Season's Greetings from The Tin Cannoisseur

...or "Alternative Uses for Tins No.5"

Thanks to DIY/craft website Practically Functional for the picture and idea

All best wishes for Christmas and the New Year!



Tinned Trump

There is a town in the south of England called Lewes, which every year on Bonfire Night burns an effigy of the least popular personality of the last 12 months. Previous victims in recent years (or maybe that's the wrong word, as generally they deserve it) have included Osama Bin Laden, Colonel Gaddafi, Bush and Blair, Cameron and Clegg, the Pope (perhaps unfair), Angela Merkel (definitely unfair) and Jimmy Savile (yep, fair enough).

This year, while a return for David Cameron would have been justified, and Nigel Farage must have been fairly high up on the list, clearly there was one candidate who was way ahead of the competition, who I doubt needs any introduction - one Donald J. Trump Esq.

While it was tempting to create an effigy of him to burn myself at home, sadly I have very limited outdoor space, so that would potentially have been somewhat dangerous.

Instead, I decided to create an image of Trump in the only way I saw fit - with tinned foods, based on an idea I had seen in a vintage SPAM cookbook that I'd bought off eBay for "Funny Faces", made out of the famous tinned luncheon meat to amuse the children.

Hoops

2016...it hasn't really been the best of years so far, has it? Two-thirds of the way through and already I'm not looking forward to the "Year in Review" articles in the papers and news bulletins when December draws to a close. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, Brexit and its aftermath, the inexplicable rise of Trump... If he makes it into the White House I think it will may be the worst year ever. Possibly.

On top of all that, it feels this year as if we have lost an inproportionate number of well-known faces from the entertainment world: Victoria Wood (as mentioned in a previous post), Prince, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, the legend of the airwaves that was Terry Wogan, and only this week the unforgettable Gene Wilder. One star whose passing fell more or less under the radar at the end of June, probably due to the blanket coverage of Brexit in the news at the time, was the writer and actress Caroline Aherne, at the age of just 52. 

Caroline rose to fame in the 90s through her appearances in sketches in The Fast Show - most memorably as the supermarket checkout girl who loves to comment on people's shopping, and the Spanish weather presenter for whom the sun is always shining and it's always "Scorchio!". Equally brilliant was her wonderfully tongue-in-cheek turn as a septuagenarian chat-show host in The Mrs Merton Show, who never shied away from firing the questions we all wanted asked to her celebrity guests - "So, Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?"

Campbell's launch new range of bouillabaisse, fish chowder and seafood bisque

Oh no, wait, it's just a marketing tie-in for Pixar's latest release Finding Dory. They're all just chicken broth with pasta shapes - no fish in them at all. Perhaps for the best - might have upset the kids otherwise.

The Last of the Leftovers (for now, at least...)

In my last post I wrote about the recipes I'd tried out in order to use up the remains of a tin of chestnut puree, including one with lentils in the ingredients list, giving me the opportunity to clear another space in my can cupboard, which is always good. The only trouble was that the recipe only required about half the tin of lentils, leaving me in much the same situation as before, searching for recipes again in order to find a use for the rest of those. Such are the trials of being a tin cannoisseur who can't bear to waste food.

The manufacturers of the lentils, Epicure, have been going since 1891 according to their website, "originally bringing food innovation to Britain by importing exotic canned fruits and vegetables previously unseen in this corner of the world". I like the cut of their jib. While their product range has grown to embrace all manner of products and types of packaging - tubes of anchovy paste,
jars of pickled walnuts, packets of marzipan - it still includes various types of tinned fruit and veg, as well as a wide range of canned of beans and pulses, both organic and non-organic. One kind I hadn't come across before was aduki beans, to which my immediate thought was "oh, like the highly-stylised form of classical Japanese theatre with dance and elaborate make-up", before remembering that's kabuki, not aduki. Noh link between the two whatsoever.

That old chestnut

While the chestnut hot cross buns I made at Easter had been an excellent opportunity to open the tin of chestnut puree I'd had lurking in my cupboard for a while, the recipe had unfortunately only required the use of about half of it. I kept coming across the Tupperware pot containing the rest of the stuff in my fridge, generally looking at the greyish brown mass and wondering what on earth it was, before remembering and telling myself that I really must think of a way of using it before it started to go off...and then forgetting about it all over again.

Thankfully, I did remember to find some ideas for it, ahead of the mould starting to grow. The Merchant Gourmet website, where I had found the bun recipe, had a wealth of other excellent chestnutty suggestions; I was quite drawn to the "No Meat Meatballs" - partly for the name, and partly as it called for green lentils in the recipe. Merchant Gourmet were suggesting a pouch of their own lentils, but it just so happened that I had a tin of organic green bijoux lentils in my stash, crying out to be used (which for once didn't mean rapidly approaching or past their best before date).

