Spam: The tinned meaty treat that brought a taste of the ‘hot-dog life of Hollywood’ to war-weary Britain

When the 18-year-old daughter of a grocer celebrated Boxing Day in 1943 with Spam salad, had a whisper of Hollywood glamour descended on the Lincolnshire town of Grantham?

Margaret Thatcher retained fond memories of that wartime Christmas spread: ‘We had friends in and I can quite vividly remember we opened a can of Spam luncheon meat,’ she recalled, decades later. ‘We had lettuce and tomatoes and peaches, so it was Spam and salad.’

Pink and flabby, greasy as Brylcreem and invented by Hormel & Co in Austin, US, during the Great Depression, Spam was a creative way of using pork shoulder meat, previously often discarded as waste because it took so long to cut from the bone.

On New Year’s Eve, 1936, company president Jay Hormel offered a $100 (£80) prize to his party guests if they could name his new product. One guest famously came up with Spam. Does it derive from ‘spiced ham’? ‘Spiced shoulder and ham’? Or perhaps ‘shoulder pork and ham’? The company has never explained. Perhaps the etymology simply got lost in a New Year’s hangover.

Spam was available, if in short supply, in British grocer’s shops from 1941. However, by 1942, it was Spam-with-everything, courtesy of the Lend-Lease programme of aid shipments from America to her allies — and weren’t we grateful.

Spam was ‘the best tinned food that I’ve tasted in two wars,’ gushed Amelia Garrett from London in fan mail to Hormel & Co. The Rochdale Observer suggested, tongue in cheek, that it would bring a taste of ‘the high, hot-dog life of Hollywood’ and that the local Co-op (and also, perhaps, two Grantham grocer’s shops belonging to Alfred Roberts, father of Thatcher) would be imbued with the ‘glamour of El Morocco’.

To the war-weary British, Spam seemed symbolic of the American lifestyle and positively exotic. We ate Spam omelette (made with dried eggs), Spam fritters, Spam-in-the-hole, Spam-with-everything. Newspapers and women’s magazines vied to give tips and recipes, as if a woman’s biggest contribution to the war effort was making Spam palatable. Even escalope Amigoni, with its whiff of la dolce vita, was, in fact, breadcrumbed Spam with turnip and carrots braised in margarine.

As it wasn’t rationed in the same way as sugar or tea, Spam could be purchased under the points system, which allowed shoppers some freedom of choice — those who couldn’t stomach it could opt for cornflakes or pilchards instead — although a 12oz can cost eight points, which was half a monthly allowance.

London restaurants even served gussied-up, camouflaged Spam. In 1944, Simpson’s in the Strand, renowned for its roast beef, was offering creamed Spam casserole instead; escalope du Barry, at a restaurant in Soho, sounds like haute cuisine, but turned out to be sliced Spam in cauliflower sauce. At the Green Midget Cafe in Bromley — scene of the Monty Python sketch that immortalised Spam for a new generation — you could have Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam or lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle pâté, brandy, a fried egg on top and Spam. ‘I don’t want ANY Spam,’ screeched comedian Graham Chapman.

‘As the war dragged on, people got really sick of it,’ explained the food historian Kelly Spring, author of Spam, A Global History (Reaktion Books, £12.99). ‘Spam wasn’t cool — out of the can, it’s a weird, jiggly meat.’ The recipe that most intrigued her, although she wasn’t brave enough to re-create it, she says, was tripe and Spam pie from ‘Lady Edith’s Hints’, published in a Belfast newspaper in 1942: the filling was made from 1lb of cooked tripe and two or three slivers of Spam.

Eventually, a backlash ensued against the tinned meat — there was simply too much of it. A Glaswegian man was fined for beating his wife after she gave him a meagre Spam sandwich to take to work. ‘It was the only thing I could get on a Monday,’ she claimed in her defence.

‘Real men’, it seems, didn’t eat spam. ‘There’s this idea that Spam was good enough for women, okay for their needs,’ notes Spring. ‘However, “real” meat was primarily for men, who had “protein priority”.’

A female war worker wrote to The Manchester Guardian after ordering a pie and a cup of tea for her cafeteria lunch: ‘You can’t have a pie,’ replied the attendant, with the faintest hint of reproach in her voice. ‘Pies are scarce today and we are reserving them for the gentlemen’s buffet. But,’ she added helpfully, ‘you can have a Spam sandwich.’

‘I was served with a really lady-like Spam sandwich,’ recalled the disgruntled customer, wondering why a woman with a full-time war job and a house to run, ‘should be denied priority for the benefit of a business gentleman who probably had a wife in the background planning his evening meal.’

Classless (because everybody ate it), Spam was to become a nostalgic, slightly embarrassing joke after the war. Council tenants taunted the aspirational middle-classes living in ‘Spam Valley’, homeowners so heavily mortgaged that they could only afford canned meat.

In the Armed Forces, however, Spam continued to have multifarious uses. Soldiers greased their guns and waterproofed their boots with it and even fashioned candles by inserting a twisted rag into empty cans. During the Korean War, US soldiers inked card faces onto slices of Spam, which lasted through three months’ worth of poker games, although one veteran complained: ‘We lost the deuce of diamonds when a dog ate it.’

Spam has proved such a mainstay of army rations it was reported that British soldiers in Afghanistan survived for six weeks on a diet of Spam carbonara, Spam stroganoff and Spam stir-fry, after the Taliban shot down a helicopter bearing fresh food supplies. That was in 2010—not long after we finally cleared our Lend-Lease debt to America, making the final payment of $83 million (£66.6 million) in December 2006. Although it was seen as a neighbourly gift, clearly there’s no such thing as free Spam.