Forage Primeval » Food, stores and stories

The effect of social revolution on your kitchen appliances

In a long and detailed story last month, The New York Times reported on a trend that’s causing a good deal of upheaval in Germany: mothers who want to work are signing their children up to have lunch at school and spend the afternoon there (http://bit.ly/55VSC9). In so doing, they are bucking a 250-year old tradition in which school ends at lunchtime and then resumes after the midday meal. Raising children out of wedlock? Not a big problem, says the Times. Raising children without the benefit of a lunch at home? Scandal, obloquy, insults shouted in public. “Rabenmutter” is the term applied — Raven Mothers, so-called because these big black birds are thought to push their young out of the nest at a very early age.

Although the Raven is rich in mythical and poetic stature — a sacred messenger, a creator, a bringer of light, a dark prophet, and the reason the Kingdom of Britain continues to this day  — I have not found a single reference to its maternal impatience. But that’s not the reason for my bringing up the story. No, it’s to point out some of the ramifications of lunch at home, based on what I discovered  while living in another country with an identical tradition, namely Switzerland.

A fun new puzzle in the refrigerator

Come with me into the kitchen of the apartment where I lived in suburban Zurich with my wife and two teen-aged children. Take a look at the refrigerator, which by American standards will seem extremely small. Fitting into it a few days’ worth of milk, juice, vegetables, cold cuts, fruits, cheese and meat was a little like playing with one of those pocket games in which you have to slide letters or numbers all around to get them in a sequence. And if we had to store something like a whole chicken, it made the task even more daunting. There was a freezer in our refrigerator but it was good primarily for making ice cubes the size of dice; there was barely enough room for a box of frozen peas. Like many expatriates, we had a supplementary freezer to hold the inevitable overflow (which in retrospect I can see was less a matter of dietary than of psychological necessity — comfort food in a literal sense).

Don’t forget the preservatives

What does this have to with lunch for school-aged children? For one thing, the fact that mothers had to be home to serve a meal meant that they could — had to — shop every day. And because they did, refrigerators didn’t need to be the gigantic storage cabinets they are in the United States. Food purchased every day doesn’t need to be grown or treated with preservatives; it won’t last nearly as long as the stuff we buy in the U.S., but it tastes better and it’s healthier. And because so much of the food purchased was going to be consumed on the same day, there was, at least during my time in Switzerland, hardly any resealable food packaging. I’m not saying that’s good or bad: I am just saying it was very noticeable. When I discovered shortly after arriving in Switzerland in late 2003 that food stores in smaller towns throughout the country were typically closed at lunch, I thought it had to do with some wacky European labor treaty or custom. The truth was more practical: with Moms at home, and with no lunch-on-the-run culture for those who weren’t, there were no shoppers for stores to be open for, the odd and exasperated expatriate notwithstanding.

As the all-day schooling revolution spreads across Germany, Switzerland and other countries, watch for other customs and conventions to change, too, protests or no protests. Will refrigerators get bigger? Will stores stay open longer? Will diets change for better or worse? Or will tradition reassert itself, returning mothers to the stove? On this last point, let the Raven have the confident last word: Nevermore.

Let’s say you lived in Istanbul and it was around 5 pm. Dinner is still four or more hours away, but you’re hungry now. Any ideas? In many Turkish homes, the solution is a platter of gozleme, taken with coffee or tea. A gozleme is a paper thin sheet of pastry folded over any one of a number of fillings such as feta cheese, spinach, potatoes, lamb — or no filling at all — and baked on a round griddle. A well-made gozleme is light, tasty and totally satisfying. Just because you are not in Turkey as you read this, or have no plans to go there soon, doesn’t mean you can’t have an authentic first-class gozleme whenever you want. All you have to do is go to Zeytinia, the supermarket with Turkish roots that’s also an exotic food store (or is it vice versa?) on Rte. 7 in Wilton near the Norwalk border.

Store manager David Young is quick to point out that just because Zeytinia carries gourmet foods doesn’t mean it’s expensive. “‘International’ is a better word for Zeytinia,” he says, adding that the store’s European character both attracts and reflects its German, Ukrainian, Israeli, Polish, Italian, French and of course Turkish (among other nationalities) clientele. “Many of the people who shop here speak very little English. They come here because they trust us” he notes, pausing to greet a shopper and promise that he’ll order some of her favorite bread for her to have the next day. Young adds that the layout of the store, which features a butcher’s counter where you can get your meat cut just as you like it and free-standing islands for produce, cheese and a wide variety of prepared foods, makes Zeytinia more like a European grocery store than an American one.

Zeytinia would like more people to think of it as a store to shop for milk, cheese, eggs, produce and other everyday items because the quality and prices are at least as good as, and in some cases better than, those of other stores. A random check comparing Zeytinia to two nearby supermarkets found this to be the case (but I do not claim that my comparison shopping is authoritative or reliable).

