Yes We Can!
An ode to the most convenient of kitchen shortcuts.
Photographs, clockwise from top left: Progresso can by Susan Chalifoux/Globe Staff; iStock; Newscom; iStock; Healthy Choice can by Susan Chalifoux/Globe Staff; can opener by Lane Turner/Globe Staff; Newscom; iStock; Rienzi can by Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff; can opener by Lane Turner/Globe Staff
It was on recycling day a few months ago when I realized that the "fresh, local, seasonal" trend in cooking had gone too far. That was the day I found myself trying to hide (I blush to say it) the empty cans. Yes, there they were: tomatoes and beans, chicken broth and tuna, silent testimony to my shortcuts in the kitchen. I felt a stab of shame.
I've tried to change my ways. I've tried to be happy, in the depths of a New England winter, serving up pureed root vegetables and pies filled with home-grown apples dried in a solar-powered dehydrator. I've tried feeling virtuous about soup made with fresh-killed chicken, late of a friend's backyard, and filled with local beans and root-cellared carrots. But when I contemplated using a blanket to muffle the sound of the can opener on an 8-ouncer of Dole's pineapple rings (I needed them for an upside-down cake) while guests lounged in the living room, I knew I needed to reassess. I searched the Internet, looked at library books, sought the support of friends, called my Mom. And here's what I found: Everyone uses canned food.
Everyone, that is, since about the time of Napoleon, an era when primitive canning - in corked glass bottles - was first developed. By 1812, the Royal British Navy had adopted foods in "tins" as rations for sick sailors. But, according to Sue Shephard, author of Pickled, Potted and Canned, a marvelous book on the history of food preservation, it wasn't until World War I that canned food was brought to the masses. It wasn't long before the inevitable happened: Spam.
Although Spam does not figure large in my culinary life, I use plenty of canned foods. Five of the six ingredients for my black bean soup come from cans: tomatoes, broth, beans, corn, and chipotle chilies in adobo. I make a killer posole from canned hominy. I toss canned water chestnuts and those weird-but-tasty ears of baby corn into most stir-frys. One of my older daughter's favorite lunches is something I like to call Tuscan Salad, which actually consists of a can of cannellini beans and a can of tuna drizzled with oil and balsamic vinegar. My marinara consists of not much more than a No. 10 can of tomatoes. And I'm still a sucker for canned pears and cottage cheese, a dish I often shared with my Mom at lunchtime.
If canned food, in its ubiquity, has a certain unifying quality, then the Great Divide appears to be the can opener: electric vs. manual. (A can without an opener is a conundrum. My husband remembers fellow Boy Scouts, finding themselves not at all prepared, heating cans in a fire until they exploded.) Either modern opener is an improvement on the first can opener, which was, according to Shephard's book, a hammer and chisel.
Nowadays, folks who favor the electric can opener seem to tend to be cat owners, who have trained their felines to respond to the whir; my cousin Rosemarie Merino, who lives in Tenafly, New Jersey, attached her opener to a 25-foot extension cord so she could call the kitty from anywhere in the yard. Others say it helps with carpal tunnel syndrome. But Ruth Seligman, a Bronx mother of three who also holds a full-time job, says her life is so busy that she now considers opening cans with her manual device "a form of exercise." (As a kosher cook, she has three manual openers: meat, dairy, and pareve.) Monica Patitucci, who lives in Brooklyn, recalls trying to open a can of tuna, only to have her electric opener break. She tried again with a manual - it fell apart. But she persevered, using a fork to finally pry the lid open. "I bent the tines of the fork, but that tuna was mine!" she crows. Shades of the hammer and chisel.
In the end, the ancient (OK, 1924) wisdom of a writer named James Collins, who thoughtfully penned The Story of Canned Foods, gives me both solace and perspective. Canning, he wrote, "gives the American family - especially in cities and factory towns - a kitchen garden where all good things grow and where it is always harvest time." That's the way I like to think of it now, as I peruse my pantry shelves, full of beans and corn and tomatoes. I'm a gardener. The harvest is calling. On recycling days, I hold up my head with pride.
What's your favorite can?
E-mail us yours to magazine@globe.com.
Marialisa Calta, a writer and syndicated columnist in Calais, Vermont, is the author of Barbarians at the Plate. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
