My salad days are definitely over

I found this rather splendid picture on the old t'interweb a few weeks back, and felt the need to share it. Donald Trump's face, hewn from SPAM, like a meaty Mount Rushmore. It's vastly better than the lame portrait of the great orange one that I made from SPAM last year, just prior to the presidential elections, but it reminded me that I had intended to revisit my creation at some point, or at least the SPAM Family Cookbook from which the recipe came, which I had purchased on eBay.


The booklet is packed full of all sorts of weird and wonderful recipes, all involving SPAM in some way or another, including a SPAM risotto, Chilli Con SPAM, "Devilled Nuts and SPAM", SPAM en Vin, Gazpacho (with fried SPAM cubes on top), SPAM en croute and Glazed SPAM Loaf (as illustrated on the front and back covers, both of which look like alien lifeforms of some kind) and for the kids, the "SPAM Special", which is "an old-time Wild West puffer train" fashioned from several tins of SPAM and a few tomatoes. No childrens' party would be complete without one.

While SPAM is very much the star of the show, many of the recipes also feature tinned vegetables, for which they always recommend the Newforge brand, as it was Newforge Foods who were awarded the licence to produce SPAM in the UK after the Second World War. The one that really caught my eye though was the sole recipe that featured Newforge's tinned fruit, but still keeping the SPAM element too - the incredible sounding "Savoury Fruit Salad" from the "Salad meals for the Family" section. Clearly this had to be tried.

The recipe was a fairly simple assembly job - a tin of SPAM, chopped into cubes; 5 small tomatoes, skinned and quartered; a cucumber, peeled and thickly sliced; and then the fruit element: a tin of Newforge Fruit Salad, and another of their prunes in syrup. All of this was to be dressed with a simple vinaigrette, with the addition of a teaspoon of garlic salt ("or a little more if liked").

My tin of pitted prunes were in juice rather than syrup, though in fact had imparted so much of their sticky pruniness to the canning liquor that it had practically become a dark, thinnish syrup anyway. I should imagine prunes canned in syrup would therefore be excessively sweet. Instead of fruit salad, I had a tin of Sainsbury's fruit cocktail, which I guessed was pretty much the same thing. I hadn't had tinned fruit cocktail in years - it used to be a mainstay of the canteen at my primary school, for some reason always served up alongside thick slices of Arctic Roll, with the juice from the fruit turning the layer of sponge unpleasantly soggy, and the ice cream starting to melt into the juice, leaving a fruity-dairy liquid at the bottom of the bowl.

A very good friend of mine has much more traumatic childhood memories of fruit cocktail though, having been forced to eat a bowl of the stuff after a so-called friend had spat in it. I fear this savoury fruit salad recipe is unlikely to alter her hatred of the stuff brought about by this experience.

No sign of any elusive cherries when first opening the tin

Save for the arctic roll, the fruit cocktail was exactly as I remembered it - the grainy-looking pear pieces; the soft but overly sweet cubes of peach; the tough, pale niblets of pineapple; the slightly shrivelled grapes. Listed last in the ingredients of course are the cherries, so elusive in their number amidst all the other fruit that in my childhood they seemed like the most prized part of all. Learning now that their vibrant red colour is due to added erythrosine  (also known as Red No.3, E127 or C₂₀H₆I₄Na₂O₅), I suddenly feel a little less keen on them.

Back to the salad: fruits and SPAM were combined with their dressing of oil, vinegar and a little garlic crushed with salt (as I didn't have any actual garlic salt). "Stand in the refrigerator for at least an hour to allow juices to run", the recipe went on. I emerged an hour later, thoroughly cold through and without any noticeable difference in my juices - then realised it had meant the salad, not me. Boom, boom!

"This forms a very liquid salad that makes an excellent first course". Hmmm...not sure "very liquid salad" and "excellent" are words I would generally put together. Unless a G&T with a slice of cucumber counts as a salad. The recipe certainly wasn't wrong about the liquid - with the vinaigrette, the juice from the tins, and the extra imparted by the tomatoes and cucumber, everything was swimming in the stuff. "Serve with crusty bread to soak up the delicious dressing," advised the recipe.

