Let it snow (crab), let it snow (crab), let it SPAM

 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.

Culture Canned by Lockdown: SPAM, Beans and Soup

While 2020 has been a fairly terrible year, we must look for the positives.

None of us were able to travel very far this year, but thankfully I hadn't made any travel plans in the first two months of 2020, so didn't have to make any disappointing cancellations on that front. I didn't venture any further than the Sussex coast for a few days' cycling in August, but that was very enjoyable in its own way. Last year, I made it as far as Lake Superior (not by bike, obviously), to visit a friend I hadn't seen for a decade, on the northernmost part of border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. If Covid had happened last year, I would have had to cancel that, which would have been downright depressing.

Despite being in Minnesota, I didn't make it to what must surely be one of that state's best loved attractions - the SPAM Museum in Austin. Yes, that's right - an entire museum devoted to SPAM. Austin is in the very south of the state, and as I quickly discovered, distances on maps of the US can be quite deceptive. It's a big old place (Lake Superior alone is a similar size to Austria), and hence just 'nipping down' to Austin and back for the day to look at some tins of SPAM really wasn't feasible. But having had such a brilliant time anyway, I wasn't fussed at all.

More Spiced and Tinned Treats from a Tier 4 Christmas

Spiced fruit like the plums in the previous post can, of course, by enjoyed at any time of the year, but it definitely has a particularly Christmas feel about it. And it doesn't have to be a solely sweet thing - they can be a fine addition to savoury courses too. In the last few days before Christmas, one of the featured recipes on Nigella Lawson's website was her Spiced Peaches - in which she specifically calls for tinned peaches to be used, not fresh, and in syrup rather than the healthier option of those in juice. And what Nigella says must be obeyed.

As with the spiced plums, the recipe could hardly be simpler - tip a can of peach halves into a saucepan with a tablespoon of vinegar, a cinnamon stick, sliced fresh ginger, cloves, peppercorns and dried chilli flakes. Bring to the boil, then turn off and leave to cool. And that's it. They'll keep for a week or so if refrigerated. I only had tinned peach slices in juice in my stash, but did still have most of the tin of apricots in syrup that I'd opened for those meringues in my last post but one, so I reckoned they'd do. Pears would probably be quite nice too.

Impulse buys, plum puddings and other fine messes

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.

Have a CFAB Christmas!

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".

Well, you can live on tinned food, but...

In my last-but-one post, I wrote about Trump's bizarre statement about tinned soup, and how it is (according to him) bring used by protestors as an innocent-looking missile to throw at police. Many thanks to my friend and reader of this blog who sent me this fab sticker soon after! 

There didn't seem to be any evidence to back up Trump's assertion (not that he cares too much about minor details like that), but it reminded me that tin cans can be put to similar use, but with good intent - to fight crime, for example.