The Joy of SPAM
And since I’ve been discussing canned foods, let me say something about SPAM. In the late 1980s I found myself in the Hawaiian Islands. SPAM was everywhere. Here’s a rundown from my Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary History.
“It Must Be A Local Delicacy.” From Ann Kondo Corum, Hawaii’s SPAM Cookbook (Bess Press, 1987).
Hawaii gives SPAM an Asian or Pacific twist. It is perhaps most commonly fried and served with rice (and maybe eggs) for breakfast or a quick lunch or dinner. Victor Hao Li, the urbane former president of the federally funded East-West Center, suggests “Begin the day with thickly sliced Spam, fried crisp on the outside, served with rice and sunny-side eggs plus a streak of oyster sauce across the top. (In truth, this really does taste better than jook.)”
John de Soto, of Portuguese origin and a Council member of the City and County of Honolulu, establishes his credentials with his constituents by a Japanese kind of dish: “When I was a kid, we always had rice and nori and SPAM around the house, and we would eat those things in various ways. When there were leftovers, we put them together, creating a kind of sandwich, . . . which we called DeSPAMwich.” . . .
SPAM can be wrapped in ti leaves or foil and left roasting in the ashes while you go fishing. It can be cooked in a little soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and ginger, and served on toothpicks for cocktails. It is a common stuffing for deep-fried wonton. It can be mixed with Chinese fishcake. It can be used to stuff aburage. You can make SPAM lumpia with kamaboko, green onion, and eggs. Just as good is SPAM fried rice or chow fun or stir-fry. It is standard as a topping for saimin.
If your taste runs to the Japanese, SPAM can be used to stuff lotus root or cooked with miso or daikon, and of course, it makes excellent tempura. Or, if it runs to the Korean, you can skewer squares of SPAM with squares of kim chee, dredge them in flour, dip in beaten egg, and deep-fry to make SPAM and kim chee jun.
Needless to say it also combines happily with haole [white] foods to make omelets, meatballs, burgers, quiche, or macaroni and cheese. Sometimes it is even eaten on white bread as a sandwich.
Until arriving in Hawaii I’d never given SPAM much thought. It had occasionally appeared at school lunches, dipped in batter, and fried, not an appealing presentation. That was nothing special though. Practically nothing in the British school lunches of my youth was appealing.
The popularity of SPAM in Hawaii could not be put down to ignorance or philistinism. People were extraordinarily well informed about food.
It wasn’t a bookish kind of information. No one used cookbooks. And the food was not the kind of Mediterraneanized Anglo food of the US mainland or Britain. Instead the food knowledge was a really-know-your-rice, catch-your-own-fish, share-the foods-of-the-Japanese, Koreans, Han Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Okinawans, Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, and Anglos, make-fish-sauce (garum) under-the-kitchen-sink, kind.
So when I wrote The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage I had to come to terms with SPAM.
To take on SPAM is to pick at all the ethnic and economic seams of Hawaii. To newcomers, to nutritionists, to those with pretensions to gourmet status, SPAM is an embarrassment, serviceable during wartime rationing perhaps, but too salty, too fatty, too over processed to be eaten in these enlightened times. It contains—horrors—256 fat calories for every 4-ounce servicing. Its manufacturer—-can you imagine? —advertizes not recipes but SPAM carving contests.
But SPAM is so satisfyingly easy to dismiss that I have become uneasy about being so smug. I’m no longer sure that a well-fed urbanite like myself, with a full freezer and supermarkets just down the road, should be too sniffy about canned meat. My alternatives to SPAM are fresh meats, not dried and salted meat and fish. I do not have to spend hours fishing, calm or storm, but simply pop down to the local market. I do not have to worry about my fish going bad in the tropical heat, I just stick it in the refrigerator or freezer. I am not concerned that fresh fish costs more than SPAM because I can afford it. And what I suffer from is an excess, not a deficiency, of fat in my diet.
Such considerations make me a little more aware of why in remote Pacific islands (and in many other parts of the world), SPAM, like other canned meats, had such appeal.
It began in the 1930s, when the Hormel Company set about designing a canned meat that was neither tough nor bland, two of the chief problems with canned meats. To beat the toughness, they ground pork up finely; to give it savor, they spiced it up with salt, sugar, and a variety of other flavorings. They held a competition for a catchy name: in 1937, a certain Keith Daugneau submitted the winning entry—SPAM (spiced ham)—and walked off with the $100 prize.
