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.


In the museum's permanent galleries devoted to Space Exploration, you can see some other foodstuffs taken onboard missions, including tins of macaroni cheese, and the very non-descript sounding "biscuit". I have never come across tinned biscuits before, but surely they would be a crumb-creating nightmare in space? No idea what they would be like, but I have my doubts that they could look any more revolting than the sachets of chicken salad, tomato soup, "strawberry cereal cubes" and "seasoned scrambled eggs" in the same display, which are vaguely reminiscent of colostomy bags.

Over at the Imperial War Museum, their revamped First World War galleries opened last year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the start of the conflict, creating a far more interactive, accessible exhibition that will interest all ages of visitors. Artefacts on display that attempt to depict just how hard life in the trenches was include some typical rations of the time, such as tinned beef dripping, condensed milk, pork and beans, and the infamous Maconochie's stew. The latter was produced by an Aberdeen-based family canning company, who won a contract to supply tinned stew to the British Army for the Boer War, which was still in place at the outbreak of the Great War a decade later, allowing hundreds of thousands more soldiers to try its recipe of "finest beef" (as the label itself proclaims) in a thin stew with potatoes, haricot beans, carrots and onions.

 

Contemporary accounts were not particularly complimentary though, claiming that "Warmed in the tin, Machonochie's was edible. Cold, it was a man-killer". This was in part due to the large quantity of animal fat in the product ("an inferior grade of garbage"), which would congeal when cold. And with cooking facilities and fuel largely non-existent in the trenches, there was usually little choice but to have it cold. Its reputation for causing flatulence among the troops did little to endear it to them any further.

Also on display is an unopened tinned plum pudding (above), as issued to all soldiers as a Christmas gift in the earlier years of the war, and a tin of ox tongue, sent to prisoner of war Captain Jack Straw by his mother, which in fact contained maps, compasses and wire cutters to aid his escape from the Holzminden POW camp in Germany, though in fact the war ended before he had a chance to do so. Perhaps he didn't have a tin opener.


Further afield, on a recent trip back to Glasgow I paid a visit to the excellent Riverside Museum, which incorporates many of the exhibits from the city's old Transport Museum into new galleries that "detail Glasgow’s rich past, from its days as maritime powerhouse to a glimpse into daily Glasgow life in the early to mid 20th Century". One of the many vehicles on display is this three-wheeled 'Invacar' from the 1970s, known by many Scots a Wee Bluey.


These were essentially adapted motorcycles with a lightweight body, designed to be easily used by disabled people and allow them to get around independently - and in fact were even issued and maintained by the NHS until they were deemed to be too unsafe in 2003.


What does this have to do with tins? Well, apart from the fact that some people referred to them as 'sardine cans on wheels' due to their size and shape, apparently Wee Blueys were so unstable that to prevent them from toppling over when taking corners, owners were forced to keep heavy items in the boot to weigh them down, such as books or tins of food, as a photo on the information panel alongside the car shows.

I couldn't help but think of the Reliant Robin from those early episodes of Mr Bean, which frequently came a cropper as a result of the eponymous hero's driving. Perhaps the owner of the three-wheeler could have taken advice from a Wee Bluey user, and fought back against Bean with tins of, well...beans.

And back in London, those of you with tickets to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace this week (you lucky things) will be pleased to hear that alongside the plethora of trade stalls to visit, one of the exhibits on display will be, somewhat unexpectedly, a fishmongers stall - but one where every single item on the slab, from big flat flounders to incredibly intricate langoustines, has been hand-knitted by artist Kate Jenkins. Amazing!

She clearly has a thing for fish, as seen in many of her previous works, which will also be on sale at the show, including her range of genuine sardine, pilchard and other tins with her own knitted, sequinned fish peeping out of them. They're great fun and I must say I would quite like to have one myself, but at £250 a pop I don't think I will be able to put one up on my wall any time soon, sadly. I will just have to stick to the real thing for now - which, after far too much talk from me about tins in museums and galleries rather than in my kitchen, is probably no bad thing at all. My cupboards at home are starting to look like the display cabinets of a weird exhibition of tinned food, so I really do need to crack on with using some of them up!