And be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you

[venta]

Tut, tut. I have, up til now, regarded ebee as one of the world's most well-prepared people. She can produce a first-aid kit which would shame a minor hospital from nowhere, and remains unflappably calm and competent if required to use it. On a recent holiday, some mischievous guests attempted to manufacture circumstances she hadn't catered or allowed for. We They failed.

I'm briefly camping out at her house just now and was about to make myself a sandwich (using a foodstuff which has been provided for me even though she doesn't eat the item in question).

This is why you can't trust a vegetarian to equip a kitchen. They don't treasure those vital, purpose-built little bits of metal which are so hard to do without. They don't, apparently, keep a pair of pliers[*] in case emergency intervention is called for. Bluntly, they don't have a strategy for dealing with corned-beef tins which have lost their keys.

Yes, yes, I'm sure you're all carnivores, and the reason that you're not equipped for this particular brand of crisis is just because you're southern or middle-class or something. So sue me.

[*] Long-nosed pliers, known in the family house as "81s" (after their part number on my Dad's original GPO tool-list). Useful for any number of cookery-related things, including tricky jobs like getting the funny stringy bits out of the legs of turkeys or opening corned-beef tins.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Was there ever any functional benefit to the packaging ? I have always wondered why the tins are such a damn fool shape - and, come to that, why they're so hard to open.

Despite my pro-corned beef stance, those strange tinned pies scare me. I don't believe I've ever eaten one.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

So that when you are in your nuclear bunker under the stairs, which is the only situation in which sane people would ever eat corned beef :p you can still eat corned beef if you forgot to get the tin opener out of the kitchen drawer before you spent 4 minutes madly barricading the cupboard under the stairs with mattresses and sandbags.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Good question -- I assumed so just because all the mfrs seem to do it the same, and it would seem a bit weird if they came up with it arbitrarily.

I suppose it would be quite (ie. even more) difficult to take out of the tin if it didn't taper away. And perhaps the fact of the taper militated against early tin-openers? We could speculate for hours.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I maintain it would be relatively easy to get out of a standard cylindrical tin (using a knife, in much the same way you can get cat/dog food out of a tin).

I have a feeling that the reason for the traditional tin-shape is just the sort of useless dross the mother will know, hopefully she will happen by and answer.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

it would seem a bit weird if they came up with it arbitrarily

But it would be way less weird if they all just imitated each other for marketing reasons.

Although that's allegedly not the real motivation.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Hmm... clearly cuboidal ones would pack tighter than eg. cylindrical ones, but I don't think the present frustum shape really packs all that tightly.

I think that even if just one mfr came up with it arbitrarily and the others all imitated for marketing purposes, that would still be pretty weird. I can only see it happening if that one had had a lengthy stranglehold and so completely "owned" consumers' ideative corned-beef-space before anyone else made an impression on the market. Which is certainly possible, but in that case it's weird that they've since disappeared from memory, leaving only their packaging legacy behind.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I bet it's to do with manufacturing the actual corned beef. Hmm, I wonder how they put the beef in the tins - do they squirt it in as fluid, or stamp out from a lump of beef using the tins, or what?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Here are 90,000 anecdotal reasons - one of whom imposes the incorrect spelling of Sharpe onto THE ADJECTIVE and should therefore die, preferably of clostridium botulinum from a tin of corned beef.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

We really like the strange tinned pies. B prefers steak and ale to steak and mushroom, though. Also, I am fond of goblins (tinned meat puddings).

My husband has a habit of buying corned beef in chilled packets. That's really weird.

[hendybear.livejournal.com]

I have a phobia about Fray Bentos pies..... I loved them when I was on holiday with my parents in the Caravan. Until we spent 12 weeks living as gypsy's waiting for our new house, when they became part of our "staple" diet....

Now I shudder at the thought of them, I guess the old adage of "to much of a good thing applies"