First tins first

A blog...about tinned food. As ideas I’ve had go, it’s one of the more unusual ones. I’m not entirely sure when I hit on the idea, or why. Though I would never say I was a particularly good cook, I have always enjoyed messing around in the kitchen ('mess' being very much appropriate word there) and trying out new recipes and ingredients. I find myself making a beeline for the food and drink section whenever I go into a bookshop; what little television I watch tends to be cookery programmes, and I would say a large proportion of the (by contrast) quite considerable time I spend procrastinating online is spent poring over food websites and blogs. Yet for most of these, the emphasis of the writers, presenters and chefs is on using the freshest, highest quality produce available, in season if possible, to create the tastiest possible dishes, all beautifully presented and photographed to show off food at its absolute best.

In other words, they tend not to feature ‘stuff in tins’ all that often. Admittedly, there are a small number of store-cupboard staples which are often called for in these recipes - the sort of thing that either tastes better than the produce available year-round in the supermarkets, is far more readily available than fresh, or simply is far more convenient as an ingredient - tinned tomatoes, coconut milk and pulses all being examples. But aside from such items there is a definite sniffiness about tins among the so-called ‘foodie’ circles. Tinned foods have come to have an association with the most basic, unimaginative cookery: the low quality, lazy option to be heated up and eaten by those who can’t cook, or don’t want to cook. Try suggesting that they are used for something a little more adventurous, and you face public mockery, as Delia Smith discovered to her cost when she tried to show us how to ‘cheat’ at cooking with tins of ready-cooked mince and similar products.

Or did the mockery just come from the press and the foodies? As for the general public, there can’t be many households who don’t have tins of some kind in their kitchen cupboards, and for good reason. I would argue that as you make your way home from work on a cold, dark winter’s night, there is little more comforting than the knowledge that you have a tin of beans in the cupboard, to provide a hearty and filling dinner in next to no time - apart from the eating itself.  But tins aren’t just convenient in that they give a quick and easy meal; the whole point of sealing food inside a metal can is to preserve it. So we can push them to the back of the cupboard and forget about them for months or even years, and they will still be ready to go and fine to eat. We can stock up on them without the worry of not being able to use them before the food goes bad. They may be the perfect food for the lazy cook, but so too are they for the busy one, who doesn’t always know what they will be doing from one evening to the next and hence how much fresh food to buy; the environmentally-friendly one who hates food waste; the economical one who likes to take advantage of the supermarkets’ special offers; and even the paranoid one, who thinks that nuclear or chemical war is just round the corner, so they’d better build up supplies now...

My own personal stash of tinned "goodies"

What is remarkable when you start to look into it though is the sheer range of foods you can get in tins. Think of tinned foods, and you naturally think of staples like beans, tomatoes, tuna, soup and so on – but start to take a closer look at your supermarket’s shelves and you will find more varieties of fruits, vegetables, fish and meat than you might ever have imagined came in tins, and plenty that make you wonder why on earth anyone bothers canning them (does anyone really buy tinned apples?) There are a huge range of tinned ready meals available, from those that sound quite appealing to the frankly revolting. And that’s just in your average Tesco or Sainsbury’s – start rooting around the shelves of international or speciality food shops, and you open the lid on a whole world of tinned surprises - some good, some...less so. I’m not saying it would be much fun to have to live off tinned food in the event of a nuclear holocaust, but were that ever to happen, we could be eating a far wider variety of foods than you might at first think.

On this blog I will be trying and reviewing some of the more weird and wonderful examples of tinned foods, to see whether I’ve been missing out on any hidden gems, or whether there are some that would be best left forgotten at the back of the kitchen cupboard. I will trawl recipes old and new to find different or interesting ways of using the more common store-cupboard essentials, and offer reviews of any new tinned products that hit the supermarket shelves. I will also look at what the rest of the world has to offer while on my travels, and perhaps even indulge in a little nostalgia by retrying some of the tinned foods I used to eat as a child, to see what memories they bring back.

For good measure, I will thrown in the odd tin-related article now and again, such as the history and manufacture of of tins, ideas of things to do with your used tins, the use of tins in the worlds of art and science (more common than you’d think) and plenty more. 

Just don’t expect the haute cuisine recipes and mouthwatering photos of your average ‘foodie’ blog - the offerings I’ll be serving up will probably look like they’ve been nearer a Michelin tyre than a Michelin star.