I have had no trouble buying tomatoes, despite all the dire warnings of shortages. Maybe it’s because I don’t often shop in the big supermarkets where people seem to buy in bulk and therefore create further shortages. Just look at what happened with loo roll at the start of the pandemic lockdown. Whatever the reason, our small local Tesco doesn’t have rows and rows of empty spaces on shelves like the ones people post in photos on social media.
So I now have tomatoes, both for making my pasta sauce and for putting in salads. Not that I was ever really panicking. By the way, here’s a nice suggestions for a substitute for tomato ketchup.
Some pieces in todays papers suggest that apples and pears could be our next food shortage item. Leeks are also seemingly under threat. Surely these are things that we can grow in the UK and not need to worry about importing. However, it would seem that certain crops, such as leeks, were adversely affected by the very cold weather we had not so long ago. And farmers are uprooting their fruit trees in order to try other crops because they don’t make enough money selling them to the supermarkets. What a silly state we have got ourselves into.
I was thinking about imported food. We have grown used to eating all kinds of food from all over the world. Whenever we are asked about traditional British food in our Italian class, we come up with the old roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, roast leg of lamb and new potatoes and garden peas, and that kind of thing. Fish and chips, of course! And yet in fact most of us are much more cosmopolitan in our approach to food and the types of cuisine we not only eat but also cook for ourselves.
And now there’s talk of rationing certain food items. I’m not old enough to remember rationing after World War II, although I do vaguely remember playing with ration book coupons as a small child, after rationing had disappeared.
I also remember more clearly a time when we had never heard of certain food items. Pepper was something that was put on the table in it’s little pot alongside salt. Who even knew there were such things as green peppers, let alone red and yellow ones too? Figs came preserved in boxes at Christmas time - or in fig biscuits - and tangerines also appeared only at Christmas. Cherries were mostly glacé and peaches mostly came sliced in tins, as did apricots.
We may not have known about peppers and yet I can remember having pomegranates, which now seem more exotic. We would be given half a pomegranate, or maybe a quarter, and one of my grandmother’s hatpins to prize the individual pomegranate seeds out without getting the rather bitter tasting pith. It’s amazing how long a piece of pomegranate can last when eaten that way! It’s even more amazing that nobody worried about children wandering round the house with sharp hatpins in their hands.
We were talking about this yesterday when Granddaughter Number One ordered a San Pellegrino orange and pomegranate drink in a cafe (where incidentally they misspelt Pellegrino on their menu, changing it to Pelligrino) only to find they had sold out. They offered her San Pellegrino blood orange but she is unable to have anything with blood orange or grapefruit as they interfere with the medication she takes! She declared her love of pomegranate but confessed that she buys it ready prepared - “I can’t be doing with the faff of picking the seeds out of fresh one!” I told her about buying freshly squeezed pomegranate juice in Sicily, from the same kind of machine as cafes use to provide freshly squeezed, and chilled, orange juice.
So I found myself wondering why we have known pomegranates for so long and other fruit and veg for such a relatively short time, despite our rapid assimilation of these items into our cooking. Is it because we had a long ago connection with a certain Catherine of Aragon. Just as the Tudors had their rose (also known as the Union Rose as it combined the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York), so the pomegranate was the symbol of Aragon and was combined with the Tudor rose to make a symbol for Henry VIII and his first wife. It could be that we’ve had pomegranates ever since then!
Those who know such things are now saying that food shortages could continue for a couple of months yet. We’ll see how the rationing works out.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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