The packet of flour has a picture of a cake on it, but according to the translation app on my phone, the label reads as biscuit flour. I thought it said biscuit flour, but I wasn’t so sure which is why I’ve been stood looking blankly at the shelves of flour for the last few minutes.
Finding flour in the small-town supermarket wasn’t easy. It’s not that it’s a big shop, it’s not. It’s just that this supermarket isn’t laid out in the same style as the supermarkets I’m used to back home. Back home it’s simple.
First in front of you are the flowers, then the fruit and vegetables. This is a technique supermarket chains use to give the impression that all their produce is fresh. Milk and bread are typically at the back of the shop, because everyone in England needs to buy milk and bread and so putting them at the back of the shop forces the customers to walk past the aisles of things that they might otherwise not think about stocking up on. Like flour.
Flour lives in the home-baking section alongside things like chocolate chips and dried fruit.
Except here, when it lives beside olives and across from crisps.
I buy the biscuit flour deciding to go with the picture of the cake. I crave something hot, stodgy and English. I move on to find eggs. These I know are opposite the almonds next to bananas. I have no idea how you’d go about translating the phrase ‘free-range’ and so simply pick the ones with the grass in the photo. I’m in luck as I later discover that they are genuine free-range eggs. I have learnt that if you look at the code printed on an egg, the first number will be a 1 if it’s free range or 0 if organic. The numbers 2 and 3 are reserved for eggs laid by less happy chickens.
I crave cake. Not necessarily for the sugar rush, but for the stodginess. I also want hot custard.
Vanilla I discover above the fridge of chicken by the jars of what I am going to assume is chilli paste. By now I have ten euros worth of produce in my basket, enough to fill my ‘Yorkshire Tea’ shopping bag, and enough to try baking a cake. I head for the till.
Outside the sun has set.