So I didn't take a packed lunch on Saturday, I went shopping instead. On the corner of the High Street is the International Supermarket; I bought a packet of little yellow triangular pillows labelled 'Grape pastille with pistachio' out of curiousity. I've just eaten half of one and won't bother with the rest -- the yellow is dried grape pulp, like fruit leather but with no acid to cut the sugar (so sweet it set my teeth on edge) with a smudge of green stuff in the middle with no flavour to speak of. Perhaps they're better made at home?
Anyway, further east there's a tiny shop called 'Baltika'. Aha, I thought, interesting sausages and cured meats. There were, also breads, cereals, pickles and cheeses, very few of which had any English on them anyway. Never before has the Roman alphabet been arranged in ways that meant so little to me...
Food from Walthamstowsarah And me neither.. I lived a long time near the Dalston Ridley Road Market.... close on 20 yrs in fact. What an education!! I grew to love it to bits, and it's the first...
I bought some caraway rye bread (I recognised it *and* it had an English label).
I bought some 'Basturmi' on the grounds that it was a recognisable single piece of muscle and might be related to pastrami; it contains (the word order suggests it's a list of ingredients, but some could be insults for all I know) jautienos nugarin (I think it's a grave, but it might be a dot) 100proc, druuska, E250, prieskoniai, cukrus, skonio ir kvapo stipriklis E621, antioksidatorius E301. I do know what some of those must be.
I looked hard at the rest of the stuff in the cured meat cabinet and disregarded anything that was recognisably intestinal. The bag of cured? pork rind floating in yellow fluid with what were probably spicy bits didn't appeal either. So we've also got1 some karscarontai ruthere's a line over thatyaa Sthere's a caron over thatventine nugarine dot or grave, and some virtas (real?) kiaulienos su liezcaronuviu. Which is apparently 'vyniotinis. pirma rulinescaronis'. And some cheese. I could recognise cheese, and it seemed less likely to be so laden with garlic that all my nice new weaving friends would be asphyxiated. It's labelled 'sulineris RUlineKYTAS, it's 43% rieb s.m., and it's very nice. Somewhere along the line it's been coated in spices and smoke flavouring, or smoked properly.
I'm going to go back; they were selling sections of what might be smoked salmon and looked delicious but too smelly for a small room. 'Sections' as in slice the entire fish into chunks and then smoke it.
This was just about 5 doors from a Portuguese restaurant, and not far from the kebab house. Talk about spoilt for choice!
regards sarah
1 I've written in the accents that appear above the letters, as most aren't unicode and my newsreader is so strict it won't display them.
-- Think of it as evolution in action.
