On the first day of Christmas I made this for me din'...

...a Partridge in a Pear Tin.


Merry Christmas!


from


The Tin Cannoisseur

More sweet potato? No thanks...

Another All-American acquisition of mine recently was this tin of Princella Cut Sweet Potatoes, or Yams as they are also known on that side of the pond (over here the term "yam" tends to refer to the massive log-like vegetables you see stacked up outside African food shops).

Princella claim to be "America's Leading Sweet Potato" - though the accolade of "America's Favorite Yam" apparently belongs to a rival company called Bruce's Yams (so they say on their website, anyway, the brilliantly-named YamRight.com). Both companies will no doubt have been selling plenty of their products of late though, as sweet potatoes also form an important part of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, whether that be on their own as a side vegetable, made into a sweet potato pie, or most commonly topped with marshmallows and baked in the oven, to be served alongside the turkey itself. As a Brit, for whom cranberry or apple sauce is about the sweetest thing we ever have to accompany a roast, this took some getting used to the first time I experienced a Thanksgiving dinner.

Give thanks to the pumpkin

Once again I find myself catching up on the blog after a hectic period at work and then a couple of weeks away, so I didn't have time back at the end of November to write up my Thanksgiving exploits.

Not that I was actually celebrating the occasion in any real way - being British born and bred, Thanksgiving obviously doesn't really feature on my radar at all, and I have only ever experienced the traditional dinner once, in Austria of all places, where I was working on a teaching programme which also had lots of American participants, who very kindly invited me to join in with their celebrations.

There does however seem to have been an increased interest here in Britain in the kind of dishes served up on the other side of the pond for Thanksgiving - not least the ubiquitous pumpkin pie. So much so in fact, it's now quite easy to find the ready-prepared, canned version of the dessert's most important ingredient - pumpkin puree - in supermarkets over here.

It's still not cheap though, with a tin of Libby's 100% Pumpkin generally setting you back around £2. I was delighted therefore to have spotted a heavily-dented can a few months back, reduced to a truly bargainous 20p. I couldn't say no.

Not entirely sure what this meanz...

Spotted in my local Co-Op yesterday morning - a somewhat unusual piece of 'on-shelf marketing', as I believe it is called, presumably to try to shift a few tins of beans:

I know we're considered to be a nation of bean lovers - but not that much, surely? Very weird.

Unless the Co-Op are trying to get people raising money for charity by suggesting that they lie in baths filled with baked beans? In which case good on them, but they should probably start selling catering-size tins, as the few standard ones seen here would barely fill a sink, let alone a bath.

Tweets Instead of Telegrams for a Sort-of-Centenary

A quick return here to Marguerite Patten's 500 Recipes:Canned and Frozen Foods, the day after what would have been her 100th birthday. The occasion was being marked yesterday by the Guild of Food Writers, inviting readers, cooks and bloggers to take part in a cookalong of sorts, preparing and eating some of her recipes and sharing the results on Twitter with the #Marguerite100 hashtag, which would either have amused or confused her - possibly both. I was a little late to the party with this offering, but thought it was still worth posting nonetheless.

I'd had a tin of raspberries in my stash for a very long time, but had yet to find anything I particularly wanted to do with them. With its recipes listed by tinned ingredient however, Marguerite's book made it easy to find some ideas to inspire.

I decided to go for her Raspberry Cream recipe, which seemed like a fairly quick and easy option, and unlike her scotch eggs that I made previosuly, sounded fairly virtuous too. And more to the point, I had all the ingredients to hand.

But first, the raspberries themselves. Marguerite notes that "canned raspberries are rather soft, so are not really good for decorating cakes and pastries. The flavour, however is extremely good." She's certainly not wrong on the first two fronts - mine prove to be soft almost to the point of falling apart, and while they do still resemble raspberries, I doubt you would get very far on the Great British Bake-Off by crowning your Showstopper with these.

How to avoid being poisoned in prison

The news last week that South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius is being released from jail in Pretoria on parole - just 10 months after shooting his girlfriend dead - comes as little surprise given the way the entire saga has been treated by both the courts and the media, with the concept of justice being somewhat severely strained or skewed in the process.

