My Mother Never Had to Go Grocery Shopping
My story about how my mother and many others of her generation found cooking to be thankless and unremitting labor is consistently one of my most popular posts.
Where my mother won out, though, is that she never had to go grocery shopping. I was reminded of this when yesterday a post on Facebook about how tedious I found navigating the 30,000 items in the average American grocery store drew dozens of responses. Most of them were personal advice for which I am really grateful. Increasingly, though, I think of the housewife who ventures regularly into the American grocery store as a “supermarket warrior.” More on that when I get around to it. For now, the opposite.
Looking down Tisbury high street today. Howell’s Grocers was the bay-windowed building up three or four steps from the right hand side of the street. Then it was grey stone. It’s been done up as a private house
About once a month or two during the early 1950s, my mother requisitioned the second hand, horribly unreliable Jowett van that served as the farm car and drove the three miles to the nearest small town, Tisbury, with its single shopping street to pay her grocery bill.
I angled to go with her if I could so that I could enjoy the treat of a candied violet or rose petal from one of the jars on the counter.
We sat on high bentwood chairs on one side, Mr Howell stood on the other in front of shelves with canisters of tea and other delicious things. He and my mother would chat about the particularly good Cheddar he had in, or occasionally some nice Wensleydale or Caerphilly or Cheshire, or how much preserving sugar to set aside for her, or whether the green or the smoked bacon was better that week.
Tisbury High Street fifty years before my time.
The rest of the time, she called her order in to Mr Howell on Tuesdays, using the bIack dial phone on the shelf in the back hall under the bells for the servants that no longer existed.
Our farmhouse was isolated. Today, naturally, it would not seem so. The village a mile away is just a couple of minutes drive, the largest nearby town, Salisbury, 20 minutes.
On Wednesdays, the Howells’ van would pull into the back yard. The delivery boy would bring in two boxes for our household that never numbered less than seven.
Sugar, flour and salt.
Butter, cheese, bacon, lard, and margarine for baking.
Tea.
Jacobs Cream Crackers and Rich Tea Biscuits.
Occasionally rice or macaroni, a can of tomato soup that sat on the pantry shelf until a child was sick and needed a treat, or a can of sardines to make picnic sandwiches.
Lea and Perrins over my father’s dead body.
Soap and vile shiny toilet paper (newspaper was much better).
I suppose the oranges and bananas that supplemented our own preserved fruit in the winter also came from Mr Howell.
Little else. A far cry from the 30,000 items in the modern American grocery store.
Bread and meat were the same story. Tuesday and Thursday saw Les the baker’s delivery boy turn up with gossip from all the upstream villages and with a van with sliding shelves filled with good breads and cakes.
My mother always took two or three large loaves of excellent white bread, plus some other breads to vary the options: a cottage loaf, bridge rolls if there was a child’s birthday party coming up, wholemeal or Hovis.
Lardy cakes were wonderful though I always wondered why my father enjoyed dough cakes. Buns and tea cakes of multiple kinds and none of them cloyingly sweet. And there were the cakes too fancy to bake at home, like Battenburg.
Thursday or Friday was the day for the delivery from the butcher. Again my mother had called in for a roast that alternated between beef, lamb and pork, varied with a request to put “a nice piece of beef in the brine” or to send a nice piece of gammon.
The big meat, designed to last several days, was supplemented by chops, sausages, liver, or kidney for the end of the week, though the sausages had to be just so, not any old sausages would do.
That was it. Except to say that these deliveries were not just for the rich. The vans were traveling stores, stopping in the villages as well as in isolated farmhouses.
Fruit and vegetables came from an extensive and (for my mother) labor intensive garden. They were supplemented by lovely watercress from the beds in the next village, tomatoes and cucumber from the Manor greenhouse in summer, and the occasional head of celery or exotic green pepper when someone had been to town.
Milk came from our dairy cows. We children were dispatched with a conical milk can, and instructions to stir the milk in the churn so that we did not cheat customers by taking the lovely top of the milk.
I did not know supermarkets existed until after I had left university in the mid to late 1960s.
OK. Nostalgia.
