Tag: food

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copperbadge:

Did you guys know they make straight-up sheets of non-triangle-cut canned crescent roll dough now? I figured everyone knew but I told my mum and it BLEW HER MIND so I figured I should probably tell the internet, just in case. 

I can’t hold it in any more WHY WHY IS THE DOUGH IN A CAN AMERICA THE LAND OF THE CANS WHY WHAT IS THIS CANS ARE FOR THINGS THAT YOU LEAVE AT THE BACK OF THE CUPBOARD FOR 6 YEARS AND THEN THROW OUT WHEN YOU MOVE OR PIE FILLING I’LL GIVE YOU THE PIE FILLING BUT DOUGH? MEAT? YES THEY PUT MEAT IN CANS TOO! HEATHENS!

Canning has a long tradition in America, going back to the colonization of the east coast and later of the west, where isolated farmhouses might go weeks without access to a dry goods store and had no access at all to fresh food in the winter (barring winter hunting, which could not get you fruits and veg). Canning was a common practice to make sure you had some kind of plant food to survive the winter months. 

During the early 20th century, when industrialized food preservation and production was picking up (especially because long-term preservation was necessary for feeding troops in combat) canned food became commonplace, including in poor urban areas where refrigeration wasn’t available. Canned meat, because of mass production, might be more available and less costly than fresh meat, and would certainly last longer. (It’s now considered subpar to easily available fresh meat, but many people still have a can in their pantry or two, just in case, and canned tuna is a quite popular way to keep fresh cooked fish around for snacking without dealing with the smell). For households with two working parents or with only one parent, canned food was a convenient way to stock the larder for the week and still be able to provide your family with a decent meal. During the war, women who worked during the day and had a husband off in combat (or had a husband who had died in combat) still had to come home and feed their families, but without the eight hours a day they normally had to shop, prepare, and cook a meal (and do the laundry, and clean the home, and the million other unpaid labor activities that are always overlooked in homemakers and took a lot longer before industrialization).

After WWII, canned food was a major sub-industry because of all this, but with improved shipping speeds and preservation methods, it was also on the decline as an in-demand product; we started getting seasonal fruit and veg year-round which put the demand for canned food, sold next to said fresh food, on the decline. Marketing offices for canned food producers turned to aggressively marketing quick-cook recipes as a method of selling more product – if you can empty a can of condensed cream-of-mushroom soup into a dish instead of chopping and sauteeing fresh mushrooms and adding a cream-soup base, you’d save at least forty to fifty minutes of your time, you wouldn’t have to worry about buying mushrooms and cream (neither of which keep long, even in refrigeration) and you’d get a meal that was still pretty tasty. Particularly for boomers, who were raised on this method of cooking, it’s a totally normal flavor in prepared food. Keeping a can of cream-of-mushroom soup in the pantry was standard, and we used them in our house with regularity. The only reason I don’t keep one in my own pantry is that I have a dry soup mix that just requires adding mushrooms, and I have pre-chopped mushrooms available to me within two blocks of my apartment, plus the time, money, and able-bodiedness to procure them. You can get five or six cans of cream of mushroom soup for the cost of a pint of cream and a container of mushrooms, and you don’t have to walk from the veg aisle on one side of the store to the dairy aisle, usually on the opposite side. 

Also in the 1950s, canned food was a common stockpile item against nuclear winter. Cold-war thinking bred two generations, the Boomers and the older GenXers, who wanted lots of food on hand in case we ended up nuked by Russia. Preparation for the Cold War honestly is the reason that people freak out about natural disasters and end up buying tons of fresh food, because those two generations were indoctrinated into the idea that any disaster means lack of available food. 

And canned food in the pantry means if you get home at the end of the day and you’re exhausted, you don’t have to drive to a supermarket (remember that in the US there are very few corner groceries outside of major urban areas anymore, and many urban areas contain “food deserts” with no groceries at all). You can open a can, pour it into a pot, maybe dress it up a little, and have a decent hot meal. Making baked beans from dried beans, if you don’t have a pressure cooker, takes hours even if you do have a slow cooker; making baked beans from a can takes either 30 minutes (if you have plain canned beans; this also requires tomato sauce or ketchup or bbq sauce, plus brown sugar or molasses) or 10 minutes (if you have canned pork and beans, which might enjoy some added mustard and bbq sauce but don’t require them). And it’s a reasonably nutritious, filling meal. 

Canned bread dough has to be refrigerated. It’s a sub-luxury food – it’s cheap and convenient but still needs to be bought relatively fresh and requires some, but not much, labor to prepare. It’s a nice dressing on the table if you have extra energy, or a fun meal to make with your family that doesn’t involve hours in the kitchen. Rolling little sausages up in Pilsbury dough takes maybe half an hour, but it doesn’t take the hour and a half to two hours it would if you had to make the dough from scratch. And in our culture where “quick cook” is aggressively marketed to sell convenience foods, there’s some competition to be had in terms of who can come up with the most imaginative use of this food – what’s the best thing to stuff into the bread, how do you cope best with the triangular shape, how delicious can you make this essentially convenience food. 