Peach, prune, SPAM, cucumber and cherry on bread

Again, I'm going to have to disagree here. A garlicky vinaigrette mixed with pruney-grapey fruit juice that has had green pepper, cucumber, tomato and SPAM steeping in it for an hour is not delicious. It's actually pretty unpleasant. And while I'm aware that fruit and meat can sometimes work together in a dish (think Moroccan tagines with dried apricots and so on), SPAM, fruit cocktail and prunes really don't complement each other at all well. The sweetness of the fruits overpowers, making this not so much a savoury salad with some fruit in it, but more a fruit salad with a bit of meat and greenery thrown in - a pudding dumped onto the same plate as a half-eaten main course. Needless to say, the pepper, tomatoes and cucumber do not benefit from an hour sat in the fridge in a bowl of sweet, sticky liquid.

I had reduced the quantities of the recipe by two-thirds, but that still gave me enough salad for 2 to 3 portions, and I had struggled to finish just one. Not liking to waste food though, I put the leftovers back in the fridge to see how it would fare the next day. Would it improve overnight?

No. It did not improve overnight. A night in tupperware in the fridge had lowered the salad to whole new depths of horrificness. Something had occurred during that night, with the effect that the copious amounts of liquid had congealed, forming a prison of jelly around the chunks of food, holding them in place even when I held the pot on its side. I suspect it was fat or gelatine from the SPAM having leached out into the juice, but I don't know for certain; I'm not sure I want to know either. But a solid mass of jellied fruit, salad stuff and SPAM on your plate definitely does not make for "an excellent first course". Or an excellent main course. Or an excellent dessert, for that matter. I ate what I could manage, which was not very much at all - the flavour of the garlic seemed to have intensified overnight too - and I'm afraid I had to confine the rest to the bin.

Some of the remaining SPAM and fruit that hadn't been saladified (and then solidified) were later used, as mentioned before, to make Trump's horrendous orange face with the addition of some tinned spaghetti. The inside cover of the SPAM Family Cookbook (could they not have just called it the SPAMily Cookbook?) had an advertisement for a tin "SPAM Spread" - a product which does still exist in the USA, but is no longer made over here. So I had a go at making my own with the last of the SPAM, whizzing up a couple of chunks in my mini-chopper and then mixing in a dollop of spicy Sriracha Mayonnaise to give a spreadable consistency. This was a vastly better use of the SPAM than the salad, with the spicy mayo proving to be a much better bedfellow for the meat than the fruit had been.

As for the rest of the fruit cocktail, while I was tempted to go literally old-school and eat it with some arctic roll, instead I moved away from the desserts of my childhood and went for something a little more adult. The remaining fruit and juice were whizzed up together (having thoroughly cleaned the mini-chopper after making the SPAM spread), mixed with some fizzy tropical fruit drink, a slug of Malibu (which, err, someone must have left in my cupboard...certainly didn't ever buy it myself...) and garnished with a piece of each of the fruits on a cocktail stick to give...a Fruit Cocktail Cocktail, of course! A little too sweet for my liking, but still a lot more agreeable than that salad.

Apparently the term "fruit cocktail" would originally have been applied (in the States at least) to a dessert laced with whatever alcohol was to hand or left to spare. Come the time of prohibition over there, the booze element was forgotten about, but firms such as Del Monte kept the name going with their canned mixtures of fruit in juice or syrup. Quite often this was a way to use up slightly bruised and otherwise unsaleable fruit, and was typically a mixture of pear, peach, pineapple, grape and cherry, as we still know and love today (well, some of us).

My tin of Sainsbury's fruit cocktail says the fruit appears in "varying proportions", but it seems such a relaxed attitude to the make-up of fruit cocktail is not acceptable in the US - there are, amazingly, very strict guidlines on the minimum and maximum proportions of each fruit, the size of the chunks, the quality and so on. I won't go into detail now - for that, you can access the USDA document yourself here, and digest it all at your own leisure, should you wish.