It also has nothing to do with the subject matter of this blog - except, however, that when reading the news online, my attention was drawn to an earlier story in the Related Articles section, with the headline: "Oscar Pistorius living on tinned food after prison poisoning threats".

I hadn't heard about this when it was reported back in March, but allegedly Pistorius had become so worried about threats from inmates that he had taken to eating only tins of 'chakalaka' from the prison tuck shop to avoid the risk of anyone poisoning his food, a diet causing such considerable weight-loss that his prosthetic legs no longer fitted him properly.

For those unfamiliar with the stuff, the article mentions that chakalaka is "a spicy South African vegetable stew", but offers little more information than that. I however had not only heard of but actually already tried it, having found a tin in the reduced section during a relatively recent visit to a South African food shop near Charing Cross Station. The tin was being sold off alongside a number of other items that had already passed their Best Before dates; I'm not entirely sure if shops are allowed to do that, but never mind. Let's just hope they don't kill anyone. Oops, bad choice of phrase...

The tin I purchased was made by a company called Koo, whose motto or slogan is "It's the best you can do". To my ears this is a rather odd phrase; I suspect they mean something along the lines of the tagline for Gilette razors ("the best a man can get"), but I can't help think of someone complaining "Is that the best you can do?", which doesn't fill me with much confidence in the product. Still, it probably is the best that Pistorius can do food-wise, given his current circumstances.

Tins on Display

While you won't find any tins in Tate Modern's The World Goes Pop exhibition, elsewhere in museums across the capital there are plenty of tinned goodies on display.

At the Science Museum, a brilliant new exhibition has recently opened entitled Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, which tells the fascinating story of the Russian space programme, from the surprisingly prescient predictions of pre-revolution thinkers, via the first satellite, dog, man and woman in space, through to the Mir and International Space Stations towards and after the end of the USSR.

It's well worth a visit, not least as one of the items on display is a 'dining table' from the Mir space station, complete with compartments for various tinned foodstuffs including caviar (who said space travel isn't glamorous?), cheese, chicken in white sauce, and liver stroganoff (hmm...maybe it's not glamorous after all). The table also has a built in vacuum system to suck up food debris, although quite how you open tins or any other kind of food packet in space without at least some of the contents going everywhere I have no idea.

Pop goes the Easel

As if following on from my post earlier this month which featured a Pop-art inspired artwork seen in Birmingham, this was the front cover of last week's edition of Time Out:

The reason they've chosen that particular image for this edition, with its special features on London's art scene, is no doubt due to the opening of a major new exhibition at Tate Modern entitled The World Goes Pop. It's a bit of a misnomer on Time Out's part though, as the show itself doesn't actually feature Warhol's familiar soup cans at all, with Tate's marketing bumpf quick to stress that "This is pop art, but not as you know it". While famous images like these, the Marilyn and Elvis prints and Roy Liechtenstein's comic strip-style paintings have come to symbolise Pop Art in general, the exhibition sets out to show how the movement was much wider-reaching and influential than this - "never just a celebration of western consumer culture, but...often a subversive international language of protest – a language that is more relevant today than ever."

And the Canned Food Capital of the UK is...

In a hugely exciting post on their website, Facebook and Twitter pages, Canned Food UK, the not-for-profit organisation that promotes the use of canned foods, have announced that Birmingham is the "Canned Food Capital" of the nation.

The revelation is based on the results of a survey they carried out themselves, which suggested that between them, the people of Brum consume 640,000 cans of food each day (or 265,000kg - the equivalent of 21 double decker buses), more than any other city in the UK. With a little over a million inhabitants, that's pretty good going. Canned Food UK are, however, based in Birmingham themselves, which does make you wonder quite how far their survey extended.

Putting the "Urghh" in Burger

It was National Burger Day this Thursday just gone. Did you know? Do you care? Probably not. Every pub and restaurant under the sun seemed to be tweeting about it to get the punters in, but prior to that the only reason I'd heard about it is that it was organised, and promoted ad nauseum, by Mr Hyde, one of the many email newsletters I find in my inbox on a daily basis. It is effectively an online spin-off of the men's lifestyle magazine Shortlist, though most of its content seems to be reviews of places to eat and drink in London, generally fairly biased in favour of anywhere that serves up huge slabs of meat, alongside plenty of craft beer with which to wash it all down.

