A contact in India posted photos from their vegetable market and this brought back memories... it's 20 years since I first came to England and I still remember being stunned by the salad vegetables here. Thank God they have improved over the years... but still...
Huge cucumbers, all the same length. Tomatoes that were firm and red and... tasteless. Peppers that cost the earth but tasted of nothing. For an Israeli - to whom salad is an essential part of daily life, and is supposed to taste nice - this was a huge culture shock.
Not to mention going to a pub for lunch and discovering that when they said a dish came "with salad" they didn't mean what we mean by salad - they might serve it with coleslaw, or rice salad, or Waldorf salad, or all sorts of things... or even that thing that Brits do, when they throw a whole load of lettuce leaves in a bowl, scatter some cherry tomatoes to give it some colour, and call it a salad...
For Israelis, salad means cucumbers and tomatoes - possibly with the addition of onion/spring onion/peppers/maybe some lettuce - chopped up very small and mixed together. And we serve nearly everything with salad, it's just a totally basic and taken-for-granted part of life, like bread, like hummus.
Well, I kind of got out of the salad habit over the years here, and I don't completely blame the quality of the veg - in a colder climate, salad is less appealing, so it's only on warm summer days that I find myself in the mood for salad here. (And warm summer days are rare...)
But I was very pleased when the new trend started here on the salad veg front - especially on the tomato front. At some point in the 90s, Marks & Spencer's started selling a new, more expensive kind of tomato - on the packaging it said: "grown for flavour". I could hardly keep a straight face when I saw that... what else do you grow tomatoes for? I felt like screaming... but I know - for British housewives up to then, a tomato was just for adding colour to a salad, it had to have a good shape so that you'd have neat slices, it had to be firm for easy slicing, and the idea of flavour - well, they obviously didn't know this was possible in a tomato...
M&S led the way, and others followed. So today I can go to the supermarket and choose from all sorts of nice tomatoes, tomatoes with the aroma that a tomato should have, tomatoes that actually taste like a real tomato! I think the cucumbers have also improved - or maybe I've just got used to them? But the English peppers are still more for colour than for flavour, so now and again when I spot an Israeli pepper on the supermarket shelf I pounce on it with great excitement... But hey, at least I've seen some progress :-)
Not to mention going to a pub for lunch and discovering that when they said a dish came "with salad" they didn't mean what we mean by salad - they might serve it with coleslaw, or rice salad, or Waldorf salad, or all sorts of things... or even that thing that Brits do, when they throw a whole load of lettuce leaves in a bowl, scatter some cherry tomatoes to give it some colour, and call it a salad...
For Israelis, salad means cucumbers and tomatoes - possibly with the addition of onion/spring onion/peppers/maybe some lettuce - chopped up very small and mixed together. And we serve nearly everything with salad, it's just a totally basic and taken-for-granted part of life, like bread, like hummus.
Well, I kind of got out of the salad habit over the years here, and I don't completely blame the quality of the veg - in a colder climate, salad is less appealing, so it's only on warm summer days that I find myself in the mood for salad here. (And warm summer days are rare...)
But I was very pleased when the new trend started here on the salad veg front - especially on the tomato front. At some point in the 90s, Marks & Spencer's started selling a new, more expensive kind of tomato - on the packaging it said: "grown for flavour". I could hardly keep a straight face when I saw that... what else do you grow tomatoes for? I felt like screaming... but I know - for British housewives up to then, a tomato was just for adding colour to a salad, it had to have a good shape so that you'd have neat slices, it had to be firm for easy slicing, and the idea of flavour - well, they obviously didn't know this was possible in a tomato...
M&S led the way, and others followed. So today I can go to the supermarket and choose from all sorts of nice tomatoes, tomatoes with the aroma that a tomato should have, tomatoes that actually taste like a real tomato! I think the cucumbers have also improved - or maybe I've just got used to them? But the English peppers are still more for colour than for flavour, so now and again when I spot an Israeli pepper on the supermarket shelf I pounce on it with great excitement... But hey, at least I've seen some progress :-)
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