Tins & Ready Meals

Tins and ready meals are the working reserve of an Asian kitchen in the UK. A good cook still makes rajma from dried beans on a Sunday, but on a Wednesday a tin of kidney beans, a tin of plum tomatoes and ten minutes of onion, ginger and garam masala get the same dish on the table. This department gathers the tinned, powdered and pouched foods that home cooks from Punjab to Jaffna actually reach for, alongside a few British cupboard classics.

The biggest aisle is tinned vegetables: peeled plum tomatoes for gravies, sarson ka saag and spinach purée for Punjabi greens, sweetcorn and peas, and the young jackfruit, banana blossom and breadfruit that Sri Lankan cooks turn into polos curry and mallum. Beside it sit tinned beans and chickpeas, already boiled and ready for chole, chana chaat or a pot of rice and peas.

For sweet and creamy cooking there is coconut milk in tins and as powder, condensed and evaporated milk for milk toffee, kheer and tea, and tinned fruit, from Alphonso mango pulp for lassi to lychees, rambutan and toddy palm in syrup for falooda and fruit salads.

The Sri Lankan shelf is well stocked with tinned and dried fish: jack mackerel for fish buns and cutlets, fried dried fish to eat with rice, and Maldive fish flakes for sambol. For the nights nobody wants to cook, ready meals cover dal makhani, chole and Sri Lankan vegetable curries, and instant mixes turn dosa, idli, upma, dhokla and haleem into something you can make before work.

A useful habit with any tin: once it is open, move what is left into a glass or plastic tub with a lid and keep it in the fridge. Tomatoes, coconut milk and beans all pick up a metallic taste if left in the opened can, and most keep well for two or three days once decanted.