Think tinned food can never be good or fancy? Prudence Wade talks to Jack Monroe about her can-do new recipe collection.
Food writer Jack Monroe's enthusiasm is clear: It bubbles out with every word she speaks - which is a lot, because she sure speaks quickly.
So what is she so excited to talk about? The answer might surprise you - it's canned food. Monroe really isn't picky when it comes to tins - whether it's beef stew, Spam or canned mandarins - and she showcases them all in her new cookbook, Tin Can Cook.
This is Monroe's fifth book, and by far her boldest. She's always focused on cooking on a budget of course, and this one is an extension of this theme - born out of her experience as a food bank-user, when all she had to cook with were tins. Now, Monroe wants to overturn misconceptions around cans, which she thinks suffer from a "definite PR problem", all tied up with deep-rooted classism.
She's well aware of canned food's dodgy reputation. "You say tinned food to people and they think of post-war rations, Brexit stockpiles or the stuff your nan has at the back of her cupboard," she says with a groan.
Through developing the recipes for this book though, Monroe realised she too was holding onto a fair few misconceptions of her own. Take canned steak: "I thought I wasn't going to eat or cook it, because I had these horrible memories of stewed steak," she says. "But actually, I took it and turned it into this tender barbecued beef, and then I put it in a curry - because it's just slow-cooked tender beef underneath all that sloppy gravy."
Changing her own perception was crucial to pulling off the project. "Once I'd got over my own initial childhood phobias of stuff I'd eaten as a kid and not particularly enjoyed, there was a whole world open to me and I wanted to invite other people into it," she explains.
So why do tins have such a PR problem? Monroe reckons it's "definitely a class thing".
"My parents were both working class and we used loads of tins as kids. I didn't think it was anything weird, until I started mixing in the food world and every recipe book includes fine grass-fed beef that's had a massage, extra virgin olive oil or fresh tomatoes," she says, with a cheeky glint in her eye. "The only time you really see tinned food in a cookbook is the occasional can of chopped tomatoes, and even then it's with the caveat that chopped tomatoes are 'fine'."
What Monroe wants to do with this book is show that no food is only for higher-income people. For her, the defining example is the cannellini beurre blanc, which she says is "a recipe I'd not cooked myself in seven years as a food writer, because I thought I was too working class to make beurre blanc - I thought beurre blanc was for other people".
At this point, Monroe becomes so impassioned she's fighting back tears. Including a tin can recipe for beurre blanc is, for her, a way to "sum up my whole ethos behind this book" in making food for everyone - no matter how 'fancy' it might seem.
The chasm between what people think is food for the sophisticated and wealthy and for everyday people is, she says, "deeply ingrained".
"I felt I wasn't good enough to make this fancy food, when actually it's people's attitudes that aren't good enough," she adds. "I want to make the best of everything accessible to everyone, no matter how small their kitchen or how small their budget is."
To achieve this, Monroe steeled herself for a lot of hard work to dress up cans. But in fact, it was a whole lot easier than she anticipated. "What surprised me was the sheer scope of possibility once I started to - no pun intended - crack into the tins and start to throw things together," she recalls. "I'm never short of ideas for even more recipes from cans."
In fact, she discovered that they can be broken down and "used as the building blocks to make delicious, restaurant-quality meals - and that's not a term I use lightly".
Monroe isn't the only one who was blown away by her tin-based adventures. She started making the recipes for friends and family, without telling them what they were made out of - and "they never would have guessed".
The book features plenty of what Monroe's perhaps best at too: Creating weird and wonderful combinations that work.
This is obviously her favourite part of cooking. "I do just sit in my kitchen and feel like a mad scientist sometimes, hurling things together and making them work," she says conspiratorially. "It's never been more fun than when I'm standing there with a can of steak in one hand and a tin of mandarins in the other, thinking 'you've gone too far this time...'!"
And yet she hadn't - that combo actually happened and after 45 minutes on the hob, Monroe came back to find "a very good approximation of a slow-cooked Brazilian feijoada that went in the book. It was almost like the heavens had opened and I let out this massive sigh of relief."
She credits her unusual way of thinking about food and flavours to her autism. "I don't approach recipes like other people do," she says. "I'm always throwing ingredients together that other people may not have thought of, or would initially say didn't work, and somehow 99% of the time manage to pull it off.
"It's just how my brain works," Monroe adds. "It's not wired like other people's and I never really realised that until I started publishing recipes."
Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store-cupboard Recipes by Jack Monroe is published by Bluebird, priced £6.99. Available now.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here