Serving suggestions
How to do battle with the shopping public: don’t
Regular readers with a good memory may recall that I work in a shop. A mini-market. I think it would be fair to say it’s a “high class grocer’s”. Apart from me, most of the people who grace our threshold with their presence have money. The credit card terminal at one of the checkouts sometimes has sticky keys, so that one of the figures you enter doesn’t register. Some of these moneyed customers try to argue that, if I enter €25.45 into the machine, instead of €254.50, then €25.45 is all they need to pay. Even after I tell them I made an error, and abort the credit card transaction. They still push ahead with their humour, until I tell them that we might make mistakes on a Sunday, but we don’t make jokes.
The shop is in a well-to-do village about 25 km outside the Belgian capital. Today, someone asked me why the shop is where it is, and I have to admit that I was somewhat lost for words. I replied that the nickel tour was above my pay grade. One day, maybe in nine years, I will be asked to write the history of the store to mark its half-century. But, until then, I will have to content myself with taking customers’ money and answering their questions, both to the best of my ability.
A few years back, I was at lunch or dinner or whatever with people I know in a nearby town. I’ve known them for many years. We met when I was in professional employment and they were both students, studying for their PhDs. They now have their PhDs and important jobs, and we see each other much less. Well, not at all, actually. But that’s no issue. Whilst they were students I invited the guy to empty my cellar of anything he saw there that could be useful: a sofa, an armchair, a bed, a table, a cabinet, and I gave him them with my blessings and, to thank me, the couple invited me to Spain, where the girlfriend was studying, to spend a week with them in their home there. It was wonderful. If you get the chance, do visit the Alhambra Palace in Granada.
I intend no ridicule in what will now follow, but the repast they were preparing here in Belgium was to take on an Italian quality. There would be pasta and a sauce. A bechamel-style white sauce. I noticed that an onion was being cut. “Onion salad?” I enquired. “No, the onion is to form a base for the sauce.” “The white sauce?” “Yes, the white sauce.”
There is, as far as I’m aware, no legislation that forbids the chopping of onions in order to make a bechamel sauce, but it’s a practice that is outside my experience. Onions usually get put into a brown sauce, a meat sauce, ragout, erm … that sort of thing. Bechamel is made with flour and milk and butter. Salt and pepper. Then, add cheese, or parsley, or—yes, why not? Onions. It was delicious, if only because I said so.
Okay, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ridicule them a tiny little bit: you do not put onions in a bechamel sauce. Really, you don’t. You put them in spaghetti bolognaise, or coq au vin, or Irish stew, or Lancashire hotpot, or Scotch broth. But not in bechamel sauce. But these guys were no ragamuffins who needed raising by the scruff of the neck. They were civilised, grown-up, adult PhDs. They know a thing or two. And, because of the letters after their name, which attest to their expertise in molecular biology and game theory, you cannot tell them how to make bechamel sauce.
Last year I recounted some of the daft questions I get asked at the shop, and this year I am still getting asked daft questions.
So, of course turkeys are a matter of endless confusion among the expat housewives of Belgium again this year. On Saturday (13 December), a woman presented me with a 4 kg frozen turkey, and framed her question thus: We want to eat it on Saturday (20 December). Should I thaw it or should I freeze it?
I said that thawing it would likely take about two days, in a cool place like the garage, but that it should really be roasted within three days of that, at the outside. So, she should eat it on Friday at the latest if she thawed it when she got home. She pulled a face. She obviously didn’t fancy risking manky turkey.
But, I added, not without some hesitation, since it seemed a little like venturing into the realm of the blindingly bleeding obvious, You don’t need to freeze it. She looked expectantly up at me, as if I had divined a magic solution to all her problems, and I had the strange premonition that I was about to tread dangerous ground. It’s frozen, I said. You don’t need to freeze it, just take it home and put it in the deep freeze and take it out on Wednesday.
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to do that, and I gave up. But she had more comprehension than the chap who actually bought and paid for a five-kilo turkey from my colleague at the next till and then put a question to her that she deferred to me to answer. The turkey will be thawed by tomorrow? I suppose he could have set it in front of an electric heater and it would indeed have been thawed by the next day, but I replied with a more sensible Two days, I’m afraid. Well, that was that, he didn’t want it any more and I had to get the duty manager to give him a cash refund. Well, what was I to say?
We sell a lot of pies. Chicken and ham, steak and gravy, steak and ale, steak and kidney, mince and onions. Yum. A pie is a crust, made essentially from flour and water filled with the relevant meat and some gravy to ease it down the gullet. But did you ever dissect a meat pie to find out just how much meat is in it? Let me tell you: astonishingly little. It’s the same with prepared curries, shepherd’s pies, and that sort of thing. What sells these delicacies is not their meat content, it is the fact they are ready packaged to go. They are easy.