Only a few days before my recipe search, the world had received the very sad news of the far-too-early passing of the great Victoria Wood, whose sketches, stand-up and sitcoms I have loved since about the age of 10. One of my favourites, and hence one I'd had on my mind at the time, was the brilliant "Brontëburgers" monologue, in which she played a tour guide at the Brontë family parsonage in Howarth despite having never read any of the books ("I'm more of a Dick Francis nut"), ending with the classic lines "Snacks and light refreshments are available in the Heathcliff Nosher Bar, so do feel free to sample our popular Brontëburgers. Or for the fibre-conscious, our Branwell Brontëburgers".

For Willy, England and Saint George!

While the very subject matter of this blog means that my posts pay little attention to when food is in season, I do nonetheless quite like to link what I cook and write about to the time of year, and specific calendar events. So I have sampled tins to try out recipes for Christmas and Easter, hearty Scottish fare for Burns Night, and Welsh and Irish dishes for St David's and St. Patrick's Days. So, two weeks ago, I felt it was high time that merrie olde England had a look-in too, with some tins to celebrate St George's Day on 23rd April. Which it just so happened was also the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, hence the title of this post.

One possibility being offered by a bar in Stoke Newington was this "Full English" cocktail - a somewhat dubious-sounding spin on a bloody mary, with HP sauce, Marmite, bacon, toast and a quail's egg adding to the traditional vodka, tomato juice and Worcestershire sauce, all served in a baked bean tin. Alas, it was only available for a very limited time around the 23rd April, so I didn't get the chance to experience it for myself. Perhaps for the best - while this creation might be a low-sugar option compared to some cocktails, I think this benefit is probably cancelled out by the addition of salt, fat and cholesterol in the added elements.

The chicken tikka masala has reportedly been topping the polls of England's favourite favourite foods for over a decade now, but I felt something a little more traditional would be more appropriate. Few things could fit the bill more than a good old roast dinner, with roast beef feeling the most suitable - the French don't refer to the English as rosbifs for nothing, after all. I had just the tin for it too, with these Beef Slices in Gravy.

Deeply fascinatin'

Those of you with an interest in science and the natural world will have been enthralled this week by the footage beamed live from the bottom of the Mariana trench, which at 11km beneath the surface of the Pacific is the deepest point on Earth. That's nearly 3 times the average depth of the ocean, over 10 times deeper than sunlight can reach, and further below sea level than the summit of Mount Everest is above it. It's so hard to get to that very little is known about the region, so the images of the flora and fauna that somehow survive down there, including species never seen before, have stunned scientists just as much as the public, as their commentary on the footage reveals.

They also found this:

 

Proof, if ever it was needed, that whatever lengths, or depths, you go to, you can never completely get rid of SPAM these days.

The force is strong here...

...the maths, less so.

May the sauce be with you.

Chestnuts: not just for Christmas

Say the word "chestnuts" and, for many people, "roasting on an open fire" is probably the first thought that will come into their heads, evoking thoughts of winter nights, paper bags of the hot nuts bought from street vendors, and of course the traditional Christmas dinner, with chestnuts either in stuffings or tucked alongside the sprouts with crisp shards of bacon.

But why should we limit them just to the food of the festive season? While it's true that the nuts do come into season as the weather starts to get colder, surely there is a place for them on our tables at other times of year? It's easy enough to preserve them, after all, whether steeping them in sugar syrup to be consumed as the tooth-rottingly delicious treat that is marrons glacés, or simply pureeing them up and stucking them in a tin, as the gourmet merchants at Merchant Gourmet do.

You may recall that I tried their chestnut puree as part of my tin-based Christmas dinner in 2014, putting a layer of it in my turkey wellington, and mixing a dollop in with the tinned sprouts in an attempt to make them more palatable (it didn't). Apparently the company have now stopped selling it in tins, sadly switching to plastic pouches instead, which may be why, some time later, I came across a tin in the reduced section, even though it was still well in date. Having bought it but not got round to opening it at the end of last year, I started to look around for some less Christmassy uses for chestnuts. And lo and behold, if Merchant Gourmet's website didn't provide precisely that, with a recipe suitable for Easter - the world's second favourite Christian festival - Dulce de Leche and Chestnut Puree Hot Cross Buns.

Baxters Broth Brothers

Recovering recently from a bout of illness picked up on a trip to Cuba (I won't go into too much detail, but it was the Cuban equivalent of Delhi Belly, or as I dubbed it, 'Castroenteritis' ), I felt the need for some good hearty soups to restore me back to health. Of course something homemade will always be your best bet here, seemingly infusing the broth with additional healing properties, but when you're feeling a little under the weather, you don't always feel up to all that chopping of onions and veg, followed by a lengthy simmering, and then the blending - or if you do, you suddenly find that by the time you've finished, you're not that hungry after all.

So naturally I decided I would turn to the tins for comfort and sustenance, with Baxters seeming to me the next best thing to homemade, given that their messages from Audrey Baxter on the labels almost give the impression that they have been made by a real person. I happened to have two different tins in my stash - Highlanders Broth, and Scotch Broth - but which to go for? Which did I feel would do me the most good?

Shakespeare Tin Love

Occasionally in my blogposts I have moved away, briefly, from just sampling tinned foods and attempting to write vaguely amusing things about them, to tell you about some artist or other who has either used or been inspired by such items in their work, or even television programmes that happen to feature canned goods. Not quite sure why I do it, but it makes a change, at least.

