How long can you keep a fresh turkey?

And other revelations about consumers

“About this big, madam.”

As a consumer, you probably reckon you have a pretty fast track on consumer expectations. After all: consumer + expectations = consumer expectations, doesn’t it? The job I have been doing for the last three weeks at a specialist destination supermarket just outside Brussels has nonetheless raised my eyebrows in respect of what the expectations of other consumers sometimes are.

Turkey

The store has a stock of frozen turkeys in preparation for the festive season (and to cater to the American expat community celebrating Thanksgiving). But, in the run-up to Christmas, customers can also order fresh turkeys, which will be delivered for collection on 23 December, in time for cooking on 25 December, for the traditional Anglo-Saxon Christmas celebration, or the evening of 24 December, for the celebration more popular among Belgians and other continental Europeans.

One customer, when apprised of this information, and the order deadline of 11 December, replied that, oh, dear, her celebration wouldn’t be until the Saturday. Now, I bit my tongue at that point but the question really is whether she can expect a one-off bulk delivery of everyone’s turkeys for the Christmas season to cater for her own planned dinner, to be held on 28 December, a full three to four days after everyone else. She was concerned whether the bird would still be fresh on the Saturday.

I pointed out that fresh fowl generally tends to prefer a short shelf life, unless it is game fowl, when it may be hung for up to several weeks to ripen the gamey flavours of the beast. Gamey turkey, however, is not really to the taste of most people (and, though I didn’t exactly say so, there is quite a serious risk of botulism or salmonella or, for all I know, e-bola). One or two days would not harm, but of course the bird should be kept in the coolest place possible, but without freezing it.

She wanted to know how big a ten-kilo turkey is (she’s having 16 to dinner). The biggest frozen bird I could show her was six kilos. Her eyes fell upon one at five kilos. “So it’s two of these?” she said. “Er, no,” I replied, pointing out that, regardless of how large a turkey is, it still only has two legs, two wings and one breastbone. Yes, it likely will fit in a standard oven, as long as you remove the apple pie, roast potatoes and stuff it inside. “Stuff it?” queried she. “Put the stuffing in it, not in a separate dish,” clarified I. She nodded, knowingly even.

The lady opined that her fridge would likely be too small for it, and I agreed: since it would probably be full to overflowing with the rest of the season’s titbits and temptations. I told her it was my own practice to put the turkey down in the cellar, pending the big day. With wide-eyed astonishment, the lady agreed: and, wouldn’t you know it, she also has a cellar. “Pretty cool place?” I asked her. “Yes.”

This turkey-purchaser was not advanced of years, but no spring chicken either. One really wonders how close she has come in the past to infecting herself and her family with her poor meat-conservation knowledge.

However, I added, perhaps the best solution is to cook the thing when you get it, and have everyone round for a cold buffet on the Saturday. By which time they’ll likely be fed up to the back teeth with the question “White meat or dark?”

Water

Water, water everywhere, and every drop to drink, to parody Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Like most supermarkets, Stonemanor sells water. Not like Italian San Pellegrino, or French Evian, or even German Gerolsteiner. Because one of our principal suppliers is in Ireland (a result of a shift of supply chain after Brexit), we sell Irish water.

Now, as a destination store (the principle being, you go there to see what they’re selling, rather than with a regular store, where you go with a specific shopping list), there is no real need for Stonemanor to sell water, which many will argue is no different to the spring water sold elsewhere around the country. In fact, we also sell salt, and at the time when salt was introduced as a product line, the board debated whether there is anything intrinsically British about salt. The decision to sell it was based on the fact that, even as a destination store, it is a nuisance if customers in any case have to go to another store to get the remainder of their shopping. It is as a convenience to them that we sell salt and, likewise, water. Remember that word: convenience, because although we sell water as a convenience to shoppers, we are not actually a convenience store.

Except: we don’t just sell it; we ship it out to online customers. Now, the online store works only for what is called ambient stock, which can safely be stored and handled at room temperature. (The other types are fresh, chilled and frozen, which may only be transported under specific conditions.)

I’ll say straight up that it is not Stonemanor’s fault that its online customers order the water that is offered to them in the online catalogue. In a way, why shouldn’t they offer Irish water to their European customers if that is what their European customers want? Stonemanor is running a business, not bearing on its shoulders the environmental concerns of the entire western world, for it should in fact be the entire western world that takes upon its own shoulders its own environmental concerns, should it not? Anyway, no end of other online delivery services also supply water, so Stonemanor is no outlier.

But this water is not going to the thirsty in the third world, it is going to continental Europe. Perhaps because people like Irish water in their Irish whiskey; perhaps for reasons of nostalgia; perhaps out of pure curiosity, or perhaps because their local water is not so tasty, or even potable.

Still: it beggars belief, that we ship litres-worth of plain ordinary water by courier service to our customers at home and abroad, which they are happy and willing to pay for us to do. Not because we want to, but because the customer requests it.

It is a hard, hard question to know where the duty to educate ends and the duty of personal responsibility commences.

Horseradish

According to one customer, you cannot eat beef without horseradish. I grew up in Yorkshire, where beef is regularly eaten with Yorkshire puddings and onion gravy, and my father preferred mustard to horseradish, in any case, so I demurred. “Yes, I think you can,” I said.

The customer’s beef, if I may be allowed a small pun, was with the expiry date on the jars of horseradish sauce in the sauces and pickles section of the store: January 2025. I admitted that it was perilously close to the current date, and followed up by asking the gentleman when he planned having the beef repast that was so demanding of this condiment, and he replied that he didn’t know.

I suggested that, when he did know, he might like to return to the store to buy the horseradish he avidly wanted to accompany that particular meal, but he retorted that he wanted to have it in stock for the event that he just happened to want beef that day.

I suggested another brand of horseradish sauce that we carry, but here the story only got worse: December 2024, the very month we are in. He found it disappointing that the shelf life of our horseradish condiments was not of longer date and wanted to know why.

Of course, I knew exactly why (huh?) but preferred to goad him. No, seriously, it was an odd question.

I confessed that the shelf lives of most of the products in our store were pretty much a closed book to me, until I actually turned the product upside-down to read the date off the bottom of the package, so I had no explanation for the shelf lives of any of the products we happen to have in store. However, I did add that, given two different makes of essentially the same product had remarkably similarly short shelf lives, perhaps the shelf life of horseradish is in any case not that long. In all events it would tend to indicate the products’ lack of any shelf-life-preserving additives, and that surely had to be an encouraging sign?

The gentleman was unimpressed and demurred on the purchase. And I got on with what I had been doing before this entertaining interjection into my otherwise uneventful day.