RECIPE: JACK MONROE .PHOTOGRAPHS: HANNAH HUGHES. FOOD STYLING: JESS MEYER. STYLING: TONY HUTCHINSON
Dear Philippe de Girard
I’m writing to you from the year 2021, hoping this letter travels back in time 200 years so it can reach you. I’ve recently written an entire cookbook, Tin Can Cook, using ingredients and food products mostly preserved in the modernday version of your original tin can.
Tin cans are so ubiquitous nowadays that they occupy entire aisles of our supermarkets (brightly lit, enclosed, enormous shops containing everything that used to be sold by the farmer, the butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, the merchants and the market stall holders, all under one roof!). If you could travel forward in time and visit a supermarket you’d find row upon row of neatly stacked tin cans.
While you were here in the present day, you’d perhaps be surprised to learn that, even with all our modern inventions and conveniences, poverty and malnutrition are still very present in today’s society.
Your invention has been an unlikely hero in difficult times. People all over the world who don’t have, or can’t afford to run, refrigerators (specially designed cupboards kept permanently cold to preserve fresh food in its prime) rely on charity food hampers from their churches and neighbours, consisting mostly of tin cans of preserved food.
You might be surprised to learn of the sheer array of foods that, thanks to your cleverly designed can, can be stored at an ambient temperature for months – even years, and remain safe to eat and packed full of goodness. Cured meats, soups and stews, fish, pulses and grains… We can enjoy exotic fruit and vegetables from far flung locations, as fresh as the day they were picked. The canning process allows companies such as Del Monte, which started in 1886 (not long after your era), to preserve juicy pineapples and other fruit at their source, with all their goodness, for people all over the world to enjoy.