Also thought provoking. The labor of cooking for women has shifted. The rise in expectations for the home cook is well documented. Have I just missed the burden that the explosion of items in the grocery store has put on shoppers, largely women? or the fact that it makes deliveries so difficult? Or that it is not accompanied by a parallel rise in quality? All kinds of questions.
I’d love to hear more on this.
- US Foreign Policy, the Flaky Flatbread Called Parotta, and Where Does Asafoetida Fit?
- Maida Heatter and Molly O’Neill, RIP.
I’m a man who shops for our family of four in an affluent country. We are on a very limited budget. I sometimes feel like it is a hunt for me to bring back the food for the family and to do it as cheaply as possible. I literally have to hunt for the basic ingredients somewhere in the mile of shelves, hunt for the brand that offers the best value for money (quality/price). Add to this mix that our country is dominated by a supermarket duopoly and they are very keen on weekly specials, so it isn’t a matter of buying the same brands every week because sometimes more processed foods (yogurt, bread, mixed frozen vegetables, curry sauces, chocolate biscuits/cookies, etc.) are cheaper and convenient if they are on a special and we can stretch the budget a bit.
Add to the mix that the cheapest of these processed foods are often full of unhealthy trans-fats, preservatives, colourants etc. and I wont buy them. We also live a distance from town and I try to only go to town once or twice a week, and do my grocery shopping fortnightly though I pick up more vegetables in the off week. Then there is the fact that two of our family have various allergies. So I find it quite mentally exhausting going to the supermarket and coming back with enough food for 168 servings. The the piped music is my enemy, especially as it seems to have gotten louder over the last few years.
I look for:
1) price per gram
2) quality (a combination of healthy nutrition and taste)
3) convenience
4) how it fits in to my repertoire of recipes
I suppose it would be possible to write a computer executed algorithm to make all my decisions for me, but then I wouldn’t come home feeling like I had hunted the wild beast and won.
I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful response. Hunting and gathering is not dead!
This made me smile, because I experienced something of the opposite when I lived in England in 1972. I’d grown up with American grocery stores — granted, nowhere near as overwhelming then as they are today, but still vastly different from what I found in England. Pharmacies were more nearly parallel, but food shopping was remarkable, with different shops for meat, fish, veg, bread, and so on. Fortunately, because this was not a long-term change, it remained an adventure for the most part — though I can remember the relief with which we found the restaurant The Hungry Years, where they had ice in the water and blue cheese salad dressing, not just salad cream. A few years later, in the U.S., I took a business associate who was visiting from the UK to a big grocery store–one who had been critical of Americans–and I felt some delight when he was completely blown away by the variety, quantity, and prices. Of course, today, the big grocery stores in the UK — at least in larger towns — are far more similar to the supermarkets in the U.S. — though friends in the UK still work hard at keeping the small shops busy. But fun to remember adjusting to shopping in the UK — and to realize that coming here was an adjustment, as well. I think one sometimes assume that more choices will always be welcome. But I remember a comment made by a British-born friend visiting from Australia, who asked “Do you ever get tired of having so many choices?” No — but it is not because I am clever, just because it’s what I grew up knowing.
Lots of small shops can be an adventure. They can also be a pain. My Mexican friends in Guanajuato danced for joy when a supermarket arrived and they could get everything in one place, load it in the car, and be done for the better part of a week.
Absolutely understand that it can be a pain — but also have friends who cherish lots of little shops, because that’s how they grew up. It seems that everything depends on either nostalgia or circumstances. For me, with no nostalgia involved, it was fun because it was novel — and short term.
My wife and I plan our meals together, and usually do our grocery shopping together. We don’t find it terribly difficult. We live close to a supermarket, so transit time isn’t onerous. We plan a week’s worth of meals at a time, and buy as many ingredients as possible on one weekly trip. I do most of the cooking, and I usually plan leftovers both to eat later in the week and to freeze for busy times (and for friends and colleagues who are bereaved and need food delivered). We make a list and generally stick to it, though impulse purchases are more likely if we do our shopping before lunch. We usually shop at the same supermarket, and I have the layout nearly memorized, so finding our normal purchases takes very little mental energy.