There's certainly no shortage of places for them to review, with the explosion of places serving up American-style pulled pork, ribs, hot dogs and burgers over the last few years. The latter in particular is nothing new to British high streets of course, but it is only recently that the so-called 'gourmet' burger joints have started appearing everywhere, focusing on high quality ingredients for maximum flavour. Such places certainly aren't suggesting that these are healthier options though - in fact some places play on that by marketing their products as somewhat of a guilty pleasure. The Dirty Burger chain is a prime example, with their menus asking "How dirty will you go?" - i.e. how much extra cheese, bacon and so on do you want to add to their already calorie-laden eponymous burger.

So in their case, "dirty burger" means something naughty but nice - so bad, it's really, really good. But the term could just as well mean a burger that's so bad, it's just bad - and for that, it's time to crack open a tin.

Yes, tinned burgers in gravy, made by a company called Goblin. I found this on the shelves of a branch of Morrisons during a rare visit a few months back. I have to admit to being slightly disappointed that they've called them hamburgers, rather than just burgers, as otherwise they would be "Goblin burgers", suggesting they were made from the minced meat of some kind of grotesque malevolent dwarf-like creature. Maybe the Goblin company wanted to avoid that potential confusion.

I couldn't help but be reminded of the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (although that concerns a market run by goblins, rather than one selling its meat). I wrote an essay about it at university, looking at its presentation of women in the Victorian age. It was, by quite some way, the worst essay I wrote during my time as a student. Apologies - that was a bit of a random sidetrack. But would the burgers be any better than my essay? It seemed unlikely. They didn't sound all that appetising to begin with - and then I looked at the list of ingredients:

A deep-fried "treat", in honour of Marguerite

Mentioning the 1940s-themed bar Cahoots in my last post reminded me, sadly, of the passing a couple of months ago of the great doyenne of thrifty wartime cooking, Marguerite Patten, at the ripe old age of 99.

After a brief stint as an actress and then a demonstrator for the Frigidaire company, Marguerite came to public attention during World War II working for the Ministry of Food, suggesting recipes that made the most of rationed foods and broadcasting these and other tips and essential skills on the BBC radio programme Kitchen Front. After the war she started to appear on television cookery programmes, but remained adamant that she was not a celebrity chef, saying "To the day I die, I'll be a home economist" in a 2011 interview. She had a staggering 170 cookery books to her name, including the 1960 glossy bestseller Everyday Cookbook in Colour, which was hugely influential at a time when most cookery were printed in black and white without any pictures at all.

Alternative uses for tins no.4

While the tinned 'cocktails' I've tried so far (Bloody Mary beans, and the Pina Colada pineapple chunks of my previous post) have been somewhat lacking in their alcoholic content, that's not to say that you can't have a proper drink in a tin, should you wish to. There seems to be an growing trend in bars for using actual empty tins instead of glasses for their cocktails - here are two such examples I have tried recently:

"If you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain..."

...then you might have been disappointed by the sunny weather last Friday (10th July), but excited to have known that it was in fact National Piña Colada Day. I'm sorry not to have mentioned this important occasion in the drinks calendar in advance. While it might sound like this has been concocted purely as a marketing ploy, the piña colada is genuinely the 'national drink' of Puerto Rico, and is celebrated as such there annually on the 10th.

Elsewhere in the world though the celebrations are somewhat more commercial; had I told you about it in time, you too could have had a free Piña Colada last week - courtesy of Malibu, if you'd signed up on their pinacoladaday.co.uk website for a downloadable voucher, and joined their email mailing list. My apologies, I'm sure you're devastated to have missed out on enjoying and honouring this most sophisticated of cocktails, served up in a Malibu-branded faux-coconut cup.

But don't worry - you don't have to wait until next July to celebrate this most noble of drinks, or give away all your personal details to do so either. How so? Well, not all that long after buying the tin of bloody mary beans that featured in a previous post, I spotted this interesting-sounding tin of "Pina Colada" pineapple on the shelves of the canned fruit aisle. Was this part of a growing trend of tinned goods inspired by cocktails with an incredibly small amount of alcohol in them?