We sell “freshly whipped cream”, which is a boon to anyone who doesn’t know how to whip cream. It is hard work if you don’t have a mixer, although the risk of making butter is somewhat less if you do do it by hand. But, the thing with whipped cream is that it doesn’t stay whipped cream for all that long. It tends to lose its stiffness. So the freshly whipped cream that we sell (which was freshly whipped about a week before you buy it) has the addition of xanthan gum, which is harmless but is needed to keep the cream stiff until you serve it. You could call xanthan gum the Viagra of whipped cream, if that didn’t start to sound a little salacious.
Do you know what salts of lemon is? Would you put it on your chicken? Or use it to get rust stains out of cricket whites? How about bicarbonate of soda? Cream of tartar? What exactly is in curry powder? Or baking powder? Do you ever add soda crystals to your vegetables?
We are constantly advised by the consumer organisations to read carefully the labels on the products we buy. Especially if they are in the category of UPF—ultra-processed foods. Next time you go shopping, however, look at other parts of the label. There will often be a serving suggestion. Even the most obvious product is illustrated with a serving suggestion: like a bowl of steaming peas waiting to be served at table, maybe with a knob of butter melting over them. You mean to say you didn’t know that you can add a knob of butter to peas to make them look like on the packet?
The serving suggestions can be simply outrageous at times: the product never, or nearly never, actually looks like the one on the packet, if only because the one on the packet is coated with wood varnish and paints and dyes to make it look deliciously tempting (and, if you’re not convinced, they will add, in “steamy script” the words deliciously tempting). Aside from that, they will tell you what the product does: makes you look like a real professional chef, or frees up the time to have a good time doing something else, or whatever. Look at the bumph: the inane nonsense that makers put on packaging to tell you, not what the product is, but what it is for, or what image it will bestow on you (besides getting fat).
Here are a few examples.
Borwick’s bicarbonate of soda is packed by the makers of George Borwick’s baking powder. Not made by them, but packed by them. I have to confess that I would have reached that conclusion on my own, but it’s useful to have been steered to this utterly irrelevant piece of information. Would I buy this? Of course I would! Because I’m a good cook, and good cooks use Borwick’s, whether it’s made by them or packed by them.
Old Jamaica Ginger Beer is made from fiery Jamaican root ginger. I guess that’s why they call it Old Jamaica, but that can’t be guaranteed, so it’s nice to have confirmation. I’m not sure what parts of the ginger plant can all be used for making foodstuffs, but the root is certainly a part that I know of. So, good to know that it’s root ginger in this ginger drink from Jamaica. And it’s none of your wishy-washy half-gingery ginger. This is the fiery stuff.
What is “original” HP sauce? Do they think I think their sauce has been knocked off (imitated)? I really don’t know what original means, but everything these days is original. It used to be classic and now it’s … original. Not made by AI, perhaps?
Wrights may have lost their apostrophe, but they haven’t lost their Irish gift of the gab: golden puff pastry filled with a rich blend of minced beef and hearty vegetables. (It is better if it’s said with a Wexford accent, I have to say.) Most importantly: if there’s to be vegetables, let them be hearty!
Marmite started life as the scrapings of beer barrels. Just how they imagined anything other than vegetarian got into it, I don’t know, but here they confirm that there were no meat ingredients used in producing this particular beer.
Not only do the almonds in Dr Oetker’s almond extract come from Morocco, but they are also real. No fake Moroccan almonds. What’s an extract, whilst we’re here? And how much stronger, or weaker, is it than an essence? Now that’s something they won’t readily tell you.
Supervalu is happy to tell us that corn flour comes from corn. You bet!
And baking powder is perfect for cakes, scones and buns, or, put more succinctly, fluffy bakes.
It’s not just in your supermarket that you are led by the nose. Go into a car spares shop and browse the cleaning products. Many are all the same stuff, in different bottles, one to clean this, one to clean that, one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
It is because of the general lack of awareness about what things actually do, what they are, that allows marketeers to re-market the same stuff time and again as something new. Tell me, what is it that is in your “whiter than white” washing powder that isn’t in your “colour” washing powder? Could it be bleach? The codswallop that is brandished on product packaging comes over as an insult to the intelligence of the half-baked user of the product. But, and there’s the rub, when you make something easy, by whipping cream with xanthan gum, you up its attractiveness thousandfold. And as long as you make things easier for the idle rich, they will lap it up, and revel in their ignorance.
People stagger out of our store balancing things in their arms. I ask them Do you need a bag or a box? They reply No, the car is just in the car park, which is about a hundred or so metres away, and I leave it at that, and wonder to myself how the hell they’re going to get to the car without dropping something and what kind of a projectile their shopping is going to form for their children once they’re all safely buckled into their seats.
I guess some people really do need serving suggestions.