The joys of combat food

Combat food seems to prove particularly divisive. It is the Marmite of culinary preparation:you either love it or loathe it. I’m firmly in the former camp.

Combat food isn’t specifically military, though there is a link. It refers to simple, no-nonsense, hearty fare, whose ingredients – typically from tins – can easily be thrown into a pot and quickly mixed, cooked, then poured into a large bowl (combat food doesn’t tend to work with delicate plates).

As I said, apparently divisive stuff. I once made the mistake of getting in touch with a then recent ex-girlfriend, thinking there was a chance of patching things up. Among a long and often impressively accurate list of my personal failings she sent back explaining why we would never meet again, she poured particular scorn on my terrible taste in food – especially my preference for combat food-type dishes.

There may be a touch of a gender divide when it comes to appreciating the joys of combat food. The ease of preparation certainly appeals to us impatient chaps who struggle with multi-tasking. At an aesthetic level I can see why elegant-minded ladies with a keen eye might be put off: combat food doesn’t win prizes for presentation. The results usually look a mess. But the sloppier the better, I say. That mess means lots of ingredients swirling around, bouncing off each other like a well-made cocktail. Furthermore, cooking combat food is dirt cheap – no bad thing given current inflation levels and a cost-of-living crisis.

The British Army takes much of the blame for my unstylish performance in the kitchen. I was conditioned to liking combat food through consuming endless ration packs in the turret of my Challenger 2 tank. After sleepless freezing nights on the Canadian prairie during live fire training exercises, the sloppy contents of an aluminium foil boil-in-the-bag tasted like manna from heaven.

It was the same during blustery tank ranges on the Welsh coast and rain-sodden exercises on Salisbury Plain: whatever lumpy, inscrutable stew-like mix the squadron quartermaster dished out from the back of his Land Rover, you didn’t quibble about the contents or presentation, you wolfed it down and relished it.

Freelancing in the Horn of Africa, I got used to a similar dining experience. The staple of most Ethiopian meals is injera, a giant grey spongey pancake-like bread. Upon its strangely rubbery surface are served a vast array of foods, ranging from multi-coloured mounds of spicy stews to vegetable curries to scrambled eggs to cubes of raw meat. They’ll even put spaghetti on top of injera, or chopped-up injera mixed with spices on top of an injera base.It might look or sound odd, but it always works. In Ethiopia’s neighbours of Djibouti and Somaliland, I invariably dined similarly on unpretentious mixes comprising the likes of lentils, chickpeas, eggs, fish, meat and pasta – and almost always proving reliably tasty, cheap and filling.

While bouncing around Spain of late, my current go-to combat food option is fabada asturiana. It’s a rich thick stew comprising lots of white beans with slices of pork and chorizo floating around. It's very filling and yours for €1.29 a tin – the fancier tinned versions push €2.49 – and after you add some fresh bread and a glass of red wine, the result is a splendidly satisfying and cheap meal. Sod going to a restaurant with that to hand (though I counsel younger male readers that that’s not always the best attitude in a relationship – further apologies to the ex-girlfriend).

Another good Spanish option is albóndigas. It’s basically Spanish meatballs in a feisty sauce of chopped tomatoes, garlic and smoked paprika. The other day at dinner time I entered the hostel kitchen to find a chap slaving away at the hob with a giant pot and a great array of ingredients laid out across the counter. Standing beside him, I plonked my tin of albóndigas into a small pan on a neighbouring hob, added some chickpeas (from a jar) and artichoke (tinned) and got cooking. Admittedly his concoction looked tastier – just – and fresher, but he was still at the hob 20 minutes later when I was washing up my dishes. He knew, as did I, who had made the right tactical choice. There is also lentejas a la riojana, Spanish lentil soup that is so thick – with plenty of chorizo floating around – it could pass for a type of stew.

I won’t deny that combat food can make one feel a chided cook when others are around. Especially the likes of Italians making extravagant-looking meals as I tip out the contents of another tin. But the tinned-food-bad vs fresh-food-good narrative isn’t as clear-cut as it’s sometimes made out. Recent studies have suggested that tinned vegetables can actually be richer in nutrients than fresh produce lingering in the fridge. Leaving aside affordability, tins are also recyclable, easy to transport and can be stored for years. Human engineering at its finest. We should be much more thankful for these superbly efficient food delivery systems.

Combat food is essentially humble and egalitarian. Which, as with tins, may explain its often-maligned reputation. For the comfortably smug status quo could be seriously undermined if we embraced the truth that simple is often tastier, more satisfying and less stressful. The edifice of absurdly priced dining falls apart in the face of what the squadron quartermaster and the boys in the cookhouse, plus those street-side cooks in the Horn of Africa, can achieve with so little. The agribusiness fat-cats and stockholders of huge supermarket chains would not be content if we suddenly slashed our weekly grocery bills in half.

At the individual level, the disinclination toward combat food might have something to do with how, as with the topic of sex, the catering to our essential needs that it represents serves for some as a too clear reminder of our baser and more animal nature; of how, despite all our pretensions and apparent sophistication, we need to be fed and to feel. Food and sex, there’s no escaping them: we depend on sustenance from outside sources and without it we shrivel and die – either literally or spiritually.

So sustaining and fortifying is combat food it brings to mind the Mexican priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and his contention that with the simple wafer at Holy Communion you are taking God Himself into your mouth. Not sure about you, but I don’t get anything close to that sort of satisfaction from overpriced avocado on toast or expensive restaurants serving up plates on which there is more white porcelain visible than the meagre dollops of food ‘stylishly’ arranged.

Faced with such puritanical offerings that increasingly dominate our foodscape today, it’s enough to make you cry out with Aldous Huxley’s protagonist at the end of Brave New World (with a spot of paraphrasing): ‘I don’t want comfort [and small, neat dishes of food]. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin [and combat food].’