A can opener or a cannot opener?
This is a short piece about my new book ‘Two’s Company – Simple: Fast and Fresh Recipes for Couples, Friends & Roommates, by Orlando Murrin. I am focussing on one of the first recipes I tried in the book because the corned beef brought back memories. First of all, just to explain that Orlando is a chef ‘friend’ of mine. I have never met him, but he is a member of my Facebook group, Archers Chit-Chat, and is a great source of advice and inspiration. It is because of Orlando that I now buy mixed sized free-range eggs, rather than the large ones. These are much kinder to the hens, who suffer from being pressurised into laying large eggs. This advice is endorsed by the British Hen Welfare Trust. Orlando knows that I do not take his other well-known piece of advice in the kitchen, which is to not bother to heat up your oven. Well, sadly my oven is not very advanced, despite probably being only about 5 years old, and it really does make a difference to my meals if I pre-heat the oven, especially for bread, pizza, cakes, scones and so on. I don’t do this to extremes though and find 10 minutes will generally suffice.
We as Chit-Chat were even mentioned in one of Orlando’s articles for the Waitrose news weekly paper. There are lots of keen cooks amongst us and the discussions can get quite heated (even if the ovens are not pre-heated!)
It is always great to have a new cookery book. Indeed as a keen amateur cook and a school librarian, I live by the mantras ‘You cannot have too many books’ as well as ‘You certainly cannot have too many cookery books.’
Today I decided to make the Corned Beef Hash Revisited from Orlando’s new book. You can see the results in the picture:
This was the kind of dish which I think would be great for breakfast or brunch, although Orlando suggests it for supper with some home-made baked beans. I decided to make it for lunch. We don’t eat that much meat and so when we do I quite like something more exciting than corned beef! But lunch seemed the right occasion for this dish. I served it with some sliced mushrooms, as there were some lurking in the fridge which really needed using up.
So what is the significance of the sub-title of this article? Well I was quite surprised to find that the can of corned beef was meant to be opened with a key! I had not seen one of those for years and it seemed so nostalgic. However, after having a go, the key snapped off and I had to resort to the can opener. Even though the can was rectangular with rounded corners, it was a relief that I did manage to open it. It got me thinking about cans of food and how we open them. The immediate literary reference which comes to mind is the can of pineapple in ‘Three Men in a boat’ which is one of those classic comedy scenes.
Here are some interesting facts about cans and can openers:
- Canned food was invented or came into being in 1810
- The can opener was invented in 1858
- In 1866 J. Osterhoudt patented the tin can with a key opener
- The modern can opener, with the wheel device, was invented in 1870, but it was tricky to use
- An improved version of the can opener, with a second, serrated wheel, was invented in 1925
We have had family holidays in self-catering accommodation and not been provided with a can opener. I have to say that we have fared better than George, Harris and Jerome in managing to get to the contents of our can. My daughter Jessica did very well with a knife on holiday in Sardinia. We had asked our host for some extra equipment in the kitchen, but failed to notice the absence of the can opener. Not that we eat much canned food, but canned tomatoes and chick peas are part of our staple diet! Strangely we also could not find a can opener in our apartment in Florida, so I made do with the end of a bottle opener. You will see my efforts from the picture, but of course this method would not have worked for the corned beef!
The trouble with this method of opening a can is that the whole structure gradually caves in the more holes that you make.
I have completely digressed from the main theme of this article which is the corned beef hash recipe in Orlando Murrin’s new book. He uses some lovely flavours in his recipe. Chilli, garlic and tabasco feature as well as worcestershire sauce, the latter of which I think is probably traditional. He also suggests flipping the hash over in sections to make it easier to manage.
We really enjoyed the hash, but I had one problem with it, which might be just me. I found it very hard to cook the eggs in the middle of the hash without burning the hash slightly. I did put the lid on my saute pan, but it is still much more tricky to cook eggs in this way than poaching them or frying them in the pan on their own. This is no criticism of Orlando’s recipe, but my own incompetence. Next time I think I shall just fry the eggs on their own and put them on top of the hash at the end. I do think that the home-made baked beans would have made it lovely and moist too, so I’ll do those next time.
I love to support independent bookshops, so here is a link to some of my favourite cookery books available: the-jolly-jaunts-of-sarah-kooky-cook Bookshop UK
Sarah, I can never get eggs to cook in a well in corned beef hash, so I don’t think it is just you. I fry them separately now as well. Not too bad at home, but I can see the point of saving on washing up if one is camping (corned beef is a staple when we’re camping).
Yes too true! I am not bothered about saving on pans, as they will go in the dishwasher anyway. We don’t like camping, but that is another funny story!
A fascinating piece, thank you!
I know what you mean about the eggs, although that is how I do them and I am always super-keen to avoid using another pan. I wonder if your pan was a bit smaller than mine, resulting in a thicker hash – and therefore the eggs took longer to cook. Just an idea, but if you made the indentations deeper, so the eggs were nearer the heat source, would that work?
On the preheating front: just out of interest, how long does your oven take to get to 200C (or 180 fan)? This would be helpful for me to know because if an oven is comparatively slow, it would explain why it is not heating the food at the early stage sufficiently quickly. In my oven, the food heats as the oven heats – they kind of keep up with each other.
About 15 minutes, although as we discussed, my thermometer is probably not the most accurate. But when I need the oven hot, as when making a pizza, it really does not do well if I heat it up for less than 15 minutes. The pizza does not really seem to cook until the oven is hot.
Yes you could be right about the pan and the eggs, but I think it is more that normally when I fry eggs, I find they do best with a bit of oil spooned over, which does not work well when the space around the egg has hash in the way!