If we are spending the summer at home, we buy a share in a local farm that delivers produce directly to investors (“community supported agriculture,” or CSA, in the US). We did that in Oxford (England) in the three summers we lived there, as well. That isn’t quite delivery, but it does relieve more of the burden of choice, and it challenges me to be creative in my cooking.
I do make tradeoffs to cook at home. In academic terms, I’m less “productive” (i.e., I have fewer publications for my career stage) that I probably would be if I didn’t spend the time planning meals, shopping, and cooking. But I usually find the work satisfying and relaxing, a pleasant change from academic work that takes weeks, months, or years to come to fruition. It also matters that I cook only for two, my wife and myself, and we don’t have children to raise or (at least now) others to care for. It would be a lot harder if we had those responsibilities too.
Interestingly, deliveries and grocery pickups are now on the rise in the US, thanks to partnerships between supermarkets and online ordering companies. I have a friend who does the shopping for his family, and he usually places an order online, then drives to the supermarket and picks it up. He prefers to go to the supermarket because there are usually a few mistakes that are easier to correct onsite, and he can also get last-minute purchases that didn’t make it onto the list, but he says it does save a substantial amount of time, and it avoids the temptations of impulse purchasing.
(P.S. I loved _From Mineralogy to Geology_, which I discovered not long after it came out.)
Interesting. I’ve had deliveries–always something wrong that I just count as one of the costs–but have avoided pick up because I know I would go in to the store for meat and vegetables and thus, with the time ordering on line, would not have saved much time.
Thanks for the comments on From Mineralogy to Geology. I must get your books–I am so out of touch with history of science!
It occurred to me after I posted that my routine is different when I’m in Paris for more than a couple weeks at a stretch. (Since my wife is a historian of France, that’s fairly often.) There, we do a weekly trip to the supermarket, but we supplement it with anywhere from 2-6 trips per week to open-air markets and small shops (mostly the butcher, fishmonger, and cheesemonger, but sometimes a traitteur for pre-made food).
I’ll ask my friend about his pickup experiences. Because he’s often minding his children, he may prefer pickup even if it doesn’t save a lot of time, because it’s easier than taking children out of the car and supervising them inside the grocery store.
I love the point about getting children in and out of the car is so tedious that pick up makes a good option. And, yes, easier to do small shops in dense European cities than in suburban America.
I’m struck by your statement that cooking was “thankless and unremitting labor.” I think I’m a bit older than you are (by a decade at least) and my memories are a little similar–not quite so Victorian a childhood as you had but still, small town, Maine, depending on local farmers and dairymen and our own in-town and rather extensive gardens plus a small apple orchard. In my memory, cooking was one of the things that gave my mother, an early-retired school teacher, the most pleasure of all the varied household tasks. Laundry was the source of thankless and unremitting labor even in a small family, but cooking was an activity that she found (not always of course) full of delights, surprises, some creativity (not too much, we were a very conventional family), even during the endless, tiring but fulfilling chores of late-summer canning, pickling and jam making. She also enjoyed her status as provider, despite the fact that the income (and much of the gardening too) came from my father, she was the one who pulled it all together and put it on the table. Did your mother truly find cooking such a thankless task, Rachel? Or does your memory reflect your own unease with the activity? I’m truly curious how other women felt back there in what, for me at least, is the not very distant past.
Thanks Nancy. Yes, laundry too was a chore. Ah, the mangle. My mother, though, was adamant about cooking. She did it well and knew it came with the territory. But while she often said how much she enjoyed scrubbing the flagstone floor of the kitchen and knowing the shapes and texture of every stone, she never made similar remarks about cooking. It perhaps didn’t help that my father had very high standards. No Bird’s Custard Powder, always an egg custard to go with a pie. And it also didn’t help that she prepared 21 meals a week for ten years plus straight. No days off at all, not even meals off, except for the odd picnic (prepared by her) or tea with relatives (which had to be reciprocated). I have always enjoyed cooking but I have never had that pressure. For me it was always a change from desk work.