I have yet to have reason though to write about anything concerning tinned food and the theatre, one of my other great passions. Until now, that is.

Recently I discovered that the Sheffield-based theatre company Forced Entertainment would, over the course of a week, be putting on their own take on the complete works of William Shakespeare at the Barbican Theatre, under the title Table Top Shakespeare. In essence it is a staging of the thirty-six plays from the First Folio (no Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is a shame as otherwise I could have called this blogpost 'The Tuna-ble Tinsmen and other stories'), abridged to just an hour each, and presented without scenery, costumes, or huge casts, but instead on a table top, with one actor telling the story using a range of everyday household items as the characters.

The Barbican website describes it thus: "a salt and pepper pot for the king and queen. A spoon stands in for a servant and a candle for the Friar. Macbeth becomes a cheese grater, Pericles a light bulb and Hamlet’s now a bottle of ink."

© Hugo Glendinning

Treats from the decade that taste forgot

I have become quite a fan of '70s Dinner Party' of late, a Twitter feed (@70s_party) which "celebrates the good, the bad and the downright ugly of retro food", with photos and recipes taken largely from 1970s cookery books. It concentrates on the most unappetising, kitsch and "flamboyantly preposterous" examples - hence the most amusing ones - and I am delighted to say that tinned foods feature quite often in the ingredients.

I wish I had seen this particular example in advance of Shrove Tuesday last week - but pancakes need not (nay, should not) be confined to being eaten on just one day, so I may well give these a go at some point before next year. Fry a few slices of SPAM in a large pan, drop spoonfuls of ready-made batter over each one, flip over, et voila - SPAM cakes!

Apparently a new book based on the Twitter feed is in the offing, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the finished product!

A soup you'll be Lust(y)ing after all year...

I'm sure that by now most of you will be as bored of my witterings-on about Christmas leftovers  as you were of the remnants of the festive season themselves, after battling through them for what always seems like weeks on end, causing you to never want to see (or read about) turkey, chestnuts or any kind of dried fruit-based confection again for a very long time.

But for those who aren't...did you know you can prolong the leftovers 'experience', or have it again at any point you wish during the year, with a tin of Turkey, Ham and Cranberry Soup from the good people at John Lusty?

Leftovers? Just add custard and freeze, if you please

As mentioned in my last post, the standard Christmas over-catering back home meant that in addition to leftover goose fat, Christmas cake, turkey, ham, cheese, nuts, nibbles and even chocolate, I also had a large chunk of Christmas pudding in the food package I took home with me when returning to my place after the festive break. Tempting as it was to use it up with the goose-fat fried method, some time ago I'd seen a recipe making use of leftover pud that I was also keen to try. The source was greatlittleideas.com, a website of recipes all featuring one of the wide range of products manufactured by Premier Foods, from Angel Delight to Oxo.

The recipe I'd seen made use of Ambrosia custard - which of course, is available in tins - alongside Christmas pudding, not merely topping the latter with the former (how pedestrian; how vanilla!), but rather creating the far more original and intriguing-sounding "Christmas Pud Iced Logs".

All you need to do is break up a slab of pudding, add a couple of tablespoons of delightfully rich and creamy Ambrosia custard and a small quantity of brandy (which the recipe said was "optional" - an option I chose to go for), and then shape into a log, wrap in cling-film and pop in the freezer for at least four hours, before slicing it and serving with coffee.

No geese a-laying (but all sorts a-cooking in their fat)

When in January does it become too late to be wishing people a Happy New Year? A fortnight in? Three weeks? Burns Night? We've already gone past all those points, and February is nearly upon us, so I suppose it must now be time to go back to just a plain old hello. Seeing as this is my first post since December though, I'm going to do it anyway - happy new year to you all, and I hope 2016 is a good one for you.

It definitely feels too late to be talking about what you got up to over Christmas, as that feels like an eternity ago now, but sod it, I'm going to do that too, as otherwise my festive tinned shenanigans will go unwritten and unread for another eleven or so months, going against my aim to be more productive this year. Which I'm not doing too well on so far.

Avid readers of this blog (yes, both of you) may remember that last year I attempted a Christmas dinner made entirely from tinned goods, the elements of which ranged from the surprisingly delicious to the frankly revolting. Lingering somewhere in the bottom half of that scale were the somewhat disappointing roast potatoes, which some would say are the backbone of any half decent roast dinner, but my tinned new potatoes cooked in olive oil were far from that - pale, lacking any crispness, crunch or much flavour, they were nothing to write home about.

At home for Christmas this year, I had no inclination therefore to subject my family to anything similar for our big festive meal - but I did happen to have in my possession a tin of goose fat, which as everyone knows is the perfect cooking medium for creating a truly great roastie. I had only ever seen it sold in jars before - would the tinned version be as good?

On opening it up, it looked, well, much like the goose fat I'd bought in jars previously, in that it was whitish, slightly translucent, and rather gloopy. I had neglected the instructions on the tin to refrigerate for two hours before use, which presumably would have made it solid and hence eradicated the risk of dripping the stuff everywhere when spooning it out.