Monday, 13 June 2022
I have a confession to make. I like Spam. I have no idea when I first tried it. According to Wikipedia, it was introduced by Hormel in 1937 and became very popular during WWII, both on the home front and for soldiers overseas. Since I was born in 1948, only three years after the end of the war, there were some habits that probably were maintained in households even though most rationing in the U.S. ended late 1945.
I remember seeing rationing books in drawers at my grandparents in Morton and I also remember we usually ate margarine instead of butter. There was this yellow packet of food dye that you mixed with the margarine to make it look like butter. I was so reared on margarine it was many years later in college that I actually started liking the taste of butter over margarine. I even helped my Aunt Sue churn butter at her place in Pulaski and still hated the taste.
I also remember seeing a gas rationing sticker pasted to the windshield of my grandfathers old truck. I think it was a black sticker and that meant he would be allotted 3 gallons per week. He never took the sticker from the windshield and I can only assume my brother did when he inherited the truck.
We always had cans of Spam around the house and when Dad would get hungry in the evening, he would often fry up some Spam and make a sandwich with it. As a toddler, I must have eaten my first piece begging for a bite of his Spamwich. I soon developed a taste for it and I preferred mine on white bread with mustard. I would never use mayo on it. Mustard lent a je ne sais quoi to it.
In case you are wondering, it is composed of pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, modified potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Better living through chemistry!
Soon I branched out to include a slice of onion or tomato and lettuce. I became a Spam aficionado. When I moved into the house here in Fort Lauderdale, I kept a supply of it on hand for hurricane preparedness. I suspect the shelf life is in the millenia. I kept about 10 tins in the utility room.
One day I noticed a strong odor coming from somewhere in the house. It took me a while to trace it to the utility room but I looked and looked and couldn’t find the source. I assumed some rat had crawled into the room and died behind either the washer or the dryer.
Some days later I went to get something off the shelves of the utility room and noticed that all 10 tins of Spam had exploded. What I had been smelling for several days was putrified Spam. There was a strong oxidant in the utility room and it had started corroding all the cans on the shelf. The Spam was the first to blow.
I still try to keep Spam available for emergencies but every so often – every 5 to 6 years – I get the urge to fry up some Spam and make a Spam and mustard sandwich. It still tastes like the Spam of my childhood and fills a nostalgic place in my stomach. Last night, I had a Spam, mustard and whole wheat bread Spamwich. I’ll probably be good for another five years. However, Dad taught me how to cube it and put it in scrambled eggs along with some cheese. It makes a great omelet. Come to think of it, that might be my next treat.
Stay tuned!