Good Things Come in Big Tin Cans

by adam at 03:04 AM on May 15, 2006

I saw it sitting there on the shelf of The Milk Pail, our tiny local counterpart to New York's Fairway Market, which I miss like crazy these days. There it was, a massive tin can mysteriously labeled, "Giant White Bean Spread." Country of origin: Greece. Price: $1.82. I didn't know exactly what was inside, but here's what I did know: at $1.82 for 2 kg, who cares?

I have a confession: I am the guy that buys those huge mysterious cans covered in an inch of dust at the grocery store. It all started a few years ago when I bought a huge can at a local market in Queens. It was from Bulgaria, all of the writing on the can was in what I assume is Bulgarian, and it cost less than a buck. I think there was a picture of an eggplant on the label, and a stuck-on nutritional information label that I found less than comforting. But what was inside was amazing - delicious eggplant spread that kept me fed for about a week. And with barely any food poisoning!

Here's my theory: at a tiny factory in a small country somewhere sunny, a pair of brothers are working their hearts out packing their mama's recipe for marinated peppers into cans for shipment to the USA. "We'll be rich, Gregor!" one of the brothers declares. Unfortunately, because they don't speak English and don't know a thing about the American market, they pack their nation's most treasured delicacy into 5-gallon drums with a three-color label that features a purple child wearing a potato sack and a nuclear explosion in the background. When it arrives in America, it sits on the shelf forever, passed over because it looks not only like surplus government beans, but FOREIGN surplus government beans, and gets marked down almost to nothing. Then I buy it and eat for a month, crying with pleasure the whole time.

The can from The Milk Pail actually tasted like the best hummus you've never had. We went back, bought all 8 cans, and I'm afraid that Safeway won't be getting our $3.45 for 6 oz of hummus any more. Here's my perfect supermarket item: it should be a can that weighs about 6 pounds. There might be a picture of something on it that could pass for either a grapefruit or an avocado. There's no English on the label other than "Item of Country: Azerbaijan Contents: Vegetable Matter, Spice, Oils" And it costs 83 cents.