Kate & Wills & George &...

The weeks seem to be absolutely flying by at the moment - I couldn't quite believe there had been a gap of over a month between the last two posts I wrote, which really is terrible. And it's more than two months since I posted about the birth of the royal baby, whose name was later announced as Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, and was christened as such this Sunday just gone. What better excuse therefore to have a go at making that classic dessert, the charlotte.

While there are some quite fancy and fiddly versions of the dessert, such as the charlotte russe (with a Bavarian cream centre encased in sponge fingers), and the charlotte royale (which uses swiss roll instead and as you can see above, ends up looking weirdly brain-like), in its simplest form, a charlotte is made by lining a pudding basin or mould of some kind with bread, adding a filling of fruit and baking it in the oven. A Google search for recipes suggests that apple is the most common filling, but pretty much anything goes really, though I feel that berries, cherries and the like would take this a little too close to Summer Pudding, which is chilled rather than baked. I saw a couple of recipes for a pear charlotte, which as I happened to have a small tin of pear halves in my stash, seemed the perfect option.

Kate & Sidney

Even though it was one of their tinned pies that caused my old tin opener to give up the ghost, I don't hold a grudge against Fray Bentos. When I spotted one of the company's other products - a tinned steak and kidney pudding - on a special "Reduced to Clear" promotion in Tesco a while back, I was more than happy therefore to let bygones be bygones and give it a try.

There didn't seem to be any particular reason for it being reduced, as it was still well within its best before date. Not long afterwards though, I noticed that it had been replaced on the shelves by some steak and kidney puddings of a similar shape - but not in tins. Fray Bentos had relaunched the product in new, plastic packaging. Tesco had obviously reduced the price to get rid of the old stock, so thank goodness I bought the tin when I spotted it, otherwise I would have missed out completely. I don't care if the change means it's now suitable for microwave heating; a plastic-entombed pudding has no place on this blog, thank you very much.

This is a partly political blogpost...

Thinking it best to try to avoid politics on this blog, I hadn't intended to do a General Election-themed post. Well, I say that - I had considered trying a tin of "UKIPpers", but that seemed too spurious a link even by my standards, not to mention a woefully bad pun). I changed my mind however when I saw this article on the Guardian website on polling day, which suggests what each of the main party leaders might 'taste' like. If that sounds a little strange, it is - the article concerns a rare neurological condition known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, which causes people to be able to taste or smell words or sounds. One such synaesthete is James Wannerton from Blackpool, who for this article teamed up with artist Sam Cornwell to produce a series of photographs depicting the foods (and other substances) he claims to taste when he hears the names of the politicians.

To James, the very name 'David Cameron' creates the sensation, for some reason, of eating hard toffee, macaroons, cloth and blue ink; Ed Miliband tastes like vinegary chips, a school eraser and pine nuts; Nick Clegg like pickled onions, elastic bands, a meatless leg of lamb and a dribble of yoghurt; and Nigel Farage is an even more curious-sounding combination of rich fruit cake, the inside of a frankfurter sausage, fried onions, a few peas, a wet tweed jacket sleeve and a dollop of semolina.

The Royal (Name) Game

I awoke this morning to the news that HRH Duchess of Cambridge - Kate Middleton to the common man - had been admitted to hospital in the early stages of labour for royal sprog number two, and it was later announced that she had given birth to a girl, the first Princess of Cambridge to be born for 180 years, apparently. Hardcore royal fans had already been waiting outside the hospital for weeks, presumably as they have little better to do except wear red-white-and-blue and wave flags, but speculation as to the gender and name of the new baby had been rife for even longer. For those wishing to play the royal name game, the bookies are possibly still taking bets, though no doubt the odds for the favourite girls' names Alice, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Victoria will have been slashed now we know the baby's gender. Those punters who'd banked on a James, Arthur or Alexander will be sorely disappointed. Personally I was hoping for something a little more unusual for George's new sibling, such as "The Dragon" or "Townhouse" (think about it), but never mind.

