A clean break

Being as how they're in season Walnuts are a common sight in Spanish supermarkets and homes around Christmas time. Apparently Britons and Spaniards open walnuts differently.

In the UK, in my youth, Christmas was about the only time of the year we'd have nuts, in shells, in our house. What joy, a reason to bring the crocodile nutcracker out of it's almost perennial hibernation and set it to task. The tail applied the pressure to the nut placed between the beast's jaws.

Now this, plier like, action, is fine for nuts with hard shells - Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and almonds for instance. It was complete overkill for monkey nuts and problematic for walnuts too. Instead of a nice clean break the intricately constructed walnut shells generally shattered when they suddenly lost their structural strength. The crocodile jaws would smack to producing a mixed pile of pulverized nut and shell fragments.

When you buy a net bag of walnuts in Spain they usually (not always) come with something that looks like a flat key. The idea is that you put the short end of the key into the crack between the two halves of the nut, the seam of the shell, and twist. The shell splits neatly and leaves the brain shaped half of the nut in one piece. I bet that's how Rowntrees got those nicely shaped nuts on top of their walnut whips.

Excuse me - do you have coconut milk?

Have you ever noticed how things can be difficult to find in Spanish supermarkets? It seems to me that these Spanish shops arrange their products to a logic that I didn't share and I've had to learn. 

Imagine I want peanut butter. My Britishness tells me to look for it with the jam or honey but my recent experience tells me to look for it near the chocolate bars, near the Nutella. Peanut butter isn't a good example because peanut butter is about as Spanish as celebrations on the 4th of July. Nonetheless, the next time you're in a Spanish supermarket, provided you're not Spanish, look around and I'm sure you'll find things that don't quite mesh with your idea of where they should, logically, be. Why aren't the crackers with the pitta and other bread substitutes? Why is the juice distant from the pop? Why are the kitchen and toilet rolls not alongside the cleaning products?

In Pinoso we have quite a few supermarkets and each one of them has a different sort of atmosphere or feel. There are none of the really big ones, no Carrefour or Alcampo, but we are well served for a town of 8,500 souls. I use all of the supermarkets from time to time but my default is Consum. It's a Valencian firm and it's a co-op. Whoever manages the Pinoso Consum is aware of all the Britons in the area so, among the standard Spanish fare, and without ghettoising the products in some international section, you'll find lots of "British" products from Oxo and HP sauce through to pork pies and ordinary council house tea. Most other Consum stores do not have the same range.

I have Consum's app on my phone. As I prepare my weekly list I can usually visualise where the products are in the aisles of the Pinoso shop. It's a bit like that Sherlock Holmes thing of seeing the action and reaction stuff but without falling over the Reichenbach Falls. When I occasionally end up in the Consum in Petrer or Sax it throws me completely that the organisation of the shelves is not the same. In Día or HiperBer or Spar I often wander around for ages wondering where they are hiding the Tabasco, the dried fruit or the sherry vinegar.

It's easy enough when you can ask. For instance I want tahini and the app says they stock it. I have no idea where it will be. All I need to do is to ask for sesame paste in Spanish and Robert is your parent's brother. Obviously they don't have the tahini but that's a different problem. Recently I've been shopping for a couple of people who currently have a bit of trouble getting out and about. They wanted crispbread. Crispbread could be in any one of four separate places. I had no idea what sort of packaging I might be looking for and there is no obvious translation. Neither is there a well known product - like British Ryvita - to compare it with. After a bit of a conference two of the shop workers sent me to the section with cream crackers and Tuc biscuits.

Ah, the excitement of a humdrum existence.