How scarcity made dishes people love

Order breakfast in a Hong Kong café and you may be given macaroni in broth with ham and a cup of tea made with evaporated milk. It only makes sense once you know what was in the cupboard. After the war, the city’s cha chaan teng built a cheap version of Western food out of local cooking and imported tins, and the Michelin Guide describes dishes adapted with ingredients “many of them canned”. In South Korea, Spam comes in gift boxes at Lunar New Year and Chuseok.

A lot of food that people now cook out of affection started as food cooked out of necessity. This page is about that pattern, because it is the whole premise of this site played out over a century: long-life ingredients, cooked well, turn into something people want rather than something they put up with.

Before the tin: salt, biscuit and the sea

The pattern is older than canning. Sailors lived on salt meat and ship’s biscuit, and out of them came lobscouse, a stew eaten in ports across northern Europe. In Liverpool it shortened to scouse, which National Museums Liverpool calls the city’s traditional dish, and it gave the city’s people their name. Our scouse goes back towards the ship, with corned beef.

In Newfoundland, fishermen needed ingredients that could last through long voyages, and made fish and brewis from salt cod and hard bread, with fried salt pork on top. Newfoundlanders still cook it. Neither was invented as comfort food. Both became it. The longer history of the fish is in salt cod: one fish, three histories.

Corned beef goes global

Industrial tinned meat arrived on a large scale from South America. The Liebig works at Fray Bentos in Uruguay exported meat extract and corned beef to Europe from 1865, and the site is now a UNESCO World Heritage landscape. Tinned corned beef, as “bully beef”, has been issued to British soldiers since the Boer War.

That tin went everywhere armies and trade went. In West Africa it is cooked into a red stew of tomato and pepper; in Jamaica it is cooked down with Scotch bonnet and eaten with rice. How exactly it reached those kitchens is less well recorded than how much it came to mean. Our corned beef stew says more.

The Kitchen Front

Britain introduced food rationing in January 1940, and meat and bacon were not freed until 1954. Lord Woolton, Minister of Food from April 1940, wrote in the notes for his first speech that “he who touches the Nation’s food is courting trouble”, and treated cooking well on short supply as a national skill, broadcasting to the housewives he called his Kitchen Front. His name went on a vegetable pie whose official recipe told cooks to vary it with whatever was in season; ours is Woolton pie from the store cupboard.

American tins were part of it. Tinned dried egg arrived from the United States in 1941, a 5 oz tin standing in for twelve eggs, and one woman remembered it to Museum Wales as “quite tasty”, with “a great deal of uses”. Spam came the same way: Hormel’s own history says it sent more than 100 million pounds to Allied troops. Sliced, battered and fried, it became the spam fritter.

Across the Pacific

The same tin landed differently in each place, and each place made something of its own from it. There is a longer telling in Spam: how a ration became a favourite.

Hawaii. Spam came with the military, and stayed partly because fresh fish went short: a 1940 federal rule driven by suspicion of Japanese immigrants took much of the islands’ fishing fleet off the water. Food historian Rachel Laudan told NBC that “Spam, to some extent, filled in the gap”. Decades later the islands’ Japanese rice ball met the American tin, and Spam musubi was born.

Guam. By the end of the war, malnutrition affected nearly the entire indigenous population, and American depots handed out tinned food from shelters that looked like small warehouses. Historian Anne Perez Hattori calls Spam a “metaphor for US generosity and valor” there, with all the weight that carries.

Korea. In the hungry years after the Korean War, meat from US bases went into the pot with kimchi and chilli paste, and became budae-jjigae, army base stew. Spam has been made under licence in South Korea since 1987, and is now a gift you give.

Hong Kong. Luncheon meat, evaporated milk and condensed milk became fixtures of the post-war café menu, and still are.

Not every hardship dish is a war dish

Koshari, Egypt’s everyday dish of rice, lentils and pasta, owes nothing to a military depot. It is what you make when dried staples are what you can afford, done so well that UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list in 2025. The same is true of most of the bean and grain dishes on this site: the cheapest things in the market, made worth queuing for.

Faith did the same work as poverty in many kitchens. The fasting traditions, from the Orthodox Lent to Ramadan, built whole cuisines on what is left when meat is off the table; see what fasting kitchens know.

What the tin also carries

It would be dishonest to tell this only as a warm story. The same tins carry memories of occupation, dependence and poor health.

In Korea, the name budae-jjigae was long seen as a disgrace. On Guam, people connect processed food with high levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. In Samoa, tinned corned beef is pisupo, from “pea soup”, exchanged at weddings and funerals; the artist Michel Tuffery built a life-size bull from flattened tins to ask what colonial economies have done to Pacific peoples. The food can be loved and the history still be uncomfortable. Both are true.

For the health side of tinned meat in proportion, see tinned meat, honestly.

Why the good ones stayed

Hardship explains how these foods arrived. It does not explain why people still cook them when they have a choice. That comes down to three things, and they are the useful part for anyone cooking from a long-life cupboard now.

The tin was folded into a technique people already trusted. Budae-jjigae is a Korean jjigae with new things in it. Musubi is an omusubi. The corned beef stew is a West African red stew. The tin was an ingredient, never the dish. That is the single best rule on this site: start from a way of cooking that already works, and let the tin play a part in it.

Something sharp, hot or savoury does the work. Kimchi and gochujang, garlic vinegar and chilli, Scotch bonnet, soy and sugar. Every one of these dishes leans on a strong preserved seasoning to lift salty, starchy, long-life food. See the spice kit.

They are good to eat together. A pot at the table, a pile of rice balls, a platter everyone dresses for themselves. Much of what people remember about these dishes is who they ate them with.

Start with the four recipes this page grew out of:

• Koshari: rice, lentils and pasta with spiced tomato, garlic vinegar and crisp onions
• Budae-jjigae: Korean army stew, almost all of it from tins and packets
• Spam musubi: glazed Spam on rice, wrapped in nori
• Corned beef stew, West African style, over rice