Tin foil or aluminium foil?

You may remember that the recipe in my recent lucky dip book Cooking the Indian Way, used tin foil. Which was a bit of a blast from the past for me. Of course I use aluminium foil every now and then - for cooking and/or wrapping - but I had not heard the term tin foil for a long time. And actually I now wonder why I ever did.

For tin foil, I discovered, was not used after World War II and since I was born in the middle of it I would not have known of tin foil. But as I wandered a little more around the net I found that the Americans and the British still call it tin foil. Well, again, I'm not convinced by that. Maybe my English readers can confirm or deny.

Anyway tin foil came into being back in the nineteenth century and was used for a number of purposes - even filling teeth. It was superseded by aluminium foil for a number of reasons, one of which was that tin foil (like tin cans) actually imparts a tinny flavour to the food with which it is in contact. It is also less malleable. But it was used to make the first audio recordings on cylinders until wax was found to be much better.

The Swiss actually made the first aluminium foil way back in 1910 and by 1911 the Swiss made Toblerone was being wrapped in aluminium foil, with Maggi stock cubes following soon afterl. It was first used in America in 1913 for wrapping candy bars. And indeed today it is still used for wrapping things like chocolate and pills. Why? Well it is impermeable to oxygen, light, odours, flavours, germs and water, and therefore very protective. It is used industrially as a shielding material, a conductor and also as a reflector.

NASA uses lots and lots. I remember when I went to the space museum in Washington DC I looked at the moon lander (pictured right) and thought how insanely fragile it looked and how it looked like the walls were made of kitchen foil. Which they sort of were. Well bits of the walls were covered in it. I gather they mostly use gold foil which is more reflective, but Voyager, as a last minute solution had all of its external cables covered in ordinary kitchen foil to protect them from Jupiter's stronger than expected electro magnetic field. I think I have that right. If you would like to know more go to the Business Insider article that I found.

It's protective properties are so great that it has led some nutty people to think that if you make a hat out of foil then you will stop aliens and the government being able to read your brain! I think it was used in the film Signs. Nutty I know but so widespread a theory (only in America could this be), that the term tinfoil has come to mean a paranoid person. It's even been tested - and obviously for a start you would have to completely cover your head. And no it doesn't work.

Various people offered innovative suggestions for what to do with aluminium foil - hang strips in your garden as a sort of scarecrow, clean silver, clean all sorts of things ... But mostly its use (80% or so) is food related. And no it doesn't matter which side you use - the sides are different merely because of the way it's made. Too technical for me to understand the process but the result of the process is one shiny side, one dull. Which side is better has been tested with the result that it doesn't matter.

Then there are the people who say you shouldn't use it for cooking or wrapping anyway as the aluminium will leach out into you. I don't think there seems to be any real scientific evidence for this although various people seemed to think that if you wrapped acidic things in it there might be a problem.

So should you use it? Is there any benefit? Well I think it's useful to wrap things like vegetables in for a barbecue so that they don't get too burnt. Ditto for Webering ab ham. Though now I think about it if it's used as a heat shield how can you heat anything in it? I must have that wrong. I think it's a radiation and electromagnetic shield not a heat shield. It's also useful for baking things like fish in the oven, though I must confess I think I would rather just bake them. They end up a bit too watery in aluminium. Baking paper won't stay together as well as aluminium and just cooking in a pot doesn't quite have the same crisping effect. It's good to stop things burning though.

As far as wrapping food for the fridge is concerned - I either use pyrex containers or gladwrap mostly. Though I think aluminium is better for wrapping crispy things - they don't go as soggy as when in gladwrap. But that just might be my imagination.

I imagine somebody made a fortune out of it.

I do have it and I do use it. But not all that often. What did they do before tin foil? Well I guess they just used pots and pans and cloths. I'm not sure how recyclable it is either, even though we do put it in the recycle bin if it's not too dirty.