Anyway, all this is of course just a very convoluted way of introducing another tin I tried recently - Baxter's Royal Game soup from their "Favourites" range. The game in question here is venison and pheasant, illustrated in part with a deer on the label, which reminded me of that scene in The Queen when Helen Mirren spots a stag when her Land Rover breaks down while out on the Balmoral estate. But Baxters have better reason for calling the soup "Royal" than just that, as they are in fact royal warrant holders ("By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen - Purveyors of Scottish Specialities"). I've never known whether holding a royal warranty means the companies do actually provide a supply of their products for the family, or whether it's just a ceremonial title. If they don't, Her Maj may be interested to know that Baxter's Soups are currently on offer at Sainsburys at 4 for £3 (I don't know how many tins of soup she gets through in a year, but at that price it might be worth stocking up).

More bloody beans

In addition to the Smoky Bacon Beans I featured in my last post, another of the flavours of beans that Tesco brought out around the same time as Heinz's range were these extraordinary-sounding Bloody Mary Beans.

Eats and cheats in the smokin' seventies

Sorry to bore on about Back in Time for Dinner, but it really is one of the best programmes that has been on television recently, and just seems to get more and more interesting by the episode. The third episode in the series brought the Robshaw family forward to the 1970s, a decade which saw huge changes in the way people shopped, cooked and ate, particularly with the increasing availability of frozen foods and home freezers, and the arrival of all manner of convenience foods to supermarket shelves, such as boil in the bag fish suppers, arctic roll and, of course, the Pot Noodle. 

Rochelle with a very 70s celery jug with a face on it.
We used to have exactly the same one at home.

Having taken on a part-time job like many women at the time did, mum Rochelle found herself freed from the shackles of the kitchen for the first time in their time-travelling experiment - albeit to a minor extent. It was still widely expected at the time that women would come home from work, put a meal on the table, and run the household, creating an increasing feeling of pressure to be able to be a Wonderwoman and do everything. So it seemed like a godsend when, in the early seventies, along came Delia Smith telling women that it was ok to cut corners sometimes. Her book “How to Cheat at Cooking” provided a range of recipes which made use of many of the new ready-made convenience foods on the market to cut down on preparation and cooking times, while fooling dinner guests into thinking that their hosts had spent hours in the kitchen.

Alternative uses for tins no.3

Buy tin of beans
Eat beans
Remove label
Rinse out tin (if time permits)
Turn upside down and use as packaging for fancy expensive perfume

Ten years on, tins still causing trouble

Another brief post about Back in Time for Dinner on BBC2, which is proving to be fascinating and amusing in equal measure. The second episode saw the Robshaw family fast-forwarded through to the sixties, experiencing huge changes in what and how people ate as the decade progressed. But mum Rochelle was still struggling in the kitchen, with a can of corned beef proving a particular challenge. To be fair, they aren't the easiest of tins to get into, so it came as no surprise that Rochelle managed to snap off the key, but she also made incredibly hard work of using a butterfly-style opener on it instead, which replaced the more primitive-looking one from last week in her newly updated 1960s kitchen.

Time travelling tins and pongy pilchards

Last week saw the start of a new series on BBC Two called Back in Time for Dinner, in which an ordinary modern family embarked "on an extraordinary time-travelling adventure, to discover how a post-war revolution in what we eat has transformed the way we live", as presenter Giles Coren told us in the intro to the episode, uncharacteristically expletive-free for once. The Robshaw family spent a week 'living' in each decade from the fifties to the 'naughties', having to "shop, cook and eat their way through history" and experiencing "the culinary fads, fashions and gadgets of each age", with not just the kitchen but the entire ground floor of their house remodelled to reflect how a typical home would have looked in that decade.

The Robshaws in 1950s attire. Plus Mary Berry and cake, as is mandatory for all BBC food programmes

Because nothing says "I love you Mum" quite like tinned meat...

A nice bit of tongue-in-cheek seasonal marketing from SPAM, featured today on their official Facebook page:

Presumably it's SPAM Original that is the mother of all meats - so does that make the SPAM with Bacon, which I tried recently, its child? Who was the father - a tin of Bacon Grill? Perhaps some other product can lay claim to be The Daddy of Meats. Or maybe I'm thinking too much into this...

