The Tin Cannoisseur. A blog. About food. In tins.
A final, very quick post for 2020 here - one of my frequent trawls of the supermarket shelves recently revealed that despite its reputation for being the upmarket choice for your grocery shop, Waitrose really does cater to all tastes and budgets when it comes to tins.
On the top shelf in the tinned aisle, you'll find petite cans of Atlantic Snow Crab, which works out at £10.45 per 100g, and a King Crab and Atlantic Snow Crab mix for a staggering £15.50.
As mentioned in my last post, I've spent a fair few hours and pounds trawling through the rabbit warren that is eBay, on the search for tin-related things - not just cookbooks and pamphlets, but all sorts of other random items which I really don't need, but being The Tin Cannoisseur, I feel compelled to buy. Hence the set of mugs bearing the label designs of Heinz' most popular tinned products (Tomato Soup, Spaghetti, Baked Beans), the Carnation Milk apron, and the Green Giant lapel pin. The Campbell's Soup facemask has at least proved a very useful purchase this year though.
Merry Christmas one and all!
Well, it's been a funny old year, hasn't it? Do you remember when we were being told things would be back to something like normal by Christmas? They said much the same about the First World War, too. Ah well, maybe next year. But let's not dwell on such matters.
As regular readers will know, as well as always keeping my eyes open for interesting tins, and constantly adding more to my kitchen cupboards (to the extent that the shelves are groaning under the weight) I have also amassed quite a collection of cookbooks and pamphlets focusing on tinned foods, largely found on eBay. Quite often these were originally produced as promotional items by the manufacturers of the foods themselves - there seem to have been a vast number over the years from the big players like Heinz and Campbells - but recently I have come across a number of publications, from the 1950s onwards, from an organisation called the Canned Foods Advisory Bureau (or CFAB, as I have dubbed it purely for the purposes of the title of this post), whose function seems to have been to promote the use of all kinds of tinned foods to the "modern housewife" (their terminology, not mine!) and show how much quicker and easier they make the daily challenge of putting something nutritious and appealing on the table. In that way it was very much a precursor of current organisations like Canned Food UK and Love Canned Food, and it may well also have been funded by manufacturers of either tinned foods or the tin cans themselves.
I couldn't let Christmas pass without sharing this fabulous Canned Food Advisory Bureau pamphlet from the 1950s or 60s (there's no date on it unfortunately), entitled "Christmas Fare".
Shortly after my last post, which featured fishcakes somewhat shoddily shaped as skulls, I came across the splendid blog Ghoul at Heart, which features an amazing collection of spooky-themed recipes, from a blogger who loves Halloween so much that she writes about it all year round. That might seem a little excessive, but when your creations are as good as these, why the hell not? I was particularly taken by her "Bread of the Dead" recipe, which is essentially just mushrooms on toast, but the mushrooms are individually carved into little skulls, and the bread is as dark as night, having had squid ink added to the dough. The skulls put my fishy attempts to complete and utter shame, though in my defence, they probably took rather longer to create. I felt I would just admire them rather than attempt to make them myself - but they did remind me that I had recently acquired a tin of Chinese straw mushrooms which were already fairly spooky-looking, without having had anything done to them.
Avast, ye land-lubbers! Don't be hangin' the jib there - let's splice the mainbrace! Fill yer cup with grog, and join me in a shanty, for this day be the finest day in all the year - arrrr, that's right, it be time for scurvy folk across all the seven seas to talk like a pirate once again!
Or at least it was, when I started work on this post on 19th September - International Talk Like A Pirate Day. But that's already a whole month ago, so the day is but a distant memory I'm afraid. But never ye mind - you can talk like a pirate on whatever day you want to really - and perhaps should be encouraged to, much in the same way that pancakes shouldn't be restricted just to Pancake Day - they're far too tasty for that. But it's nice to be reminded, and join with others to do so once a year, at the very least.
We can do better than just talk like pirates though - dressing and drinking like them are actively encouraged on 19th September too. If ever there was a time to get out the bandanas and stripy shirts from the back of the cupboard, and pour yourself a tot or two of rum, this is it. As for eating like pirates though, maybe not so much. In the golden age of piracy, at a time when preserving food for long voyages was largely limited to drying and salting, even your average sailor in the navy could expect little more than weeks and months of hard, dry ships' biscuits and heavily salted or dried beef, with the lack of vitamins making scurvy and poor health a constant worry. The food aboard a pirate ship could well have made that seem like luxury. Sticking to rum was probably wise.
While this was a time well before the development of canning, my pirate-themed meal was, naturally, tin-based - with this 'Pirat' brand tin of fish that I had found in a Polish supermarket a while ago. Speaking not a single word of Polish, I had no real idea of what I was buying - I couldn't even be 100% sure it was a tin of fish, though the flat shape, as well as its position alongside other more obviously fishy specimens on the supermarket shelf, suggested that was the case, and I was keen to give it a go whatever.
In one of the more random items of tinned food news in recent months, a couple of weeks back, Ivanka Trump posted a photo of herself on her various social media platforms, holding a tin of Goya brand black beans, with the caption "If it's Goya, it's got to be good" in both English and Spanish. It followed on from a tweet from the previous week by the Great Orange One himself, where he simply said "I LOVE @GoyaFoods!", and a subsequent post on Instagram, showing a picture of him in the Oval Office, giving a double-thumbs up to the array of products from the Hispanic-owned firm on the desk in front of him, including tins of beans and coconut milk.
It occurred to me shortly after making the Butter Beans with White Wine, Sage and and Garlic from Jessica Elliott Dennison's Tin Can Magic that I should really have made the alternative version she gives a recipe for (Butter Beans with Red Wine and Fennel) at the same time, and tried them together to compare and contrast the two. Perhaps one day I will make a big batch of both when I have friends over for dinner, so I can ask "Red or white?" when it comes to serving up.
This reminded me though that I had done something similar a long time ago (in the very early days of this blog; yet another thing I never got round to writing about it) using tins of Homepride Cook-In Sauces. Well over five years must have passed now since I spotted these tins of Red Wine and White Wine & Cream sauces "reduced to clear" in my local supermarket. This seemed a little odd, as they were well within their best before dates, so I wondered if maybe they weren't selling very well and were being discontinued. Homepride make a whole range of ready-made sauces in jars, so perhaps those were just more popular among consumers - they're certainly a far more common sight on supermarket shelves. While we're used to buying tins of 'things in a sauce', be that beans, pasta or anything else, having a sauce on its own in a tin seems a bit strange, as if the main ingredient had been left out by mistake.
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