine addition to savoury courses too. In the last few days before Christmas, one of the featured recipes on Nigella Lawson's website was her Spiced Peaches - in which she specifically calls for tinned peaches to be used, not fresh, and in syrup rather than the healthier option of those in juice. And what Nigella says must be obeyed.

As with the spiced plums, the recipe could hardly be simpler - tip a can of peach halves into a saucepan with a tablespoon of vinegar, a cinnamon stick, sliced fresh ginger, cloves, peppercorns and dried chilli flakes. Bring to the boil, then turn off and leave to cool. And that's it. They'll keep for a week or so if refrigerated. I only had tinned peach slices in juice in my stash, but did still have most of the tin of apricots in syrup that I'd opened for those meringues in my last post but one, so I reckoned they'd do. Pears would probably be quite nice too.