So, in short (too late) canned food in this country arises from need and continues to cater to it, influenced by a combination of Madison Avenue, the military-industrial complex, and the shrinking quality of life for the middle and working class. 

To open a crescent roll can you hold it in two hands and twist them in opposite directions. It makes a popping sound and it’s super satisfying. In 10 minutes you can have enough croissants for a few people to snack on or for one person to gorge on, and they literally taste like the concept of softness. And they’re fucking delicious with nutella. There is nothing bad or questionable about this precious perfect food product. (Not to mention that my single mother used these as a great activity for us both to do with limited time and money, tying in to what copperbadge said.)

canned food is also really important within the history of post-depression america. we basically go from the turn of the century to world war one (rations) to the jazz age (incredible inequality) to the depression (you wish things were as good as they were when we had rations) to world war two (rations two: electric boogaloo) so like, from about 1918-1950, you see consistent major upheavals in the way we procure our food and thus the way we cook. we kind of go from “anything you can get on the table” for about fifty years to “sudden and overwhelming abundance exacerbated by the presence of new technologies like flash freezing, freeze drying, advanced dehydrating, and new preservatives”

and you also see major upheavals in how labor works and what labor is by the time we get to having a stable, twentieth century food supply, so the result is

you have basically fifty years worth of americans that have lived through and been formed by serious food insecurity, major shifts in labor and class, major shifts in what an occupied and properly tended to domestic sphere consists of, and cold war disaster preparedness. all of this hits a culture that draws its ethical and spiritual root from the puritans (and i cannot overstate the importance of the puritans and protestant christianity in shaping the american diet and what the american meal is– much less american dieting culture) and new and exciting food technologies, and the shit hits the fan and 

things get buck wild

there’s a really common statement made about julia child in that she taught america how to cook again, and there’s something to that that is very very true. it’s arguable that a love of food as an artful and beautiful tradition didn’t exist in america meaningfully until julia child, and that’s because she imported it from france. but yeah, arguably, america stopped cooking for fifty years and then by the time we had the resources to cook again, things had changed so much that many many americans didn’t have the time or the money to do it, and tastes had changed so much that we couldn’t do it as we had done before because no one liked it anymore. 

i’ve reblogged this before but i’m gonna do it again because it’s so interesting, especially considering family history and recipes.

some great hold overs from the poor south 1950s:

dirty rice – put rice, a can of french onion soup, a can of beef consomme, half a stick of butter, and canned mushrooms in a baking dish and bake it. that’s it, you’re done, dig in. fucking delicious and my dad grew up on this. same concept as green bean casserole (or literally any casserole ever) like just dump canned soup and other canned ingredients in with butter and bake it until delicious. it’s got lots of sodium but this is Florida/Georgia it’s hot as fuck you’re gonna be sweating anyway you need it.

pea salad – drained canned sweet peas tossed in a dressing made of mayonnaise, ranch, vinegar, and garlic powder. peas and all the makings are cheap, it’s a cold “wet salad” from the same family of thought as potato salad or coleslaw, goes well with most meat or barbecue, and convinces your kids to eat green stuff on the cheap. Fancier version: buy the sweet peas with pearl onions and mushrooms mixed in. Cheap and also delicious the world can fight me on this one. good alternative to coleslaw if someone’s got something against shredded cabbage and carrot in a perfect delicious tangy sweet dressing handed down from the gods (i’ll throw down about some coleslaw too oops)

and when you’re feeling really wild and like splurging you get the wonder of the tater sandwich– whole wheat bread with mayo or butter, and your choice of fried potatoes on it. My dad’s mom used to slice potatoes into rounds and fry them in a skillet on the stove top; my mum is a Scot who also had the Scot version of a tater sandwich (makes sense, lots of poor scots ended up in the SE where my dad’s family is from, lots of culinary crossover) and so makes homemade thick cut chips (call them fries at your peril). I’m not down with the tater sandwich, I’m a potato purist who just wants to eat my weight in potatoes and nought else, but I respect my elders and there will be no bad mouthing a family tradition in this house.

all the recipes from that side of the family, be they canned soup based or otherwise, are cheap, filling, and delicious. It’s not always the healthiest food by any stretch, but you’re not hungry, it tastes good, and it’s actually got a fare amount of veggies– probably because my dad’s family grew their own vegetables in a huge family garden beside their house. It was good peaty soil right next to a swamp and my Pa could have grown a new car from a rubber tire if he so chose, he was such a good farmer. My dad and his three sisters used to end up working in the garden every day after school. It was the only way they could have gotten fresh produce otherwise, they had so little money. Considering then that a lot of families didn’t have that and probably saw even less fresh produce in their kitchen than my dad’s family did…

legit, i have so much respect for people like my granny and pa who turned out such good tasting stuff from nothing but instant rice and condensed soup.