Welshman's Caviar

I've always felt a certain affinity for Wales, despite not having (to my knowledge) even the slightest hint of Welsh heritage in my family history whatsoever. We did however spend a few very enjoyable holidays in a cottage in North Wales many years ago, so perhaps that's it. Or the fact that my name's David. Or that I really like leeks. Whatever the reason, I had been keen to mark St. David's Day in some way last year, just as I had tried the tin of Irish stew for St. Patrick's Day, and several Scottish delicacies too, but at that time I had yet to find any tinned Welsh products with which to do so.

All the tins in China

In my last post I told you all about the tinned sandwich I had picked up in Helsinki back in the summer of 2013 - a very brief visit to the city, as it was in fact just a stop-off on a journey elsewhere. Not, as you might guess, to see the Northern Lights, or somewhere nearby in Scandinavia or the Baltic states, but rather to China, to visit a very dear friend and former flatmate of mine who was teaching English in the city of Xi'an at the time. Given that we've recently moved into the Chinese New Year of the Sheep, this seems like the ideal time to tell you about my trip there. Is it really a year since we welcomed in the Year of the Horse though? Time doesn't half gallop by, does it?

Can this tin opener Finnish the job?

My trusty tin opener had given me many years of service in its time, but as you may recall, it met its maker a few months back when the huge circumference of a tinned Fray Bentos pie proved too much for its ageing parts. Most tins these days have ring-pull lids, so my efforts for this blog have not been too hampered by its loss, but nevertheless the search for a replacement started soon afterwards.

Searching on eBay had me considering all sorts of devices, some as practical, long-term contenders, and others as more fun, whimsical purchases (isn't that what eBay is for, after all?). As a tin cannoisseur, I feel that having a collection of tin openers would be no bad thing. Falling rather more into the category of whimsy was this little number - "The '57' pocket can opener", produced "with the compliments of H.J.Heinz Co. Ltd." I'm not entirely sure when it dates from, but it proclaims itself to be "sturdy", "easy to use" and "perfect for picnics", which intrigued me greatly. What use would a tin opener ever have had at a picnic?

How to be an impoverished artist

Sit shivering in your cold, drafty studio
Buy tin of soup
Heat contents
Eat
Rinse out tin
Use as a pot to clean your brushes in

Channel your inner Andy Warhol (doesn't matter if it's a different brand of soup)
Paint some pictures
Sell one for more than it is actually worth, but still less than you would like to make ends meet
Repeat

 (picture taken at an 'Open Studios' event at Bow Road Studios, London E3)

Surely this should be in Tower Hamlets...?

A couple of weeks back it was reported on the excellent Londonist website that the City of London will soon be gaining another high-rise office block. This wouldn't be particularly news-worthy anywhere, let alone on this blog, were it not for the current fad for giving new London buildings a nickname based on their shape. We already have the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, and this new building will give us the "Can of Ham".

Although officially to be known as 60-70 St Mary Axe, the designs by Foggo Architects do indeed bear an uncanny (sorry) resemblance to a tin of ham standing on its end, which as Londonist points out is perhaps a little unfortunate given its proximity to the Bevis Marks Synagogue just across the street. But luckily the nearest tube station will be Aldgate - on the Hammersmith and City Line (sorry again).

New year, not-so-new tins

The trouble with tinned food is that it keeps for ages. That sounds ridiculous, I know - after all, that's the whole point of sealing food into sterilised metal cylinders: to stop it from going off. But it does mean that because you don't have to eat it straight away, it's very easy to forget about the tins you've bought, or not get round to using them. Particularly if you have an unusually large stash of them, as yours truly does.

When I see a new tinned product, I can't help but buy it, with the aim to try and blog about it as soon as I can. But that doesn't always happen. For example, some time ago now, Heinz launched a new range of flavoured baked beans (sorry - Beanz), which were on an introductory offer in most of the supermarkets for a while. I took this opportunity to buy a tin of each of the five different flavours, with the intention of writing a post about the new products when I'd tried them all.

