Spam: how a ration became a favourite

Few foods carry as much baggage as a tin of Spam. In Britain it means chip-shop fritters. In Korea it is the heart of a stew named after an army base. In Hawaii it comes on a block of rice, bound with nori. These are the same tin, but different stories, and the difference is worth knowing.

The tin itself is American. Hormel produced the first can on 5 July 1937, four years before the United States entered the war that would carry it round the world. What happened next depended on why it arrived and who was eating it.

A note on names before we start: Spam is a brand. The generic is luncheon meat, and supermarket own-label tins do the same job in every recipe below at a lower price. Where a dish is known by the brand name we use it; the ingredient we link is tinned luncheon meat.

Britain: points, not coupons

Spam came to Britain as aid. Through the Lend-Lease agreement, the United States shipped food alongside munitions, and Spam and dried egg were among it.

It did not arrive on the basic ration. In 1941 the Ministry of Food introduced a points scheme for tinned goods, alongside the fixed weekly allowances. Points could be spent on whichever of those goods a household chose, and the points price of each item moved with supply. In December 1941 an MP asked in the Commons how many points tins of Spam, and its rivals Mor and Treet, cost. The answer was 16 points a pound, or one point an ounce.

That matters for how the food was remembered. Points goods were the part of the diet a household chose. A tin of meat bought with points was a small decision made at home, and the habits formed around it outlasted the scheme. Spam is still on British shelves, and the fritter, a thick slice in plain batter, became its best-known British form.

Cook it: Spam fritters, in flour-and-water batter, the chip-shop way.

Okinawa: what the rations left behind

The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 left the island devastated, and for a period afterwards much of the population lived on United States military rations. These included foods that were new to Okinawan kitchens, among them pork luncheon meat and corned beef hash.

Okinawa remained under American administration until 1972, and United States bases are still there. The historian Chris Ames traces the word Okinawans used for these goods, amerikamun, “American things”. Its meaning has never settled. At times it stood for access to American plenty; at others for the occupation and for the bases that stayed. The food carries that ambivalence with it.

This is why luncheon meat belongs to Okinawan cooking in a way it does not to mainland Japanese cooking. On Okinawa it went into existing dishes, not alongside them: sliced and fried with egg, or cut into champuru, the island’s stir-fry. We have not yet published a champuru recipe, because the classic version depends on fresh bitter melon, and pretending a tin replaces it would not be honest.

Korea: the stew named after the base

Budae means military base, and budae-jjigae is army base stew. After the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, food was scarce, and processed meat taken or smuggled out of United States bases found its way into Korean kitchens. Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, where the US Army kept much of its food and equipment, became the dish’s centre, and restaurants there still trade on the name.

What makes the dish Korean rather than American is the method. American soldiers grilled the meat. Korean cooks put it where they would put any other protein: into a jjigae, a stew built on kimchi and chilli paste. The food critic Hwang Kyo-ik has made the point that this is how Korean cooking has always absorbed new ingredients. Chilli itself only reached Korea in the late 1500s.

Nobody wrote down an original recipe, because there was not one. The dish was whatever the base supplied. Instant noodles and tinned beans are now usual, and plenty of people add a slice of cheese.

For a long time, using the name at all was viewed as a disgrace. Today the original Uijeongbu restaurants turn up on lists of places worth the trip.

Cook it: Budae-jjigae, almost entirely from the cupboard, in one pot on one ring.

Hawaii: when the fishing stopped

The usual story is that soldiers brought Spam to Hawaii and shared it, and they did. But the food historian Rachel Laudan, quoted by National Geographic, argues that the bigger cause was the loss of fish.

Hawaii’s deep-sea fishing was largely run by people of Japanese descent. In 1940 a federal law barred fishing vessels of five tons or more from licences unless their owner was a US citizen, and in 1941 the territory banned non-citizens from fishing with certain nets within a mile of shore. The 1940 law, in the words of one historian Laudan draws on, abruptly ended the careers of many fishermen in Hawaii. Laudan’s view is that without tinned meat and sardines, the local economy would have collapsed.

Spam filled a gap in a diet already built around rice, and it was cooked the way that diet cooked things. Spam musubi, a block of rice topped with a glazed slice and bound with a strip of nori, is sold everywhere in Hawaii now. It is younger than it looks: two women in Hawaii are usually credited, both selling it in the early 1980s, and nobody knows for certain who was first. Hawaii still eats more Spam per head than anywhere else in the United States: National Geographic put it at around five million pounds a year, or about six cans a person.

Cook it: Spam musubi. Make it to eat that day; rice left at ambient temperature is a real risk without a fridge, and our rice article explains why.

The same tin, four reasons

Britain took it in as aid and kept it as a habit. Okinawa lived on it after a battle, and still has mixed feelings about where it came from. Korea took it from the bases and made it Korean. Hawaii needed it when the fishing boats were tied up, and cooked it as it already cooked fish.

None of these dishes is a compromise. Each is what competent cooks made of what they had, and that is the whole idea of this site.