Canned food went from military rations to fancy appetizers | Hacker News Reader

Canned food went from military rations to fancy appetizers

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80 pointsBrajeshwar76 comments

"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).

All hail the safety can opener[0]!

0: https://youtu.be/i_mLxyIXpSY?si=kXrTddErZvju6wIF

If anyone's interested in reading more about can openers...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-can-opener-was...

Canned tomatos.

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.

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.

Yes. And outside of a very small set of exceptions [1], in those situations I'd rather have "no tomato" vs an out of season grocery store tomato. For the most part I find they add negative value to the whole.

[1] These are circumstances where what I'm eating has nostalgic value from before my eyes were opened. Like how diced tomatoes on american style hard shell tacos gives me warm fuzzy feelings :)

Are all cans of tomatoes manufactured during their ripest period?

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.

In Germany, and maybe other countries as well, the tomato cans have a 3 digit number printed on the bottom of the can. 220 for example. That's the canning date. The good ones, read Italian ones, usually also include a 2 letter code, like SA for Salerno, which indicates origin.

Obviously not a guarantee, but you can at least eliminate ones that were canned too early or too late depending on variety. Common advice is to pick the ones canned between 215 and 245 (Early August to early September) as that's the typical harvest time.

TIL!

I had to check and yes, the cans sold here (Switzerland) have the same code. Now I have a new hangup and that's buying those within the right range :)

I don't eat tomatoes, but... How does the date encoding work?

215 = August 245 = September

Is it just the day of the year?

Yup.

For reference: https://www.epochconverter.com/days/2023

I think so - the 215th day of the year is August 3.

What happens in leap years?

The 3rd of August probably becomes 216 so just add 1

yes - I thought of that but figured that it didn't matter for figuring out what tomatoes would be best.

It's such an interesting system I never even considered. Does this mean most of the tomatoes are all planted and harvested on roughly the same days? I thought it would've been like a farm by farm, rolling harvest kinda situation.

Depends on region and variety. Tomatoes on the same plant also don't ripen on the same day.

One other aspect is the tomatoes sold in supermarkets have to be varieties that can withstand some considerable time being trucked around, where as presumably the canning facilities are regional to the growers.

That’s a great question.

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.

I haven't thought about canned brown bread in 42 years since I moved from Maine to California. I'll guess your can was made by B&M Baked Beans.

This makes me want to order a can on Amazon along with some Drake's Devil Dogs.

Canned brown bread is actually kind of delicious (for what it is).

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.

What we think of as bread in the UK is different though - vast majority of bread sold in the UK is made with the Chorleywood method[1]

Mostly as a result of high quality wheat depending on imports vs the varieties we grew at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

> 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.

I cannot remember this. (And wasn't around for the introduction of Wonder Bread.)

But I was disturbed to see recent commentary saying "why in the world does food come inside so much disposable packaging?"

That answer should be obvious to everyone. Modern food comes inside disposable packaging because the other way spreads disease. You could argue that we should have less of that, or more of it. But if you can't even imagine why the shrinkwrap is there... how do you get through the day?

>many adults could still recall when products were being sold "from the cracker barrel"

What does this mean? It's impossible to Google, thanks to the restaurant chain by the same name.

Samuel Motherfucking L motherfucking Jackson enters the Motherfucking chat.

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.

McDonald's is peak American cuisine and I'm not even kidding.

Yeah, because there's nothing worthwhile in US regional cuisine like I dunno, gumbo?

I've been to a cajun restaurant and I've been to a Jamaican restaurant.

Based on those, it would be no great loss if cajun cuisine was completely forgotten, though it's possible it was just a terrible restaurant.

There really is a problem with American food, and it's the people who design and eat it. For many years I've watched Indian restaurants open locally with great food, and then get blander and blander and blander over time. I can only assume they do it because their guests complain when the food they serve has detectable flavors.

You had to have eaten at a terrible restaurant.

Cajun cuisine is probably the second best regional cuisine in existence.

For amazing creole/cajun food - Jewel of the South on St. Louis Street in New Orleans is just top shelf (they're really small, so plan ahead). The last time I was there I had sweet breads, blood sausage, and some desert that was in french, so I don't remember what it was. It was (to be slightly dramatic) life changing. Being from the midwest, I have had sweet breads and blood sausage, both, but never, ever, ever anywhere close to as good as at the Jewel.

The owner used to be my landlord about a decade ago. I’ve heard nothing but good things about this and his other place, Manolito.