Of course, time flew by, I'd only tried about three of them, and then Heinz went and brought out another new range of Beanz, completely putting me to shame on my tardiness. Likewise, I've bought tins that have sat on my shelf for so long that they've gone out of date, or are no longer sold at the supermarket where I bought them, or even have been discontinued by the manufacturers. And there are a whole load of other tins which I have tried, but not quite got round to writing a blogpost about yet.

So, one of my resolutions for 2015 was to pull my finger out with regards to the blog, updating it far more regularly, if necessary writing the posts as more concise reviews of tins rather than full 'stories' about them. I will be working through my stash, not leaving new tins languishing on my shelves for months, and actually getting round to writing about the ones I've already tried. To start things off in that vein, I now present to you the long-awaited - but no longer new - Heinz Flavoured Beanz family!

The Christmas Special: Part Three

But the meal wasn't over there. I may have been quite full by that point, but there's always room for pudding after a big Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, despite much searching online, it appears that you can't buy Christmas pudding in a tin anymore, although such things did exist, as this amazing Heinz advert from 1917 for tinned Fig and Plum Puddings (and mincemeat) shows. It doesn't hold back at all on its ringing endorsement of the product:

"There is a new dessert among the 57 varieties - Heinz Fig Pudding. It is a treat. Figs, of course, with spices and flavourings, cooked to bring out a taste that will make your mouth water. We cannot tell you how good it is. You must try it."

If only I could - sadly these products, and such emphatic recommendations in advertising, are now confined to history.

An even older tinned Christmas pudding actually still exists, having originally been sent to the Naval Brigade in the Boer War, but it was never opened, and now forms part of the collection at the Historic Dockyards in Portsmouth - this article tells the full story.

But I digress - I wouldn't be finishing my Christmas dinner with a tinned figgy pudding. What about a pudding of tinned figs though? In one of his earlier cookbooks, the great Nigel Slater includes a recipe for figues flambées using tinned figs, which he says "come from a tin relatively unscathed", but also suggests that you "try not to think of fresh figs when you eat them". I had seen tinned figs recently in Waitrose, and the flambé element of the recipe sounded suitably festive, so it seemed like the perfect end to my Christmas meal.

The Christmas Special: Part Two

GAME's 'Christmas Tinner' did get me thinking though - while it wasn't going to be possible for me to try a Christmas dinner all in one tin, what about a Christmas dinner made from tins? Each element of the meal could be a tinned product of some kind. I already had some of the necessary items in my stash of tins, and a quick trip to a couple of local supermarkets (plus a not-so-local shop selling imported American food products) provided the rest of the bill of fare. I should probably point out though that this was a pre-Christmas feast - I didn't attempt to force what follows onto my family on the day itself. That would certainly have made for a memorable Christmas, but for all the wrong reasons...

The Christmas Special: Part One

Near the start of the festive season last year (2013), it was brought to my attention that GAME, the largest high street and online computer games retailer in the UK, was selling an "all-day Christmas feast in a tin" in some of its stores, for gamers who couldn't bear to drag themselves away from their consoles to cook on Christmas Day.

GAME had commissioned design student Chris Godfrey to create the so-called "Christmas Tinner", consisting of nine layers including scrambled egg and bacon, two mince pies, a full roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings, and Christmas pudding at the bottom. Godfrey had previously produced a 12-course meal in a can, with layers including a selection of local cheeses with sourdough bread, halibut poached in truffle butter, and a rib eye steak.

GAME's statement about the Christmas Tinner claimed that:

"According to new research almost half (43 per cent) of the nation’s gamers plan to spend the majority of Christmas day playing on their new consoles and games. That’s why GAME has developed the Christmas Tinner, enabling gamers to get their teeth into GAME play all day without having to miss out on a mouthful of their favourite food or do the washing-up."

It all has more than a whiff of a marketing ploy about it to attract shoppers in the lead up to Christmas, though to be fair that's probably not as bad as the smell that would come from the tin itself. I have no interest in computer games whatsoever, but would of course have been more than willing - keen, even - to give the tin a try. Sadly though, it was only available in a small number of stores, and by the time I heard about it, it had completely sold out online too. I contacted GAME earlier this year to find out if they would be relaunching it for 2014, but alas they said they had no plans to do so. For a tin cannoisseur, such news was as upsetting as the ending of The Snowman.