Tin cans are my security blanket

IHAVE ALWAYS kept a wellstocked store cupboard — well, maybe not before the age of 10 or so, but as soon as I could, though initially I recall it centred more on marshmallows and Bazooka Joe bubble gum than rice and red kidney beans. Non-Jewish friends, I notice, sometimes do, sometimes don’t, depending on what kind of person they are. When I call my friend Jane and ask if she’s all right for food, she tells me she’s been well supplied during lockdown as she had already laid in a huge stock of provisions as a pre-Brexit precaution, which I must admit hadn’t even occurred to me.

Jewish women friends almost always have stores to outlast a lengthy siege. Of course they do — no need for explanations. But it’s not easy to delineate the underlying motivation to non-Jewish friends without sounding bonkers. Telling them that I always have in plenty of pasta, tinned tomatoes etcetera in case we have to board up the house and lie low when the SS/Cossacks/Far Right come for the Jews might sound — at best — more than averagely paranoid.

In any case, laying in provisions so we can ride out the storm doesn’t really make sense. If the Nazis do come for us, are they really going to slope off again just because our curtains are drawn and we’re hunkered down behind the sofa while we eat our pasta with tomato sauce? “Oh well — looks like no-one’s in. Let’s continue the Jew-hunt elsewhere!” Possibly not.

My Scottish (non-Jewish) grandmother did exactly the same thing, though in her case it wasn’t because of fears about pogroms or being carted away; it was because she had been so poor as a child herself, then had to raise her own children during the war with the challenges of strict rationing.

I remember when I was about eight, her showing me her pantry — a dark walk-in room off the dining-room, lined with shelves stacked with cans and jars. She was clearly very proud of it, and rightly so, and she picked the right child to show it to because I understood immediately how wonderful it was. She had come a long way from an impoverished and frankly pretty dreadful childhood, and I think those full shelves meant more to her than the fur stole she sometimes wore to the theatre or the perfectly polished Rover in the garage.

I promise I didn’t stockpile at the start of lockdown. On a couple of occasions, I went to a small shop and bought a couple of extra tins and some cooking oil, but I already had pasta, rice, passata and, naturally, the two items no Jewish household should ever be without: matzah meal and Telma chicken stock cubes (I think I might ask to have a handful buried with me to see me through the afterlife…).

Now, I have a single small box of back-up provisions in the shed: tinned tomatoes, tuna, red kidney beans (for chilli), chickpeas — blessed be the humble chickpea! So hard and horrid in a casserole, like pellets shot from an air-gun, yet elevated to the divine once blended with tahini, olive oil, garlic and lemon to become hummus.

The only oddity, now that I think about it, is tinned fruit. We never eat tinned fruit. Literally never. So why did I buy it (and it was definitely my doing, though I usually like to blame any weird shopping choices on The Husband)? Does it hark back to Scottish Granny’s lovely larder? (The LithuanianJewish one was known to us as “English Granny” — to her absolute delight — because she lived in London, to distinguish her from “Scottish Granny” in Glasgow). Or to my own childhood? My mother really didn’t believe in desserts. Years ahead of her time, she was vehemently anti-sugar. Having a proper pud after a meal was so rare that even now, decades later, I can still remember some of the individual occasions: Arctic Roll was greeted with nearecstasy, though as it was only a cylinder of plain vanilla ice-cream coated with a micro-thin layer of jam and wrapped in sponge, it’s hard to see now why it generated quite so much excitement.

Occasionally, however, we did have tinned fruit — exactly the same ones now nestled in a box in the shed: pears, peaches, mandarins. Rarely, a tin of fruit cocktail would appear and my sister and I would fight over the elusive top prize of a cherry (if lucky, one each). Even the name seemed sophisticated to us: Cocktail! Who could fail to love that?

Like Scottish Granny, I sometimes go into the shed not to fetch a tin but just to witness the soothing presence of my cache, like stroking a security blanket or fiddling with Greek worry-beads. I feel especially reassured by the sight of the tinned fruit — one tin of pear halves, one of tinned peaches, one of mandarin segments — waiting for when we are in need of a dish of comfort food. In the meantime, just knowing they’re there, ready and waiting, brings a small glimmer of joy.

Zelda Leon is half-Jewish by birth then did half a conversion course as an adult (half-measures in all things...) to affirm her Jewish status before a Rabbinical Board. She is a member of a Reform synagogue. Zelda Leon is a pseudonym.