He was there when I was there and we had drinks. A family member of mine worked with him in the past, so I got to sit with those two old foodies/restaurant beasts who had spent their entire lives either in kitchens or as managers/owners and listen to wild-ass stories about what it was like to work food-service in New Orleans before New Orleans went PG rated post Katrina.

It was absolutely one of my favorite travel memories.

If he told you the Hunter S. Thompson story that must have been something to behold.

What’s the best regional cuisine?

Midwest, but specifically the cuisine of German/Irish immigrants from the early 1900's who were already poor when the great depression hit.

The middle of Illinois, North Missouri, parts of Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin is where to find it.

Hearty fall dishes full of fat, flavor, and the feeling of being home. Light summer dishes with local and wild greens.

Not the "regular" fried midwest foods, but dumplings, ox-tail soup, cabbage soup, so many beans, so much pork belly, cattail flour flatbread, fresh watercress and mustard greens; those sorts of things.

Szechuan

Of Chinese regional cuisine, I actually favor Xinjiang, though that is in large part because the need to be halal prevents them from serving pork.

Xinjiang cuisine also avoids the slimy glop coating that is so common in ethnic Chinese cuisine. [A problem that gets much worse if you have food delivered - the food doesn't get drained, and it's packed into delivery containers pretty tightly, so your food arrives bathing in a deep sea of sauce that would have, if served on a plate, fallen below the actual food.]

My second choice would be Hunan food.

If you ever go by Rosemead, CA I highly recommend the China Islamic restaurant there.

I've eaten lots of Cajun food but I've never had Cajun food from a restaurant. A decent cook can make an excellent pot of gumbo or jambalaya, and a crawfish boil can be a delicious and wonderful backyard event.

I'm starting to understand that the internet is mostly just people arguing over subjective things.

s/the internet/life/, but yeah. And?

Are cans not all lined with plastics nowadays and therefore a source of microplastics and endocrine disruptors?

Not always, not anymore, but the substitutes may not be any better...

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/bpa-update-tracking-c...

Yeah. The inner coatings of food and drink cans contain bisphenol A.

I came here to see this answered, so, bump.

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).

It's a bit too salty, but there are ways to address that as part of the prep.

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.

SPAM story time:

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.

Yes, those are the ingredients I would expect in a potted meat product from around the globe.

I try to avoid canned food as the inner coating might still contain BPA: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37154823/

Good point. Can't say how generalized the practice is. Still good to have some tinned food for emergencies where BPA isn't the immediate concern.

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.

Canning is a very useful method to deal with a surplus of production from your garden. We regularly conserve vegetables from our garden in glass jars. We also do this with meat, legumes, really anything we can get our hands on that's on sale. We also make soups and mixtures such as sloppy joe and conserve them.

It's really simple: you take glass jars (the kind that can be closed hermetically, there are multiple kinds), put the food in them, seal the jars, put them in a big casserole full of water, and boil them (an hour for vegetables, and hour and a half for meats). That's all. They can last for years if properly sealed.

In Korea, every year people gift each other enormous SPAM gift box sets, costing something like $30 ~ $100+ per set.

You get some cans of SPAM, some cooking oil, seasoning, and obviously as a bonus along with the box: several pairs of synthetic dress socks.

https://newsroom.cj.net/the-season-of-gifting-spam-gift-sets...

I just bought my fist spam can this week and I gotta say I’m a convert. It’s like a hot dog that sits flat enough to develop great browning and even become bacon-like in the pan if you wish. Pair it with some kimchi and I’m in heaven.

Confit de canard. Rarely disappointed. Sure, if you live in a region that raises ducks, you don't need the tin.

Perfect for making cassoulet...

Yes but only for those strong enough! I know some who have trouble handling both at the same time.

In Portugal, fancy canned foods are a marketing invention for tourists.

Staple canned tuna is the only thing that’s traditional.

Interesting... I watched a reportage on French TV about 3 years ago vaunting the merits of aged sardines in a tin from Portugal.

/r/CannedSardines/

Also canned kimchi is surprisingly decent. Available on Amazon.

> Also canned kimchi is surprisingly decent.

As an emetic

Downvotes humbly accepted because I did in fact, violate the HN rule about snark. Apologies to all offended.

Just want to say this is one of my favorite websites.

if you are into canned food, check this youtube channel "cultmoo" among others https://www.youtube.com/@CultMoo

look for their videos titles "it came in a can"

canned food been in vogue for a while now also look for reviews of sweet sue whole chicken in a can

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