Grocery stores

San Antón: Madrid’s best market makeover

Posted on by Pat and David
Madrid has been renovating and updating its historic fresh food markets in recent years, starting with the transformation of Mercado San Miguel next to Plaza Mayor into a jewel box full of tapas bars and high-end deli food. But we're even more impressed with Mercado San Antón in Chueca. The market is a symbol of how that neighborhood—once the part of town where you went to buy sex or drugs—has become one of the hippest and most gentrified parts of the central old city. FYI, about the nastiest stuff you'll find on Chueca streets these days are some shoes with 15-centimeter spike heels in the shops on calle Augusto Figueroa. The Mercado San Antón isn't exactly a temple of food like La Boqueria in Barcelona...Read More

Pomodorina belies canned tomato image

Posted on by David
Pomodorina is tomato sauce rethought, and it's my most unexpected find on a recent research trip to Modena. We've already written about “What to buy in an Italian grocery store,” but here's a product I'd definitely add. Pomodorina has been the best-selling product of one of Italy's best food factories, Menù, since it was introduced in 1967. It's made only during the roughly six-week tomato harvest season and combines freshly harvested and cooked tomatoes with celery, carrots, onions, fresh basil, and some olive oil. Menù sells it as a base ingredient for sauces, but I discovered that some restaurants consider it good enough to sauce pasta on its own. That's spaghetti sauced with Pomodorina above, and it was delicious. Menù (http://en.menu.it/) is based in Medollo...Read More

What to buy in a Dublin grocery store

Posted on by Pat and David
Whenever we visit Dublin, we make sure to enjoy lots of incredible butter and cream since we can't bring any home. (U.S. Customs frowns on such dairy products.) Fortunately there are lots of other good Irish foodstuffs that we can pack in the suitcase. For cheeses, we make our purchases at Sheridans Cheesemongers (see earlier post), but here are some of the things that caught our eye in a neighborhood Dunnes grocery store: Irish soda farls Pat's mother still remembers her own mother, who hailed from Northern Ireland, making soda bread farls in a round pan on the top of the stove. First she would shape the dough into a circle and then cut it crosswise into four pieces, the so-called farls. This style of...Read More

Sea salt from Costa Brava brings home tastes of Spain

Posted on by Pat and David
When we shop for groceries overseas, we like to bring home salt. We never realized how acrid American table salt can be (and how bland kosher salt is) until we started using salt from other places. It's obvious that gray sea salt from the flats of Brittany or Normandy would have a distinct flavor, and we often use such salts for cooking. But our favorite, hands down, is simple supermarket sea salt from Catalunya, specifically the Sal Costa brand, which sells for less than two euros a kilo. Unfortunately, Spain has succumbed to the American penchant for adulterating food by putting in “healthy” additives, so the finely ground Sal Costa sea salt for table use has added fluoride. Like the iodine in American salt, the...Read More

What to buy in a Cajun grocery store

Posted on by David
Usually Pat and I write about buying specialty foods in overseas grocery stores, but Cajun cooking stands so far apart from most other American regional food that the grocers have developed lines of goods we can rarely find anywhere else. The pickled tabasco peppers, gumbo file powder, and various hot pepper sauces shown above are cases in point. In fact, I was once told by a northern grocer that file powder was illegal. (Not true, but it is allegedly mildly carcinogenic. If you eat three pounds at a time, you might develop a tumor in 20 years.) Needless to say, file powder can be hard to find up here in the chilly north. The ingredients immediately above are even more local. Dried shrimp might be...Read More

What to bring home from a Turkish grocery store

Posted on by Pat and David
When we were in Istanbul last week, we were surprised to discover that it's common for unmarried men and women to live with their families well into their 30s. So when we asked our first guide, who is 30-something, what to buy in a grocery store, he was utterly clueless. His mother does all the cooking, and apparently all the shopping too. He's not even sure what's in her recipes. But our second guide proved a more modern young Turk. Yusuf Kilig works in Istanbul, far from his family's village in the south, and shares a flat with roommates. He knows his way around the kitchen, and the supermarket aisles as well. Yusuf had also worked for a few months at Walt Disney World in...Read More

What to bring home from a British grocery store

Posted on by Pat
Whenever I visit a British grocery store I scour the shelves for the most unusual items. But it's really the comfort foods that define a cuisine -- or at least taste like home. That's the lesson I learned from a lovely woman in Leeds who had lived and worked in Taiwan for 15 years. When I asked her what I might want to buy in the city's big Sainsbury grocery store, she immediately rattled off the items that she had most craved during her years abroad. At the end of every visit home, she would pack herself a big care package for her return trip to Taiwan. Here are the foods she couldn't do without: Heinz Tomato Soup. It's ultimate comfort food. Heinz Baked Beanz....Read More

All menus lead to Rome

Posted on by Pat and David
Ultimately, we did visit the amazing museums at Vatican City—and here's our sneaked photo of the Sistine Chapel ceiling to prove it. (Yeah, like we were the only ones....) But we have to admit that we were originally waylaid by Rome's greatest gourmet food shop. And who could blame us? Gastronomy is Italy's other art. Or maybe its other religion. When we'd finished eating lunch at Franchi (see previous post), we decided that it was a good time to stop in at Castroni (Via Cola di Rienzo 196, Tel: 06-68-74-383, www.castronicoladirienzo.it, open Mon-Sat 8am-8pm), reasoning that since we were already stuffed, we would be immune to the lures of the merchandise. It was only next door, and we'd still have plenty of time to get...Read More

Bites worth standing for

Posted on by Pat and David
It's easy to get a good, quick lunch in Rome. Usually we opt for a couple of slices of pizza in whatever pizzeria is closest when we're hungry. But for even more variety, we sometimes head to a tavola calda—an amazing array of hot and cold dishes ordered at a counter, served up quickly and almost always eaten standing up. One of the best in Rome is found at Franchi (Via Cola di Rienzo 200, tel. 06-68-74-651, www.franchi.it.), which is also one of the city's most extravagant alimentari (local food stores). Outside of meal time, this is the spot in the Prati neighborhood to buy sliced cold cuts, cheese, and cooked dishes to take home for dinner. But at lunchtime, the shop is swarmed with...Read More

A very Fortnum Christmas to you

Posted on by David
Since business took me to St. James's Street in London (mostly to visit the iconic wine shop of Berry Bros. & Rudd, which has been there since 1698), there was no way I could miss visiting Fortnum & Mason (181 Piccadilly; tel: 0845.602.5694; www.fortnumandmason.com), practically around the corner. I could tell that Christmas was coming when I met chocolatier David Burns (above) just inside the front door, handing out samples of his chocolates. (The lavendar English cream that he gave me was as divine as I'd expected.) Burns and his wife Keely operate the small firm that has supplied handmade chocolates to F&M since the 1920s. By the first week of October, my favorite London purveyor of gourmet goodies had transformed its first floor into...Read More