Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 January 29

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 29

Tinned tuna in the UK

When did tinned tuna reach the UK? My relative who worked in a small "grocery" shop in the late 1940s and 1950s says it was unheard of in that era, both in the shop and generally. She reckons it first emerged in the late 70s. Any reliable sources? Or sauces? Sounds fishy to me. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:05, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

It was available, but rare. It's in the recipe books, but not in the corner shops or on the table. Tuna was an "exotic" species, as we don't catch it either locally or in the Empire / Commonwealth. OTOH, tinned salmon (usually Canadian Pacific coast) was well known as a "posh" treat. We certainly didn't have the US thing of tinned tuna being a very much everyday foodstuff and that whole "chicken of the sea" low-budget pitch for it as cheap protein. My family had a small corner shop grocers from the 1920 to 1980s: salmon and crab, but not tuna. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:42, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, she said tinned salmon was available, but kept 'under the counter'! When did tinned tuna arrive in the UK? --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 12:40, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the date, but the US style of cheap canned tuna as a staple isn't as known in mainland Europe, but luxury canned tunas have been known about and used for a long time. Salade niçoise has used canned tuna for a long time, and really high end stuff like Italian Ventresca can run US$2-3 per ounce. So, it may have been a specialty item or luxury item before it was more commonly available. As an aside, and perhaps to give you a data point, there's a scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where one character Nigel Tufnel (who is British, portrayed by American-born actor Christopher Guest) expresses wonder at American canned tuna, so it does seem that at least in the 1970s, it was a rare item. I'm not entirely sure one could, with available research, determine when and from where the first tin of tuna fish arrived in the UK, but there are reasons why it may have been available, if rare, much earlier than the average Brit would have been aware of it. However, it may have been a specialty food item, (as in Ventresca tuna or for salade niçoise) or it could have been brought over by American servicemen in WWI or WWII. According to this, tuna was first canned in 1904, and by WWI was in full production and widespread use in America. --Jayron32 13:22, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

• Salmon wasn't kept under our counter, it was prominently displayed on the shelves, because you'd want to show off this "posh" ingredient.

Tuna was probably around in the UK for as long as canning and railways. However it would be rare, like wine and olives. Not from a suburban high street grocer like ours, but there were delicatessen, usually Italian, in the middle of the city where it could be bought. If you look at early C20th cookbooks, dishes like tuna-based salads niçoise were well known, but only amongst the upper-middle classes, or the younger upper classes. In particular, the Mediterranean became a fashionable holiday destination in the 1930s, just one of Wallis Simpson's influences and its cooking came back to England. The British in fact had been great ones for holidaying on the Riviera since the Belle Epoque, and the advent of the PLM. Escoffier came to London around 1890 to the Savoy Hotel and I doubt he'd even let brexit stand in the way of his favoured ingredients. Likewise in Cardiff and Glasgow, or any of the major ports, you had an Italian community with access to shipping, so if it was canned in Italy, it would make it back to the UK, if only to a handful of shops.

If you're interested in food in this period, then you have to read Elizabeth David. She still describes tuna as 'tunny', compares it to veal as the nearest recognisable British equivalent, and in 1950 is bemoaning the lack of it in England (meaning London) whilst it being cheap and plentiful in the South of France. By 1951 she's describing how to cook it, there being no other source than fresh, but by 1954 she's describing it from an Italian context; canned in oil in large tins in Sardinia, sometimes available similarly in the UK and by 1963 there's an editor's note recommending Epicure as the brand to look out for. Epicure was indeed a widely-known brand right into the 1980s, for 'exotic' produce (which in the UK means anything we won't be able to get any more after March). Sadly I can't find my copy of Katharine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter, because that truly is the arbiter of whether a foodstuff had made it to being 'cheap and cheerful' by 1960. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:44, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

In my 1971 reprint of the 1963 Penguin edition of CiaB (which followed its original 1961 publication by MacGibbon & Kee as Kitchen in the Corner), Whitehorn mentions tuna (as "tunnyfish") only once, as an ingredient of French Beans and Tunny Salad (p 107), saying "Cook fresh beans, or open and slightly heat a tin (not so nice). Add French Dressing while still warm; arrange tunny fish pieces on it." Her "pieces" may suggest fresh, not tinned, produce.

However, in How to Survive in the Kitchen (Eyre Methuen, 1979) her recipe for Salad Niçoise (p 46) includes "a small tin of tuna fish". {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.251.247 (talk) 16:06, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

According to John West's own archive they were advertising tuna on colour television in the UK by 1972 see page 2, suggesting that by then it was less of a luxury item, which matches my own recollection of occasionally having tuna in sandwiches by the early 1970s (and we didn't do luxury food). Mikenorton (talk) 16:04, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks all. Fascinating. The John West advert reference especially is a corking result. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:17, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

That agrees with my own recollection. A 1960s school book had a colourful picture of people in the Pacific catching enormous "tunny fish", but none of us had ever seen such a thing before. I don't recall seeing tinned tuna until I was in secondary school (from 1970) and it was some years later that I eventually connected "tuna" with "tunny". Tinned fish in my childhood was pink salmon, sardines or pilchards. Alansplodge (talk) 11:30, 31 January 2019 (UTC)