The supermarket dilemma…

Supermarket shopping in foreign countries is almost a herculean task. One tries to find out Indian equivalents in the supermarket and one often ends up with some unexpected results especially if the country in question is not an English speaking one. The situation gets worse if the language in question uses a different script altogether. In this case, you have only the picture of the product to go by. And the picture on the thing you are trying to buy almost never looks like the actual thing.

Indian and British “ladiesfinger” = Rest of the world “okra”. Then, there’s the vegetable brinjal which is called eggplant in many countries and to add to this ruckus, aubergine in many other countries. You would think that potato is commonly used all over the world. There’s a country that I don’t wish to name that also refers to it as augratine. And of course, there’s the coriander which is also referred to as a cilantro in certain countries that I again don’t wish to name. Also coriander looks eerily similar to parsley, so you will end up buying parsley atleast once with not too pleasant results. Lastly, capsicums are also called peppers. There ought to be a world wide standardization of vegetable names to avoid the kind of accidents I have been through. This issue exists in the fruit world as well. Orange, depending on its size and colour is often sold as Clementine or mandarin. I demand a standard nomenclature for fruits and vegetables all over the world like chemical names. (Gang!! No wisecracks here).

Another important thing I wish to make the reader aware of is that the Indian “chana” daal in foreign countries looks again eerily similat to the “tur” dal, which is what the Indian in the foreign country set out to buy. Now this chana daal is a big culprit because it takes 20 times the time of tur dal to cook and it belongs to what I call the explosive category. The other members of this category are kabuli chana( chole/chickpeas) and rajma (red kidney beans). I think the reader should get the drift here. Only 6 months of chana daal later did I realize that it wasn’t tur dal. That was 4 years ago. A much wiser man now, I use masur dal (red lentils) as substitute.

Just 2 days back, I bought what looked like an instant soup packet because it had a picture of hot soup in a cup. The soup picture showed that there were some bread crumbs (or croutons which would be the correct culinary word to use). So I bought this and to my horror found that it was not a soup packet but a packet containing these “crumbs” and intended to be used on soup. What does it take for the manufacturer to write at least one word Crouton in English on this pack, I will never know. That’s 2$ I am never going to get back.

As a free public service, I would be more than happy to coach inexperienced supermarket entrants on these issues. Queries on this are more than welcome.