Christmas in a tin/bowl/sandwich

Belated festive greetings, one and all! You will have noticed somewhat of a surge in my posts earlier this month, having written precisely bugger all during the year up until then. I had at one point thought I would try and do a post every day in December up until Christmas, but held off from announcing it as an 'advent calendar' for fear that I probably wouldn't be able to keep it up - which of course, proved to be the case. 15 posts in one month isn't bad though - undoubtedly my most productive month since starting the blog.

I end the year with some hugely exciting Christmas tinned food news, relating back to a previous post - I managed to get my hands on a tin of Heinz's Limited Edition Christmas Dinner Big Soup! 

As previously reported, the initial run of 500 tins sold out within minutes of going on sale in November, but Heinz teased us with the promise of more being available, for which you could sign up to register interest. I'm not sure if they did actually send out any email notifications about when the new batch of tins would be available to purchase, but I happened to spot an Instagram post from them on the morning of 9 December, saying that they would be on sale at 12pm that day, and so I was online ready and raring to bag a tin. Minutes later, they were sold out again, but I had been one of the lucky ones. I felt ever so smug.

I never had any intention of attempting to flog the tin on eBay; for me, the big quandary was whether to crack it open straight away, or save it for Christmas Day, in case we were to be locked-down again by then and unable to visit family - Christmas Dinner in a tin does have a certain 'last resort' feel to it. After it was confirmed that there would be no more restrictions before the end of the festivities, I went ahead and opened it up a few days before Christmas (though I think even if I had been forced to spend another Christmas alone, I probably would have had something a bit more creative than this.)

If you recall, the publicity shots for the soup made it look relatively appetising:

The reality was a little different. 

In his review of the soup in the Guardian, Stuart Heritage said that this "travesty...looks like fresh sewage". Dare I say it, that might be a bit of a journalistic exaggeration. Yes, it is somewhat brown, but there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that - indeed, in her latest book Cook, Eat, Repeat, Nigella Lawson gives us an entire chapter called "In Defence of Brown Food". But what those recipes might lack in vibrant colours and beauty, they more than make up for in taste. Would this tin be the same? 

The review also said "it smells bad": again, a little over the top. I just thought it smells like gravy, and there's nowt wrong wi' that, is there? A good gravy is the linchpin of Christmas dinner, bringing all its disparate elements together, and keeping them warm. There's nothing worse than having too little gravy to go round. So it should come as no surprise really that the soupy element of this 'dinner' is essentially just gravy - aside from water, chicken gravy is the only liquid element in the ingredients. Maybe not the greatest gravy I've ever had - it tasted like slightly gloopy Bisto - but nothing wrong with it at all.

What of the objects lurking in the gravy though? Right at the top was a sphere that I initially thought was one of the stuffing balls, but on closer inspection proved to be a brussels sprout. Immediately I was wary, as the tinned brussels I had a few years back were probably one of the most horrible items I have eaten in the name of this blog. These ones were, thankfully, better than those, without the taste and texture of an item that has been boiled to within an inch of its life, and then given an extra boil just to be sure. "Not horrendous" is perhaps not the greatest accolade ever, but apt here. There were two sprouts in the tin, though only one of them survived being heated through; the other seemed to partly disintegrate away into the rest of the soup. 

Delving deeper in the tin I then found the stuffing ball, which although not apparent from my photo was at least one and a half times the size of the sprout. It did have a hint of a flavour of sage about it, but otherwise was just a big bready ball. The ingredients for this also include oats and suet, which probably help towards keeping the thing together and not falling apart into a mush - I don't think stuffing really benefits from being in too wet an environment for too long. There was only one of these enormous things in the tin. 

Next, one of the two pigs in blankets - a very small sausage, identical in taste and texture to the type you might get in a tin of baked beans and sausages, wrapped in a little scrap of slightly chewy bacon. I was glad that I did have a nibble of one of these before heating the soup, as the blanket also seemed to fall apart and become amalgamated into the rest of the gravy after going into the saucepan. 

I had to search a little harder for the turkey, but there were a few dense little nuggets of the darker meat. I was glad they had opted for this as it is usually much moister than the lighter breast meat, but sadly whatever they had done to it had ensured the chunks were rather dry and unappetising too. 

Potato and carrot were the only other discernible 'bits' in the soup, with some of the pieces of the former being a little large and undercooked, but the ingredients also listed parsnips, cranberry sauce and red cabbage, which I couldn't particularly see or taste but may have provided some sweetness if nothing else.

I had half the tin heated through, as intended, as a bowl of soup, but it felt only right to have the remainder the next day as a leftovers sandwich. That didn't work particularly well though on account of the large quantity of gravy compared to chunks - it was a bit sloppy as a filling. I should really have taken inspiration from Friends and made the sandwich with a "moist-maker" - a gravy-soaked slice of bread in the middle of the sandwich.

In short, the Christmas Dinner Soup was ok. It didn't "taste like punishment" as the review said, but nor was it "Full-on ingredients, big time flavour" as Heinz's press releases put it. Essentially it was a tin of gravy with some bits in it, which mostly survived being heated through. Is it set to become a seasonal favourite in Heinz's range? Unlikely, I think, though given the demand for the tins this year I would think they could probably shift some tins for another few years. I certainly wouldn't buy it again for the taste, but with all the proceeds going to soup kitchens I could possibly be persuaded on that front. And this year's empty tin could become a Christmas decoration in years to come.