Tesco's financial results (UK like-for-like sales excluding petrol down slightly for the second quarter in a row) have provoked the predicatable comments on the internet expressing satisfaction that the Great Satan is suffering, and vilifying Tesco and supermarkets in general for damaging Independent Shops and destroying the High Street. Professing to hate and distrust Tesco is a popular sport (funny how one in eight retail pounds is spent there). It isn't a line I go with myself. I'm middle-aged enought to remember what shopping was like in the late 60s and 70s, and it wasn't very good. Or at least, there may have been a golden age of grocery shopping then in Soho, but there wasn't in provincial east Devon.
Groceries came from Knotts. The Knott family had a handsome shop with a brown varnished counter and shelves rising up behind. Mr Knott stood behind the counter wearing a sort of brown labcoat. My mother told Mr Knott what she wanted, and he put items one by one into a cardboard box. Sometimes the box was even delivered in a maroon van with Knotts written on the side in gold curly lettering. I'm not sure if cash changed hands over the counter, or if there was an account and Mr Knott kept a record of all that we had and sent the bill later. Shopping took ages, and cost a far higher percentage of the family income than a pair of academics would expect to spend on their groceries nowadays. (I last visited the village about eleven years ago, and Knotts had turned into a reproduction furniture showroom).
I particularly remember the parmesan, which we bought to go on pasta and considered the height of sophistication. It came ready-grated, in a carton about the same size as a a baking powder tin or a jar of ready-made mint sauce. We sprinkled a tiny amount on our food, about as much as a dusting of dandruff on the shoulders, which contributed absolutely nothing to the taste. Whole blocks of parmesan that you can grate or flake yourself? Forget it. They sell those in Tesco, you know.
There was a bread shop, which did sell quite decent bread. A loaf cooked in a tin and cut down the middle before cooking was called a 'split riser', a term I have found used nowhere else in the country, and which does not appear in Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, but which was certainly current in east Devon circa 1970. I will concede that the bread was good, though you had to queue for a while to get it, and if you got there too late they would have run out. Oh, and if you were thinking of ciabatta, or a French stick that tastes at least vaguely like the ones they sell in France, or sour dough bread, not a hope. They didn't do those in my young days. Tesco do, though.
There was definitely no golden age of locally sourced vegetables in 1970s east Devon. The main greengrocers was Purchells, who displayed the veg on green astroturf, very tasteful. I remember onions and potatoes and big round oranges and all the traditional fruit and veg that people must have been glad to see again after the war. I remember learning to cook from the Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery Book, or possibly an early Elizabeth David, and wondering what exactly a shallot was, and where you got one from. A grocers in Soho, perhaps, but not Purchells. In Tesco you would be fine now. They have two different sorts of shallots, and red onions. I don't think most of Purchell's vegetables were especially local, I think they came from the local wholesaler. There were a couple of strange, faded shops further down the High Street, that did sell a few tired and wizened locally grown lettuces and tomatoes, but they looked pretty unappetising.
There was a butcher (more queueing) and a fishmonger (ditto). I don't remember the meat of my youth being unbelievably flavoursome compared to the controlled atmosphere packaged, tasteless offerings that are all you can get in a modern supermarket, if you believe half the comments on the net. The fishmonger was a good bloke who ran the local young ornithologist's group and was a pillar of the community and prototypical member of the Big Society. I remember walking a long way in uncomfortable wellington boots to look at a small black dot out on the river mud, and being told 'That is an Avocet' and thinking, is that it? The butcher was more problematic. I rather think he, or his successor in business, eventually set fire to the butcher's shop in an outbreak of Insureandburn, and practically killed the people in the upstairs flat.
A local financial advisor opened a wine shop, which sold refreshments on the premises. I remember being taken to drink grape juice and eat French cheese, which was cut from an enormous wheel of brie and always tasted strongly of ammonia, because the turnover wasn't high enough to get through all the cheese before it went past its best. The grownup drank Rombouts coffee made with an individual filter holding the coffee grounds over the cup, which was filled with boiling water and dripped through into the cup while you waited. I didn't like the cheese or the grape juice particularly, but felt mysteriously chic. We didn't want a latte, or a cappucino, or an espresso instead, because in the 1970s in east Devon these things hadn't been invented, not even in Exeter and that was a City and not just a village.
Lemon grass, okra, limes, organic natural yogurt, muesli without added sugar and whey powder, fresh basil, dried pasta in any shape other than spaghetti or macaroni, any kind of fresh pasta, any kind of fresh noodles, tahini paste, puy lentils as well as the orange ones that go to mush when you cook them, chapati flour, pitta bread, fresh coriander, chorizo, parma ham, black eyed beans, whole cinammon sticks. You could not buy these in my village growing up, but you can in Tesco (or Sainsbury, Waitrose etc. Other supermarkets are available).
And yes, I know that I could visit a town centre and go to a butcher and a baker and a deli and a greengrocer and queue in each of them, and carry it all back to the car, but it would take most of the morning and cost significantly more than going to the supermarket. Sorry, but it would. And I know that the foodies tell me that food from small, local producers sold in real, local little shops just tastes so much better, but I defy them to spot the difference between pulses bought in the supermarket and ones I made a twenty mile round trip to the nearest deli to buy. And I know that plastic wrapping destroys the flavour of cheese, and I should have been to a speciality cheese shop to get my parmesan, but now that we aren't big swinging dicks in the City we do like to get some change from twenty quid when we buy cheese. And supermarket opening hours are so jolly convenient. I'm sorry, but they are. We stayed in a cottage once outside Ludlow, a foodie hotspot, and still ended up buying the ingredients for most of our suppers in the local Tesco and not the lovely independent foodie shops, because we wanted to spend the days looking at gardens and houses and strange rural churches. Leaving the shopping sitting all day in the car seemed a fast track to rancid milk and food poisoning, even in September, and by the time we got back each evening after a hard day touristing all the foodie shops had shut.
I bet loads of the people who moan about supermarkets shop in them. If you aren't going to, you either have an awful lot of money or a lot of time on your hands.
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