After years of living in London, I’m pretty adept at everyday life in the UK. I know how to set up utility bills and open a bank account. I can say “cheers” instead of “thanks” without feeling silly, and I can order “bangers and mash” without giggling. But there’s one skill that still eludes me even after all this time: grocery shopping in London.
Grocery Shopping in London
It’s not that I don’t know how to walk into a grocery store and look for the things I need. I can do that. It’s just that the things I need are often called by different names in the UK than they are in the US.
This renders my years of acquiring complex knowledge of difficult-to-pronounce items like “tomato sauce” utterly useless.
Face-to-face with a row of jars of red substance, I flounder. Am I supposed to buy “passata”, “tomato paste”, “boiled tomatoes” or some other indecipherable product? Because none of these says “tomato sauce”.
Nor does it help to ask. Once when I had unsuccessfully scoured an entire store for toothpicks, I inquired after their whereabouts. “What?” the staff member asked. “Toothpicks.” “What?”
After ten minutes of this joyful call-and-response, an empathetic passerby came to our aid. “I think she means cocktail sticks,” the woman translated. Do I?
Weights and Measures
And it doesn’t stop at products. No, weights and measures are a pain in the gullet as well.
All my cookbooks are American, as are all the recipes my mother sends me in the hope that I will stop making myself peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and actually learn how to cook.
But when I arrive at the supermarket armed with a list that starts with “1 8oz can of tomato sauce” and all I see are 10g jars of “passata”, I want to cry.
If I didn’t have my phone to help with the conversions, I would probably own ten extra jars of unidentifiable red stuff, all purchased just in case 10g was way less than 8oz.
Online Grocery Shopping in London
After umpteen wasted hours in grocery stores, I decided to try online grocery shopping in London instead. If all I had to do was type in what I needed, there was no way things could go awry, right? Wrong.
The very first thing I typed into the search box was “yogurt.” Item not found. What? I know they sell yogurt.
After banging my head against the wall several thousand times, I damaged enough brain cells to remember that the British spelling of yogurt is “yoghurt”.
Ah, the dreaded silent “h”. I added the offending letter, and voila, there were thousands of options.
Nor did my weights and measures problem go away. In the absence of seeing a physical product, I had no idea how large or small anything was.
All the tiny photos next to the listings made the most minuscule quantity look the exact same size as the biggest one.
And that’s how I ended up with half a kilo of salt to fill the dainty shaker on my kitchen table. For an American that only ever used the metric system for theoretical hocus-pocus in physics and chemistry class, 0.5kg didn’t sound like a lifetime supply.
The Solution
And so I gave up on grocery shopping in London. If I can’t even find what I need—in the quantity in which I need it—how can my mother expect me to learn how to cook my own supper, let alone do a better job of dinner than Heston Blumenthal?
It’s a good thing London’s restaurant scene gets better all the time, because I’m relying on it to ensure I never have to set foot in a supermarket again. Well, at least until I want another peanut butter sandwich.
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