Like I said a while back, while I’m doing some cooking here staying in another person’s flat, I don’t have my cookbooks and I don’t want to buy all the innumerable things I’d feel the need for only to leave them here with only a pinch or a handful from them.
I did take advantage of an archives-are-closed day to head off to the Borough Market, which, ok, is great. And so tonight I am making some food that’s a bit more than just “Waitrose prepared”, much as I think that’s pretty good. I picked up a small rolled lamb belly stuffed with merguez sausage, some mushrooms and guaniciale to make a small risotto with, and a few potatoes to oven roast. Yes, folks, it’s the Sunday Roast, if I had some casks of mediocre Fuller’s I could open a pub.
Anyway, I did think to myself: why don’t I go down to Reading Terminal Market more often in the same way? A little of it is the economics of it: Septa is (I think) more expensive than the Underground. A little of it is the time of it: I was there and back again today faster than I would be with a regional rail line that runs only once an hour. Maybe more than a little of it is that Reading Terminal Market or the Italian Market, much as I like both of them, don’t have the range, quality and fun of where I was today. But then again, London is London and Philadelphia is Philadelphia.
A lot of it is suburban life, which is less awful than I once supposed (growing up in suburbia) but which has a whole set of material, mental, and temporal structures set into it that mitigate against making a routine that includes going into an urban market regularly as opposed to an occasional fun thing. Then again, that might be true for me here too, after a short while. I’m in that strange time of being a traveller who is also working most days: it is easier to imagine an adventure than it is to imagine a routine.
The big thing I’d say for markets of those kinds, including farmer’s markets, is that it’s usually easier to get no more and no less than what you want for a meal or two. Supermarkets, of any kind and any tier, sell portions that are more than what people need much of the time, and they force either eating more, wasting more, or elaborate routinized structures of food consumption and preservation via freezing. But they also create a good feeling of being public in a way that supermarkets do not, particularly Whole Foods, which is often unnerving because half the people present are shopping for people who are absent, as a job.
Wish I were there!