Thanks, Rachel, for another one of your always thought-provoking posts. What strikes me as I read this is that when ordering groceries on the telephone, your mother spoke to a human being, and one whose name she knew. Those of us who order online today are clicking and typing, interacting with bots. Yes, there is a human being on the other end — someone has to pack up the order– and deliver it– but we rarely if ever know who they are. My experience of grocery stores is that they also tend to be very impersonal. Now we can avoid the cashier altogether by going to the self-check out station and scanning things ourselves.
I shall be very interested to read what you have to say about contemporary grocery shopping.
I hadn’t considered the impersonality of modern grocery shopping. Thanks for this and added to my list.
You brought back many memories of weeding gardens, picking strawberries, canning vegetables and the pride Mother took in her “root cellar” as we called the basement pantry full of put ups. But lets also consider the modern need to recycle all that fancy packaging that our modern groceries come in. In those days we recycled without realising it – peelings etc went into the compost heap to be used in the garden and flower beds. Leftovers were either made into something else or given to the dog. Paperwaste was burned. The only garbage was tin cans, and glass which we paid to be picked up and were perhaps even then ( 1950s) .recycled. Don’t recall many plastics and aluminum cans then. As for shopping I remember walking a mile inyo town for milk etc.until old enough to drive. Then we would go to various supermarkets to get whatever was on sale and/or use coupons from the newspaper. It was rather fun I thought.
Thanks Rachel for the memories of our long lost life in the country.
A typical Soviet woman had to work 8 hours a day. After that, about 5 or 6 PM, she hit the shops. No supermarkets, no groceries, the bread shop and the dairy shop and the fish shop and the meat shop and the vegetable shop. And as the Unbreakable Union of Freeborn Republics marched from glorious victory to fiery speech, the food on the shelves somehow shrunk, vanished, and became ‘defizit’ while queues announced shops selling anything useful. After securing something the woman deemed edible she rushed home (picking up her baby or babies from daycare on the way) to cook, clean, and fall into her bed.
That was how my mother lived. By the time I started cooking we had some supermarkets. Well, instead of the shop that had no meat and the shop that had no fish the supermarkets had no food whatsoever unless I happened to arrive at just the right time. Otherwise one could depend on finding salt, baking soda, and UCO (unidentified canned objects) in rusty, bulging tins.
Always grateful, Ganna, to have your perspective. Those women were heroines.
Chiming in here from an urban Southeast Asian experience! The only 2 constant things I buy in the grocery are olive oil and toilet paper (recently fly paper, as a tiny mouse has been observed in the kitchen). The rest I buy in bulk from my own specialty store (coconut sugar, salts, dried fish, sauces. oil). But most of our food comes from a veggie delivery (with weekly lists) and the wet market.
My area dates back to early Spanish occupation and the layout is still people-friendly. It is mixed-income. We are lucky to live near a wet market. I thoroughly enjoy the market. Here we can still shop relatively seasonally and very inexpensively. I found that many in my area do not to even own a refrigerator, as the market is so close. If push came to shove, we could survive with wet market shopping alone.
As someone cooking meat for her family but not actually eating meat herself, I find the fish lady invaluable, as she introduces me to different types of fish and preparation methods. She knows I don’t eat fish and would not be able to handle it or taste it as much as someone who does, so she pimps the easy recipes and fish out to me. The vegetable and coconut milk vendor is also always ready with a tip and a freebie as well. I try to keep things simple except on holidays, when I have more time to cook, so maybe something a bit more elaborate. I do a lot of prep work at night or when everyone is sleeping. Luckily, prepared food is also cheap in the community, as it is in other parts of Asia. I would say we cook in-house about 2/3 of the time.
The coconut water vendor stops by everyday to fill several pitchers up.
Though I have a helper, most of our time is occupied passing “kid duties” between each other so I can manage to run my business while at home. Our cooking is simple and quick. Rice, something savory, and a lot of fruit–these are our minimum requirements for happiness and satisfaction.
I love these descriptions of different ways of procuring food. It’s so easy to assume that that one’s local practices are far more universal than they are. I’d love to have a coconut water vendor. Thanks Bea, and good to see you popping up again.