Several times a week I wake up in Woolworths’s vegetable aisle like some lost somnambulist, dazed by our strange, late culture. How did I get here? And why is there a packet of broad beans in my hand? After all, I never liked the ones my mother made. And why do they have a big silver label that says ‘Discoveries”?
You may not have cooked fresh broad beans recently, but all you are going to discover is that they are an awful lot of work to prepare, and that they are worth it — if only in the first green flush of summer. Of course if Woolies’s buyer has only just been turned on to the possibility of broad beans, it isn’t surprising that sorrel, that delicious weed, also gets the silver-sticker treatment.
As do baby carrots with a few bright green stems for contrast, tiny leeks, and sometimes, miraculously, fresh porcini mushrooms. Boletus edulis are a rare treat indeed in these benighted latitudes, truffled up in secret woods or purchased at irrational expense from an Italian.
I buy them almost every time I see them, and there are very few things quite as good as fat wild mushrooms in their buttery pan-juices on a piece of toast, but the fact is I don’t enjoy them that much these days. That silver sticker sucks all the joy out of the experience.
It may sound perverse to complain about quality and diversity at the supermarket, particularly as it is such a strange new thing for us children of the culinary wasteland, but the problem has nothing to do with the supermarket per se. In fact it is even worse at smart, contemporary delicatessens such as Melissa’s, a Cape Town chain that I visit when my day-job in Parliament has not adequately filled up my cup with despair, and I need a vanilla bean.
No, the problem isn’t the shops, it is the language constructed by labels, store layout, and customer magazines, a sign system that abstracts all my favourite things into a fantasy world of easy-peasy Italian, where Jamie Oliver is the damp-lipped household god. You aren’t buying food in these places, you are buying a version of yourself that has been focus-grouped within an inch of its life.
Perhaps it has always been thus — people have been performing their status and their savvy in caviar and bird’s nest soup for as long as they have been eating — but I keep bumping into myself these days, and I look like I’m trapped in some ghastly rerun on BBC Food.
It is even worse in restaurants, where my appetite seems to ebb away into the space between the menu and the world it points to.
Some strive for authenticity, warmth and sincerity thus:
‘Corn-fed organic Franschhoek chicken breast on a warm polenta scone with onion confit and a tarragon jus.”
This is the food, and the writing, of an anxious age. It is not enough to trust that at R75, the chicken in question will be of the best quality. It needs a denomination of origin and ethical provenance that connect us with a wholesome rural world where God is in his heaven and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is in his cottage. But we also need to feel we are getting something special, a little artistry, whence confit. And jus, which really just means gravy.
Others go for irony. They might give us: chicken and pap with onion smoortjie and gravy. In this case, it is your urban hipster credentials you are eating, rather than your rural origins, but the taste is just the same — the congealed language of an exhausted culture.
I am happy to eat words, just bring me some fresh ones, and hold the discoveries.
Dear Nic … I beg to differ
It’s a pity your mama never learnt how to prepare broad beans: gently fry some onion, celery and carrots, then add garlic, potato and pancetta. Add the podded broad beans, season, cover with stock and cook. There. If it’s any consolation, my mother was a terrible cook, and came from the two meat and veg and ‘you won’t be leaving the table until you’ve finished what’s on your plate” school. We actually came to blows over a ‘boil-in-the-bag” fish and sauce.
What this all means is that I really love cooking and appreciate the effort that stores such as Woolworths go to source unusual ingredients.
Woolies tries. Who cares if they label some of their vegetables ‘Discoveries”. At least they’re going to the trouble to broaden the palate of South Africans, who, let’s face it, are not renowned for culinary adventure.
Woolies is not without a certain arrogance, but that probably comes with being the best supermarket in South Africa. It knows its customers — and it also knew enough not to be seen dead at the food expo at Gallagher Estate last year. It didn’t need to compete with the likes of Pick ‘n Pay and Spar, which both seemed to be trying very hard to promote their own gourmet-wannabe range. In fact, I’ve given up shopping at Pick ‘n Pay for anything other than toilet paper and toothpaste, such is the parlous state of its food market.
You only need wish for it and it will appear — raspberry and balsamic chutney? Done. Sea salt and black-pepper oven-roasted almonds? No problem. Organic underpants? Say no more.
I was amazed to see packets of Cavolo Nero on its shelves the other day. They were also labelled ‘Discoveries” and I had only ever seen it in Italian cookbooks. It’s a kind of a cross between cabbage and spinach, though tasting like neither and the leaves have a strong, sweet taste. I must have bought every packet in Gauteng, but now they’re finished and there isn’t any more. Must have been a dud focus group. — Matthew Burbidge