The Food Maven Diary
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Downsizing Tuna
Who else has noticed that tuna now comes in five-ounce cans, not six-ounce? The cans themselves have gotten a tiny bit shorter, but you wouldn't notice unless the old and new ones were next to each other. Of course, the price is the same. I wish they would just raise the price and leave the cans alone. What am I going to do with all the recipes I've written over the years calling for six ounces of tuna? And in the beginning of my 40-year career, with seven ounces -- maybe it was even eight. Who remembers? It's a dilemma at the moment. There are several recipes in my upcoming Southern Italian book that call for a six-ounce can of tuna.
I decided to make one the other day, to see if the ounce difference made a difference. I make this recipe all the time lately. It's a great antipasto. I blend a can of tuna with about 1/2 cup finely chopped pickled vegetables (Italian giardiniera) and a bit of mayonnaise, then stuff the mixture into small hot cherry peppers or even smaller sweet-hot peppedew peppers.
The missing ounce didn't make enough of a difference to change the amount of the chopped pickled vegetables, but I will be holding back on the mayonnaise. Still, I feel deceived.
I discovered the difference in the cans at Fairway, where I've been buying, for several months now, Genova brand solid light tuna in olive oil for the bargain price of $1.88 a can. It's not the highest grade of tuna. This brand used to be firmer and more solid. Lately, it is more broken up. But at least it is not mushy like some other less expensive light tuna. I mean, there is $30 a 12-ounce jars of tuna out there, and they are much superior to Genova. But it is not necessary to use such fine tuna for a tuna salad. You eat that tuna in big chunks, dressed only with a squeeze of lemon juice.
Anyway, when I realized, at home, that I had some cans that held five ounces and some with six, I checked back at the store. Sure enough, the two sizes were on the end-of-aisle display together. I brought this to the attention of the manager because I am a big-mouth. He had no explanation. It was news to him. In any case, last week, the $1.88 display was gone. I'm thinking Genova was selling off its stock of six-ounce cans to make a transition to five-ounce. By the way, a few weeks ago, Costco was also carrying Genova-brand tuna, four six-ounce cans for $6 - or something low like that. Looks like a sell-off to me.
In my supermarket, all the brands are now five ounces. How does it happen that every tuna canner reduces can size at the same time?
You realize, of course, that candy bars have shrunk over the years, that what used to be one-pound cans of coffee now hold only eleven or twelve ounces, and that one-pound bags of cranberries are now only twelve ounces. (Look back at cranberry sauce recipes of yore, say an old edition of "The Joy of Cooking." They call for one pound because that's how we bought them.) Now I hear that Haagen-Dazs is reducing their "pint" of ice cream - 16 ounces - to 14 ounces, "just a few spoons less," they are spinning it in press releases." And the "quart" of ice cream is being downsized to 28 ounces.
