SPAM, SPAM, SPAM!

A tinned treat courtesy of our ‘special relationship’ with the US, Spam offered Britons a taste of the ‘hot-dog life of Hollywood’ and was once served in Simpson's, discovers Mary Greene

- Mary Greene

WHEN the 18-year-old daughter of a grocer celebrated Boxing Day, 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 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.

‘We ate Spam omelette, Spam fritters, Spam-in-the-hole, Spam-with-everything’