After a hard day's work, the stomach growls, but the motivation to cook something else is low: ready-made meals have long been part of everyday life and take up more space in many supermarkets than the fruit and vegetable department. Due to the increase in single households and the employment rate, the trend is unlikely to stop in the future.

In this country, it all started with the canned ravioli from Maggi, a tin can that is probably as iconic in Germany as the Campbell Tomato Soup immortalized by Warhol is in the USA. When the first can rolled off the production line at the Maggi plant in Singen on Lake Constance on May 14, 1958, it triggered a small revolution in the kitchen and family. "Until then, it was mainly the housewives who stood in front of the stove and cooked all the dishes themselves," says nutritionist Eva-Maria Endres. "Cooking was also an argument why women couldn't do paid work because a hot meal had to be on the table every night."

"With ready-made food, it was possible to go to work during the day"

Ready-made meals have been a great relief, according to the food culture expert. Products such as canned ravioli have helped women to break away from this role model: "With the finished meal, it was possible to go to work during the day and put a hot dish on the table for the families in the evening," says Endres. The canned pasta, which was quickly heated and immediately ready to eat, brought men to the stove and freed women from it to a certain extent – not an insignificant change in family life and interaction between the sexes during the morally restored Adenauer years.

For 65 years, the ready-to-eat pasta pillows in tomato sauce have come from the Maggi factory on Lake Constance, where 550 people work today. Every day of production, 170,000 doses roll off the production line, according to a spokeswoman. Today, the cult product is available in seven variants. The small dumplings are filled with a mixture of pork and beef, for vegetarians there is a vegetable filling. Maggi produced around 36 million cans of ravioli last year. According to Nestlé, to which the food producer, which is also known for its broth and seasoning, now belongs, demand was particularly high in the Corona year 2020.

How best to refine ravioli

Originally, canned pasta was intended to meet the growing demand for Italian dishes. At that time, the Germans longed for the south: In the late fifties, mass tourism to Italy reached its peak. Today, only a few people are likely to associate Dolce Vita and Italianità with the tin can. Instead, ravioli have retained their cult status as basic equipment for outdoor trips and festivals. This is because the ready-to-eat meal does not need refrigeration or cookware during transport. If in doubt, you can place the can directly on the camping stove - but to avoid surprises, don't forget to open it beforehand.

However, the fact that the culinary experience does not satisfy all tastes even under these circumstances is suggested by countless search engine optimized texts on the net that list alternatives to canned ravioli or offer tips and tricks to refine them. When it comes to the question of how to make the wet ready meal even better than it already is, it must probably be a perennial favorite, perhaps as old as the product itself.

If you search for "refine ravioli" on Google, you will be referred to a more than 15-year-old forum thread on chefkoch.de in the top results. A desperate user from Porta Westfalica, who apologizes in advance for only being able to serve ravioli to his "troupe" due to lack of time, is looking for other ideas besides Parmesan to make the contents of tin cans more palatable. The first piece of advice from the hobby chef community was less than four minutes in coming: "The best way to refine canned ravioli is to throw them unopened in the trash."