Porky pies

I mentioned last week that we tend towards the things that we grew up with. I was thinking about this again when we went to a British shop to buy sausage. I'll explain later.

At any traditional till in a Spanish supermarket, particularly in rural areas, you will notice that the person in front, generally, has ingredients and not the finished product. We're not talking extremes. Spaniards buy crisps, not raw potatoes. It's very unlikely though that they would buy a ready made lasagne. They cook from the raw materials. There are nowhere near as many packets, cans and jars of prepared foods as there are in the UK.

I've been making the midday meal for a while using a British cookery book. The book often lists a packet of this or a jar of that as one of the ingredients. As those packets and jars are not available I have to buy individual ingredients to simulate the packet or the can that the recipe suggests. Sometimes it simply has to be a substitute because, Jim Lovell and Apollo 13 like, if the recipe calls for mangetout, tarragon stalk, pak choi, hoisin sauce, tahini, harissa paste or even chilli flakes (all, obviously as British as jellied eels) then we have a problem. Then there are things that have similar names to a British product but they just won't do for the recipes. They are products designed for a local market. You can buy a jar full or a yellow powder called curry in any Spanish food retailer. The taste is like the curry sauce I used to get on my chips at the chip shop. It's not even a distant cousin to a Sharwood's or Patak's like curry powder that the recipes call for. 

One of the key aspects of a capitalist economy is that if there's a market someone will be ready to exploit it. Carrefour, the French chain, is a big player in Spain and all of their stores have an international food section - malta for Ecuadorians, sauerkraut for Germans, dill pickles for Poles, Batchelor's mushy peas for Britons and so on. Even a small Spanish supermarket will usually have a few foreign things if they perceive a market. In Pinoso the local Consum supermarket has Warburton's crumpets, Oxo cubes, Heinz sandwich spread, HP sauce, Tetley's tea, Cathedral Cheddar and lots more. Some of the things we think of as British are readily available but with a different name. Gary Lineker could advertise Lays crisps for instance and Fontaneda digestives still have McVitie's baked into the biscuit. Other things, like Heinz tomato ketchup or Pepsi Cola, and tens of others, are international and thousands of others products are, as you'd expect, from tomatoes and oranges to canned tuna and chickpeas.

As well as the Spanish shops carrying a few foreign items there are occasional "foreign" shops selling food that Spaniards don't, usually, eat. Russian and various South American shops are reasonably common but, in this area, we Britons, even though Brexit is sapping our strength, still have the upper hand. It was curry paste that we needed. Making up a curry paste from scratch is just a bridge too far. Besides which Maggie had complained that the Spanish sausages in one of the recipes were too meaty; we needed the British product, full of rusk and recovered meat. The British shop we went to, like so many others, was a bit odd. These shops nearly always look understocked. I think that's probably because they are not expected to provide the staples. They specialise in those British things that people miss. Pork pies, ploughman's pickle, Bombay mix, Marmite, mango chutney, spaghetti hoops, custard creams, Paxo stuffing, Bird's custard powder, dandelion and burdock pop. Anyone wanting eggs, potatoes, sugar, coffee or apples will go to a normal supermarket. I suppose, understandably, because they are at the end of a long supply chain, with everyone taking their profit, the prices in the British shops tend to be quite high.

I should be fair and say that where there are larger populations of Britons there are supermarkets that look exactly like supermarkets and not like grocer's shops. Iceland for instance is involved in something called Overseas Supermarkets and Tesco has some outlets too. They have lots of stuff in tins and packets. They have piped music, the staff wear uniforms and they sell harissa paste.