"Grab a can opener, readers. Today, we’ll be cracking open the history of all things tinned."
For an article making that claim, there's a BIG omission: the history of can openers.
According to The Wiki (and article) it was around ~1800 that canned food became somewhat commonplace.
But it wasn't until ~1850 that general purpose can openers came around.
So those first (thick, heavy!) cans had to be opened using whatever tools were on hand. Think chisel + hammer. Later cans came with some kind of 'key' to peel away a strip of metal.
But can openers as we know them, didn't come around until decades after the cans themselves.
If you're diving into the history of canned food, certainly this tidbit deserves mention.
The article is a bit sloppy with some of its descriptions/language. Appert developed sealed bottles. (Though, as the article notes, some form of this may have previously existed in more artisanal form.) Canning, as we use the term today, was a slightly later invention (1810s) in the usual telling--though, in reality, there are earlier references from the 1700s to cans in the Dutch navy and the Norwegian salmon industry. As you say, can openers came along relatively late in the game (patented in the 1850s).
Totally agree! One of my favourite meals is pasta with sauce made from canned plum tomatoes, garlic, chilli, salt, pepper and basil. Also, canned San Marzano tomatoes for pizza sauce is the best I've ever had! Although I'd love to try the uncanned version one day.
Yes this. Heirloom tomatoes freshly harvested are ideal but impossible for most of the year. Then canned are in second place. And a very, very distant third are grocery store tomatoes
I mostly agree yet canned tomatoes simply can’t replace fresh in many cases. Like a slice of tomato on a burger, chicken sandwich, etc. So canned vs fresh but “out of season” is really more situational.
The theory is that tomatoes meant for canning can be harvested at a more optimal stage of ripeness (and they don't need to be bred for long shelf life) compared to fresh ones. I don't know if anyone has done any serious testing of the theory though.
There's a really good example of this in the 1965 film 'The Ipcress File' with Michael Caine (recommended).
Caine's character is portrayed as a gourmand, a bon viveur - he grinds his own coffee and uses a French press to brew it in - though I suspect that the director had never used one, as he doesn't actually let it brew.
In once scene he visits a a new-fangled supermarket with a colleague and picks up a can of tinned champignon from the shelves, remarking on how good they are. It always struck me how attitudes had changed. Today the character would be looking for the freshest mushrooms from the local farmers market.
Article mentions canned bread. I just tried one the other day, a surprisingly normal looking grocery store can given to me by a Massachusetts native who grew up often having toasted canned brown bread with butter. It was not quite as bad as I was expecting.
Never had canned bread, but I have long assumed that most of the mushy disgusting stuff that is referred to as “bread” or “rolls” in the US must come from wartime factories that were never turned off, maybe because the population never demanded anything better.
It's a combination of things. The "Pullman Loaf" (as in Pullman railcars) became common for sandwich breads in the 19th century and established a common target for what bread should look like in the US and UK - white, sweet, fluffy, thin crust.
Later, we were successfully marketed "Wonder Bread" as a clean(as in sanitary) and convenient product, and that set another standard, one sold to housewives. It was basically applying the same strategy that built McDonald's in its early years. At the time of Wonder Bread's introduction, many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel", mixed homogenously and exposed to pests. All the early packaged foods, including the canned stuff and the sliced bread, were establishing a new norm of the manufacturer guaranteeing freshness to a sell-by date. It was PB&J on sliced bread for lunch and macaroni and cheese for dinner that got a lot of the US through the Depression years.
Continental Europe was simply less interested in this genre of bread - they had competition from other varieties of grain, and different kinds of bread dishes.
We… we just aren’t too sophisticated about bread here. Or any foods other than barbecue. My Chinese wife has been laughing at my hatred of American cuisine for the last 30 years.
I've got a canned food story. Up until a few years go I never tried SPAM, I thought it was rather vile food and always wondered "who the heck buys this stuff". Then I took a vacation in Hawaii, namely Oahu and had my mind completely changed.
Those guys used SPAM everywhere, grocery stores all sold SPAM musubi and practically every breakfast place offered SPAM and eggs. Turns out it came out of WWII where it was one of the more common rations. I remember thinking to myself "these people have unparalleled access to fresh fish and other super healthy foods, if they are eating SPAM there must be a point to it" and finally tried some SPAM musubi and had my mind completely changed about SPAM in the process. Cooked properly I found it quite tasty, since then I almost always keep a can of SPAM in the pantry and make my own musubi every few months.
I think spam is the single best savory food in the world, by a large stretch. No chicken, steak, seafood, or anything else even cokes close. It's got the tender texture of Vienna sausages
, but with a bit of added crisp, in a nice rectangular UX that's easy to add to sandwiches or musubis or ramen or anything else. It's divinity in a can.
Sadly I'm vegetarian these days. They actually make a veggie copycat that mostly tastes like a slice of congealed fat, which to be fair is largely what real spam is too, but... it's just not the same. The nostalgia, man.
Glad there's folks like you out there still enjoying the stuff. I shall savor it vicariously through your post (and hopefully newsletter).
SPAM is fucking awesome. I'm pretty sure the only reasons it got a bad rep is that it was EVERYWHERE for a while since it was a high calories, dense, tasty food that kept well and needed no cooking.
It's literally just potted meat in a can. SPAM is awesome, just don't eat too much of it because calories.
Years ago I was involved with a very quirky woman. One day, apropos of nothing, she blurts out, "SPAM bounces!". I asked her, do you mean like the emails bouncing? And she said that no, she meant the canned meat. It was jiggly, it bounces. So, being the experimental physicist that I am, I felt this needed to be tested. Immediately we went to the store and bought a ruler, a can of SPAM, as well as a can of Treet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treet , per Wikipedia not to be confused with an actual treat) for use as a control and drove to a nearby parking lot.