Just as exciting, if not more so to the likes of someone like me, is what’s going on in the back half of the store. That’s where you’ll find shelves stocked with a wide variety of unusual items including canned stuffed vine leaves from Turkey, jars of the Moroccan hot sauce called Harissa, 4 sizes of bulgur (from fine-as-sand to plump kernels), barley, pomegranate molasses, many different flavors of a halvah, even more varieties of Turkish Delight, and three types of Turkish rice, including one described on the label as “cut and broken.” Why, I asked David Young, would anyone want to buy a bag of the rice kernels normally discarded during the milling process? He didn’t know so he went to check. The answer: rice pudding.

So here’s some advice, friends: go immediately to Zeytinia and buy their sensational rice pudding. It might be the best you’ve ever had. Also try the above-mentioned gozleme, and the Brazilian chicken, and the Borek, a pastry made with phyllo dough, stuffed with feta cheese or potato, and coiled into a shape that reminds some people of  a rose.

Here are a few other things you should know: my 18-year old son and many of his friends believe that Erkan, the charismatic manager of the pizza concession within Zeytinia, makes the best pies around. Zeytinia’s Chef Griselda, who has been cooking at the store almost since it opened, makes meatballs the Turkish way, which is to say either with couscous or bulgur because these yield a lighter and nuttier-flavored result than rice. Try Zeytinia’s delicious special soup, which contains only vegetables, herbs, green apple, olive oil and salt. Zeytinia makes its own hummus, which, says David Young, many feel is superior to any other because it is made using Turkish chickpeas, which are the sweetest. What about Turkish olives, you ask? They make the best oil, of course. Actually, for $8.99, you can buy a 24.5 oz. bottle of Madra extra virgin Turkish olive oil which, along with being deeply fruity and rich, does what few other olive oils do: it lists its acidity (under 1%, which is what you want to look for) on its label.

One of Zeytinia’s newest products, a handmade, brick oven Turkish bagel that is free of cholesterol, sugar and fat was, to me, also free of taste — at least straight from the bag. At my wife’s suggestion I tried toasting it — why didn’t I think of that? — and embelishing it with a shmear, and now:  this is a bagel! One more idea for you: buy a container of Zeytinia’s own beets with garlic spread. Put some in a blender with a dollop of creme fraiche and some buttermilk (work out the proportions to your own liking). Blend it. Then add some chicken stock and perhaps a shot of vinegar and blend again. Pour this into a bowl and garnish with dill and chopped cucumber for a very tasty cold soup. At the checkout, treat yourself to a lush bar of 70% cacao dark chocolate made by one of the largest and oldest food companies in Turkey, Ülker, which bought the Godiva brand not long ago from Campbell’s.

Bottom line: Zeytinia is an intriguing bazaar that offers some adventure, some treasure – and some everyday savings — to those who take a little time to explore.

Zeytinia Gourmet Market
14 Danbury Road
Wilton, CT 06897-4300
(203) 563-9749

www.zeytinia.com

Do you have some information to share about Zeytinia or a place like it? I’d love to hear from you.

A man I know says that being in a great food store is like a visit to the Louvre. There are so many works of art to inspect; so many possibilities to consider; so many stories, real and imagined, about the people who create the food, who display it and who buy it and use it. Beyond that there’s the merchandising itself, the lighting, the signage and all the other visual and aural cues that can create a wonderful theatrical experience — or a dismal one.  There can even be a social marketplace context if the store you’re in happens to be a place where you’re likely to bump into friends and neighbors. Of course, all stores can be romantic

in an archetypical way: they work hard to excite your imagination, to invite you into a fantasy. But places that sell food have an intimacy and an immediacy about them  — after all, food does not last forever — that puts them in a category all their own.

Forage Primeval is a blog primarily about the ways in which the places where we buy food both create and reflect the communities that shop there. There’s a lot of content on the Internet about what we eat and how we prepare it, but there’s much less about where we buy it. Perhaps one reason for this is that for many people, food shopping is a chore: You don’t say “Hey! Where should we shop for food today?” No, you probably go to the same store or stores pretty much every time you shop. You know where everything is, you know what to do with it and you know how much it costs. Your goal is to get in and out in the shortest amount of time with the smallest dent in your wallet. The last thing you want to do is get in a car (or subway, bus or other conveyance) and drive around just for the fun of pushing a cart around another food store. Even if there were a good likelihood of your finding something worthwhile in an unfamiliar market, it would probably have to be very compelling indeed to justify the time and effort required.

Actually, I suspect  there are quite a few people like me — and the man who loves the Louvre — who are very happy to travel around for the fun of going to another food store. More often than not, for me the effort is worthwhile: sometimes I even buy food but I get as much pleasure out of cataloging what’s interesting and where it is. I’ve noticed, though, that even people who shop in the same store every time often know something that others don’t but would find useful. So my goals are to share what I know, and to share what others have told me. I hope to encourage you to share, too.

We’re very fortunate in Fairfield County to have a very wide variety of places to shop for food  — from farmers markets and tiny ethnic shops to family-owned stores to giant links in global chains. My principal focus will be on my immediate neighborhood but I will stray across borders — and on occasion way across –  from time to time. My hope for ForagePrimeval.com is that it will become a community that helps us all find more interest, value and pleasure in the food we buy and eat.