In Hawaii, SPAM joined and then overtook sardines, luncheon meat, corned beef, and Vienna sausages as a favorite. All keep well, are quick and easy to prepare, can be stretched with vegetables, and taste good with rice. In World War II, when offshore fishing was prohibited in Hawaii, SPAM helped fill the gap.
Locals [the diverse peoples of Hawaii] then, understandably regard SPAM as thrifty and tasty, a food of childhood, a food of family meals and picnics at the beach, a food of convenience. A food of convenience, moreover, with a certain status, harking back to the time when buying something canned conveyed affluence and keeping up with the times. And a food welcomed by many of their relatives in Asia in the hungry days after World War II.
Even the fact that it can be carved is endearing because it make SPAM easy to shape for sushi and musubi. It if the motherhood-and-apple-pie of Hawaii, not specific to any ethnic group, and hence invoked by politicians like de Soto to show just how deep their Local roots go. The governor can refer to his State of the State address to the Legislature as a “SPAM-and-rice kind of speech” and have the quip quoted approvingly in the newspapers.
For parties, one student of Japanese ancestry told me, her family put out a can of tender, juicy SPAM and some chopped onions, and invited everyone to dig in with their chopsticks.
They lived at the very end of the road on the island of Kauai. Beyond their small wooden house the Pacific stretched for thousands of miles. They grew their own vegetables. For their 50 lb bags of rice they bumped back along miles of rutted track to the nearest mom ‘n pop store; there were no supermarkets when she was growing up. Fish was not available because there was no protective fringing reef in that part of the island.
For meat, her father and brothers scaled the crumbly precipices to hunt wild goat. Some they ate fresh, the rest they preserved as jerky. She brought some for me to try. The texture and taste were utterly unforgettable. I won’t even try to describe them. It’s enough to say that it was neither tender nor juicy.
Maybe now that the standard of living has risen in Hawaii, politicians should be moving away from the inverse snobbery of SPAM, and Locals should be cutting it out of their diet.
But for what? For a fast-food hamburger covered with glutinous sauce on a slimy bun, accompanied by French-fried processed potatoes. Surely, for both flavor and health, the SPAM musubi, with is good rice, its wrapping of nori, and the sliver of SPAM with a touch of salt, sugar and soy sauce, is a better bet.
So now, when as regularly as the swallows return for the summer, some American newspaper publishes another article oohing and aahing over some group’s eccentric habit of eating SPAM, like this in article on SPAM in Korea a month ago in the New York Times, I sigh and twiddle my fingers, muttering to myself that really SPAM is just pate by another name.
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And an addendum. A link to Spam, a special edition of the excellent Eat This podcast by Jeremy Cherfas. Monty Python meets Hormel. Not to be missed.
- Is the fresh the enemy of good canned food?
- Culinary History Award, International Association of Culinary Professionals
SPAM IS a form of pâté, indeed!
Good memories, Rachel. On my side of the Pacific in the late ’80’s, it was all canned corned beef (or mutton, the NZ alternative). Colonial difference? When you visited a village and you made an offering of corned beef cans, the Fijians woukld treat it like a box of chocolates.
Then there is palusami: corned beef, onion and coconut cream, wrapped in rourou (taro leaves), protected in banana leaf, tied with a vegetal string and cooked in the earthy lovo (umu)! I came to know this in Fiji but the Samoans claim it their national dish. Impossible to replicate here in Brussels, there is no import of rourou (probably because of the oxalate content).
Yes, Nick, colonial difference I think. Palusami crops up in Hawaii as lau lau though it’s not normally made with corned beef (except by Samoans). And yes, you do need to be careful with taro.
A very interesting article. Some years ago, after reading a history of SPAM, I decided to try it. I found the social history, the effect of the war years on the diet of the Pacific in particular, very interesting. So I bought the regular and different kinds: low-sodium, low-fat. At that time, there was no version (at least in Canada) that combined these two desiderata. This is what sunk the dish for me. I could have lived with the high fat content but to my taste, regular SPAM, at least then (20 years ago or so) contained a daunting amount of salt. The predominant taste seemed of salt in fact and even with thin slices, the taste was overwhelming. I could see it in small pieces giving savor to a starch base such as rice or potatoes, but even sliced with eggs the sodium rate seemed way too high. At that time too I wasn’t even thinking of the health side, just eatability so to speak. Of course that was me, brought up with our typical diet here, and I recognize that in some places a tolerance for salt differs and also, used in a certain way (e.g. with rice as you described) the food assumed the role of a relish. Jane Grigson mentions something similar in relation to red herrings.
The low-sodium one was better although still plenty salty. But anyway I never went back to it.