I opened both cans and held one of each can-shaped meat chuck in each hand, with SPAM jelly dripping down my fingers. I held the ruler upright under one foot, while my girlfriend got close to the pavement to eyeball the bounce height. On a count of three, I tossed both meat-bricks at the ground with what I felt was approximately equal force. The SPAM did not bounce. It splatted on the asphalt and broke up into a dogfood-like consistency. The Treet on the other hand, bounced like a rubber eraser, getting more than 2 inches of bounce height.
Of course, this was a very poor experiment. The acceleration force was not calibrated, and eyeballing the bounce height with a ruler was not very accurate. Using cooked SPAM or a non-canned meat may have made a better control item than Treet. And it is impossible to calculate the standard deviation with a single test. Nevertheless, I feel like I learned something.
There's a lot more to it than meat though. According to Wikipedia's page on SPAM:
> The ingredients of Spam vary according to variety and market; those of variety "Spam Classic" are pork with ham, salt, water, modified potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.
I hated canned food. They taste either fake or salty as hell to me. Went to Valencia once, bought some canned seafood, octopus, cockles and mussels from supermarket. The cockles and mussels were okay, but man the octopus was delicious. Spain seems to have a culture of eating canned seafood, as shown by the huge selection in supermarkets. I would love to learn their culture and history of eating canned seafood.
Readit News
For an article making that claim, there's a BIG omission: the history of can openers.
According to The Wiki (and article) it was around ~1800 that canned food became somewhat commonplace.
But it wasn't until ~1850 that general purpose can openers came around.
So those first (thick, heavy!) cans had to be opened using whatever tools were on hand. Think chisel + hammer. Later cans came with some kind of 'key' to peel away a strip of metal.
But can openers as we know them, didn't come around until decades after the cans themselves.
If you're diving into the history of canned food, certainly this tidbit deserves mention.
0: https://youtu.be/i_mLxyIXpSY?si=kXrTddErZvju6wIF
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-can-opener-was...
Usually better than the real thing since what's in the can is ripe, juicy and tasteful.
Something we only get in the middle of summer from real tomatos in middle and northern Europe.
Note, though, that the can should contain tomatos with no salt (let alone acid) added. Just the pure product.
Caine's character is portrayed as a gourmand, a bon viveur - he grinds his own coffee and uses a French press to brew it in - though I suspect that the director had never used one, as he doesn't actually let it brew.
In once scene he visits a a new-fangled supermarket with a colleague and picks up a can of tinned champignon from the shelves, remarking on how good they are. It always struck me how attitudes had changed. Today the character would be looking for the freshest mushrooms from the local farmers market.
This makes me want to order a can on Amazon along with some Drake's Devil Dogs.
Later, we were successfully marketed "Wonder Bread" as a clean(as in sanitary) and convenient product, and that set another standard, one sold to housewives. It was basically applying the same strategy that built McDonald's in its early years. At the time of Wonder Bread's introduction, many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel", mixed homogenously and exposed to pests. All the early packaged foods, including the canned stuff and the sliced bread, were establishing a new norm of the manufacturer guaranteeing freshness to a sell-by date. It was PB&J on sliced bread for lunch and macaroni and cheese for dinner that got a lot of the US through the Depression years.
Continental Europe was simply less interested in this genre of bread - they had competition from other varieties of grain, and different kinds of bread dishes.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/bpa-update-tracking-c...
Those guys used SPAM everywhere, grocery stores all sold SPAM musubi and practically every breakfast place offered SPAM and eggs. Turns out it came out of WWII where it was one of the more common rations. I remember thinking to myself "these people have unparalleled access to fresh fish and other super healthy foods, if they are eating SPAM there must be a point to it" and finally tried some SPAM musubi and had my mind completely changed about SPAM in the process. Cooked properly I found it quite tasty, since then I almost always keep a can of SPAM in the pantry and make my own musubi every few months.
Sadly I'm vegetarian these days. They actually make a veggie copycat that mostly tastes like a slice of congealed fat, which to be fair is largely what real spam is too, but... it's just not the same. The nostalgia, man.
Glad there's folks like you out there still enjoying the stuff. I shall savor it vicariously through your post (and hopefully newsletter).
It's literally just potted meat in a can. SPAM is awesome, just don't eat too much of it because calories.
Years ago I was involved with a very quirky woman. One day, apropos of nothing, she blurts out, "SPAM bounces!". I asked her, do you mean like the emails bouncing? And she said that no, she meant the canned meat. It was jiggly, it bounces. So, being the experimental physicist that I am, I felt this needed to be tested. Immediately we went to the store and bought a ruler, a can of SPAM, as well as a can of Treet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treet , per Wikipedia not to be confused with an actual treat) for use as a control and drove to a nearby parking lot.
I opened both cans and held one of each can-shaped meat chuck in each hand, with SPAM jelly dripping down my fingers. I held the ruler upright under one foot, while my girlfriend got close to the pavement to eyeball the bounce height. On a count of three, I tossed both meat-bricks at the ground with what I felt was approximately equal force. The SPAM did not bounce. It splatted on the asphalt and broke up into a dogfood-like consistency. The Treet on the other hand, bounced like a rubber eraser, getting more than 2 inches of bounce height.
Of course, this was a very poor experiment. The acceleration force was not calibrated, and eyeballing the bounce height with a ruler was not very accurate. Using cooked SPAM or a non-canned meat may have made a better control item than Treet. And it is impossible to calculate the standard deviation with a single test. Nevertheless, I feel like I learned something.
> The ingredients of Spam vary according to variety and market; those of variety "Spam Classic" are pork with ham, salt, water, modified potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.