Red or white?

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.

The tins were also quite unusual in that they were taller than your average can, containing 500 grams as opposed to the standard 400g. A reduced-price, unusual-sized tin with strange contents? Yes please. I bought one of each, and into my cupboard they went. Within the space of a few weeks all the remaining tins disappeared from the supermarket shelf - but then not long after that, I spotted that the tinned Homepride sauces had returned. But wait - they didn't look quite the same. They seemed smaller, somehow. I checked, and yes, the new ones were standard 400g tins. And guess what? The price was the same as the larger tins had been originally. A cheeky move on Homepride's part, it would seem, taking the same amount of money from customers, but giving them less sauce in return. Not cool. Surely Fred, Homepride's bowler-hatted gentleman mascot, wouldn't stand for such subterfuge? I can only presume he didn't know about it, or he'd have quit immediately. 

Interestingly, in another supermarket, I spotted that they hadn't managed to get rid of all the old stock before the new stuff came in, so were selling the two alongside each other at the same price, allowing you to choose how much value for money you wanted.

Anyway - I had my two big tins: White Wine and Cream Sauce, and Red Wine Sauce (with tomato and onion). A quick scan of the labels revealed that the former was the boozier of the two, containing 8% white wine as opposed to just 4% red wine. Both also contained some sherry, though how much was not specified. Chicken breasts were the recommended accompaniment for both, whether cooked whole, together with the sauce in the oven, as the red wine label goes for, or diced and cooked in a pan on the stove with the sauce added after, as the white wine label suggests. 

I decided to go for a whole chicken breast, cooked in a pan - served with both sauces at the same time. This was inspired by a Delia Smith recipe for white and black bean soup, where two separate soups are made with the two colours of bean, and then ladled into bowls simultaneously so they sit side-by-side in the bowl. I cooked my chicken on the stove, decanted a suitable quantity of the sauces into some very appropriate receptacles, and then tipped these simultaneously into the pan. As both were fairly thick and gloopy, they didn't mix into each other and just sat quite happily alongside each other, heating through and starting to bubble away merrily. I suppose I could have heated the sauces separately and then poured them over the chicken on the plate, but I quite liked the idea of seeing them in wine glasses and wasn't sure how wise it would be to try that when they were hot.

Fortunately I was still able to transfer the chicken and sauces from pan to plate without too much difficulty, or mixing up of red and white. As the labels recommended, I served up fresh vegetables alongside, though rather than the green beans or broccoli seen in their "serving suggestion" photo, I went for colour-appropriate cauliflower and red cabbage. And to drink alongside? A nice glass of rosé, naturally.

The sauces themselves were ok, but nothing particularly special. The red was very tomatoey, with a good richness from the wine. I had wondered if it was going to be overly sweet (it contained sugar; the white did not) but that didn't seem to be the case - if anything it was slightly astringent. The white's richness came more from the cream than the wine, though I did think I could detect a hint of the sherry here, which I didn't get from the red. The white seemed to have a slight taste of flour to it, as if it hadn't quite been cooked through. In order to try not to mix up the sauces in the pan, I didn't stir them very much during heating - perhaps that would have got rid of some of this taste. As mentioned before, both sauces were a bit gloopy, but by no means unpleasantly so.

These being the 'original' 500g tins, I naturally had quite a bit of sauce left, and I think in both cases I took the labels' advice and froze the leftovers to use another time. At some point between buying the tins and using them up, I had found on eBay a promotional leaflet giving recipes for Homepride's range of Cook-In sauces - not just the red and white wine ones, but also curry, sweet and sour, chilli, barbecue and tomato & onion. All but the last of these are still sold - in the smaller 400g tins - to this day. The recipe suggestions for the red wine sauce were boeuf bourgignon and lamb and red wine cobbler, which both sounded pretty good, and 'Layered Liver Casserole', which didn't. But being the fool I am, I went for that one.

Basically, you layer slices of lambs liver and ham in a dish, cover with the sauce and bake in the oven. One reason why a lot of people have grown up despising liver is that you either have to cook it really quickly at a high heat, searing it in a pan, or give it a very long, low, slow cooking - anything other than that and it ends up like leather. This recipe's suggestion of an hour at 180 degrees is very much in the "anything other than that" category. "That'll teach me to always pick the revolting sounding recipe" I thought, as I chewed away at my layers of leather and ham. (It won't.)

For the white wine sauce, the leaflet gives recipes for 'Cod Steaks Spanish Style', 'Porky Bean Pot' and 'Chicken in a white wine sauce with cream', which obviously I'd already done. I can't quite remember now why I didn't get tempted by the name 'Porky Bean Pot' alone, but I didn't go for that. The cod steaks recipe involved baking them with the sauce, tomato, onion and breadcrumbs for 40 minutes, which I thought would probably render them as inedible as the liver. So instead I just heated the remaining sauce through and served it with some fancy-schmancy seared mini scallops and bacon lardons, with samphire, asparagus and new potatoes. The sauce may have been a somewhat unlikely companion to ingredients like that, but white wine and cream is generally always a good bet with seafood, and I felt Homepride's Fred - a man of discerning taste - would have approved.

I'm not sure he would have been so impressed though with the omelette I tried making with the last of the sauce whisked into the egg mixture. It seemed to work fine in the pan, but then got stuck and broke apart when I tried to get it onto the plate. A complete mess, but a rich and flavoursome mess at least.

I shall return to this leaflet another time, having since tried some of the other tins from the Homepride range. Fast-forward to late 2019 though - I was alerted to the fact that a local wine bar called Vagabond was running a special "Swap Shop" promotion around the traditional time of harvest festival, where you could take along a tin of some kind and swap it for a glass of wine. The tins would then be donated to local food banks and homeless charities, as happens these days with foods collected by churches at their services celebrating the harvest. A win-win situation (or indeed a tin/wine situation) - but what tin to take? I thought I'd go for something apt, so I went and bought another tin of the white wine and cream sauce (the 400g size this time, of course) and, humming "We plough the fields and scatter..." to myself, made my way down to Vagabond, where I was then able to swap it for a very nice glass of red.

Probably for the best that it was just one tin/glass swap per person - with the large selection of tins I have still to use in my cupboards, I could have ended up with quite a hangover otherwise.