I agree that qua a comestible, it is easily on a par in terms of its saline and other attributes with other foods. Oysters, at least on the East Coast, are very salty too, I can never eat more than one or two, it’s like drinking seawater. So are most hams including many famous European hams. Foie gras is famously very fat as are many sausages, or cream sauces, say (or ice cream, an American favorite). There is nothing that inheres in SPAM to make it lesser although being canned probably didn’t help. It is just one of those odd things, certain things get typed early on and it is difficult to change perceptions after.
Gary
Hi Gary. And interesting to hear about your experiments with SPAM. And as to the salt, when SPAM became popular a lot of people in Hawaii still had very heavy laboring jobs as plantation workers in a hot climate, which may have meant that the extra salt would be welcome. And it goes without saying that rice would be served even with SPAM and eggs. So the SPAM is almost invariably more like a relish than the big pieces of meat that mainlanders eat. Agree about the typing.
Yes, all makes sense. Thanks Rachel, and for this post again.
I am going to persist with SPAM though, maybe this time it will be different!
Gary
Life’s short. There’s more good stuff to eat than there is time to eat it. Unless you have strong reasons, I’m not sure I’d worry about persisting.
I liked the flavour; it was the heavy salt part I couldn’t take. In checking the company’s website, I see there is now a “Lite” version that advertises 25% less salt and also 50% less fat. I am going to try this one, admittedly it isn’t the fully Monty original but it may offer the right balance for me.
Gary
Enjoy!
Interesting how we start to denigrate good foods with humble origins
Memories of WWII in the Philadelphia suburbs and a mother who didn’t know how to cook. My mouth waters! But a really interesting look at something we should be noticing. Thank you.
bkw
Barbara, Even after ten years in Hawaii I am not a regular SPAM eater. But I am very wary of airily dismissing eating habits that seem silly or odd to the well-heeled circles I move in until I understand why they are popular.
I served SPAM musubi to some well-fed Edinburgh surbanites after reading your description of them. I served it alongside Rumaki and 19th century anchovy toasts etc.So I guess that tells you a bit about my pretensions and smugness. I thought that all these things might be interesting to try as they are are/were very popular, but not in Edinburgh 2013. I explained what each item was and didn’t play up any yuk factor angle. People loved it. I’ll actually be making more SPAM musubi for a friends Tiki theme party soon (it’s not all Haggis and oatcakes in Scotland after all).
My parallel example, Adam, is serving SPAM musubi to a culinary history group years and years ago when I was first working on the foods of Hawaii. They all enthusiastically chomped until one asked what it was. The faces were priceless as gastronomic dissonance hit and they realized they were enjoying something they weren’t supposed to. I love the idea of a Tiki theme party in Edinburgh. BTW, do you know Kaori O’Connor’s great article on the luau?
“The Hawaiian Luau: A Cultural Biography, With Recipes”? No, but it look very interesting and will chase it up. Going back to SPAM, there are a lot of articles/books etc on what delicious food people eat and what yucky foods people eat, but not much on why food is delicious or yucky. SPAM served out of context and found to be delicious is an interesting case study no? Also what delicious means; I’m guessing there is no irony in the deliciousness of SPAM in Hawaii, nor at your culinary history group, but maybe not so at my party in Edinburgh? The appreciation of food cultures through medium of middle-class cocktail party irony – is this progression I wonder?
No I think that’s the book that is coming out. I’ll send you a pdf of the article. I think delicious and yucky are highly, highly influenced by one’s background. There is a big literature on disgust which is close to yucky and which I should really look at. But it’s interesting to see the comments here and on Facebook about Spam.
Well, this post isn’t about SPAM, but about food being delicious and food being yucky. And it’s really late into the conversation!
Do you or any of your readers know what “balut” is? It’s a Philippine delicacy: a duck embryo that’s been steamed alive and then eaten in its shell. When I was growing up in the Philippines, my gosh, it was so good and so delicious. When my mom bought some for us, I knew that she and I were in for a treat!
Fast forward to today. I’m in my mid-forties and have travelled the world on my stomach. I’ve eaten a 40-cent bowl of pho in Hanoi at a sidewalk “cafe”, next to an open gutter. I’ve eaten at g/astronomically expensive eateries. And balut? Well, let’s just say that I really do find it yucky now. I know it has a lot to do with knowing how that little duckling has been killed. I know it’s perceptions. Some would say it borders on hypocrisy, as I am a carnivore. But, I know that I just can’t eat balut anymore. Not that I’d be able to find any here where my family and I currently live.
Well, SPAM does provoke the yucky/delicious response. Thanks so much for adding your thoughts on balut, another really, really touchy food.
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