If I had to choose, my top 10 foods in tins (in reverse order) would be: custard, Spanish olives stuffed with almonds, sweetcorn, peas, pear halves, borlotti beans, sardines, anchovies, chickpeas, tuna and, coming in at number one, tomatoes. As rankings go, this was a lot harder to choose than I had imagined. I’m quite relieved this is only hypothetical, so I don’t have to worry about snubbing mackerel, baked beans, peaches, cannellini, pineapple, corned beef, evaporated milk and tomato soup. I also don’t have to dwell on the tuna/chickpea positioning (on reflection, maybe they should be joint third).
What wasn’t difficult, though, was choosing which tin should clinch the number one spot: the unchallenged queen of the cupboard, tinned tomatoes. As my partner Vincenzo, the grandson of a Sicilian tomato farmer, once noted: “They smile at you from the shelf as if to say, ‘I have your back.’”
When I was about 10, spurred on by Blue Peter, I wrote letters to dozens of companies telling them I was doing a school project on tea, stamps, wine gums, washing-up liquid and tinned food. The pay-off for my letters and stamped, self-addressed envelopes was enormous: envelopes five times the size and weight of the ones I had put in the postbox at the end of the road were squashed back through my letterbox. There were letters of support, worksheets, samples of tea and gummy sweets, key rings and bouncy desk toys. I was a diligent child and took my rewards seriously, reading the worksheets and using tiny coloured pencils for the dot-to-dots, sticking stickers about the history of tinned food as enthusiastically as I ate the wine gums.
What stuck in my 10-year-old mind was that, while it was a Frenchman who invented a method of preserving, it was an Englishman who was granted the patent to do it in tin cans. Now, I know the Frenchman was called Nicolas Appert and there was another, Philippe de Girard, who brought the process to England, where it was patented in 1811 by Englishman Peter Durand during the reign of George III – Norman Cowell, a retired lecturer at the department of food science at Reading University, has done extensive research about this, which makes for wonderful reading. However, at 10, I was simply grateful to anyone involved in the discovery that beef, beans, peaches, custard and tomatoes could be put in tins.
Plum tomatoes are the athletes of the tomato world. They’re meaty and muscular, with relatively little juice and just a few seeds, which makes them ideal for putting in tins because they don’t disintegrate (though you can then mash them to a sauce). San Marzano are the Olympians, keeping their shape and having a good balance of sweet and savoury. They’re worth looking out for, especially if they’re marked DOP, but, that said, the last thing tinned tomatoes need is exclusivity – try different brands and go for the one that suits your pocket and tastebuds best. There is no such ambivalence or cloudy opinions on anchovies: they are either the greatest thing or the devil incarnate. Nor are there mild feelings about the brown-grey sludge that results from melting anchovies with 30g of butter and three tablespoons of olive oil – you either think it’s beautiful or you don’t. The finished sauce is excellent as is, or do as the River Cafe does and stir in some cream. Or sprinkle 50g of grated parmesan into the pan during the last minutes of cooking, which will soften the edges and make a good sauce from two tins even better.
Pasta with tomato, anchovy and rosemary sauce
Prep 10 min
Cook 40 min
Serves 4-6
3 tbsp olive oil
30g butter
1 small tin anchovies in oil, drained
1 sprig rosemary, leaves only, chopped finely
800g tin peeled plum tomatoes
75g parmesan, grated
1 tbsp cream (optional)
500g pasta (penne, fusilli,spaghetti or bucatini)
Melt the olive oil and butter in a heavy-based frying pan over a medium-low heat. Add the anchovies and rosemary, mashing the anchovies until they melt into the oil and butter.
Using scissors, chop the tomatoes while still in the tin, then add to the frying pan, mashing with a spoon to break them up further. Bring almost to a boil, then reduce the heat and gently simmer until the sauce is thick and rich – about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the pasta according to the pack instructions in plenty of boiling salted water, then drain.
In the last minutes of cooking, add two-thirds of the parmesan to the sauce, and a little cream if you like.
Add the pasta to the sauce and serve with the rest of the parmesan sprinkled on top.
