Big Shop Day
There’s an incredible description of the Big Shop in Anne Enright’s novel The Green Road. It spans four pages and chronicles the character Constance’s journey round the supermarket as she gathers provisions for the upcoming family Christmas Day festivities, walking up and down the aisles and throwing things into her shopping trolley with increasingly frenzied abandon: a case of Prosecco on special offer to wrap and leave on various doorsteps’ ‘eight frozen pizzas in case the kids rolled up with friends’ ‘five squat candles in cream-coloured beeswax to fill the cracked hearth in the good room at Ardeevin’ ‘ready cooked drumsticks to keep people going’ ‘back to the deli counter for more cheese’.
This isn’t any Big Shop, of course, it is a Christmas Big Shop (and also a Celtic Tiger, pre- financial crash one – ‘The bill came to four hundred and ten euros, a new record’) – but the inventory of items here is a majestic bit of showing-not-telling by Enright; we get so much insight into Constance’s character by the choices she is shown to make and the way she makes them. Lists in literature are one of my favourite things, I love their pared down, bare bones quality, almost like a poem. Nick Caraway’s account of all the guest at Gatsby’s parties is another favourite and also extends across several pages. (Taster: ‘the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosever came near’)
But a Big Shop list like Constance’s, that’s something special, full of promise and possibility. I don’t go to the supermarket myself for the Big Shop anymore – I get a big Sainsbury’s delivery once a month, just after I've been paid, but I like to think the list tells some stories. I love Big Shop Day and I usually start my order 4 or 5 days before, adding and taking items away as things occur to me. Like a lot of us, I’m on a fairly tight budget due to the insane cost of living and substantial price rises on almost all staple food items, so I spend a lot more time than I used to scouring the Nectar offers, replacing usual brands for those that are cheaper, weighing up which extravagances I am going to go for this month and which I’ll go without and sometimes opening up a separate browser window to compare the prices at Tesco or Morrison’s.
This month’s Big Shop Day came last Wednesday and for some reason it felt particularly freighted with deliberation. After going through past orders and looking at prices, I made various decisions: I switched to the cheaper Stamford Street line for my cherry tomatoes, for example, and did likewise for lemons. I got a different type of ground coffee than normal, because Lavazza Organic was on offer. I judged that I could just about manage the month without another bottle of olive oil, but for wine I treated myself to a bottle of Portuguese Alvarinho, which was reduced from £9 to £7.50. I bought ground mace, as it seems to crop up in various Nigella recipes, and finally remembered to get some green lentils, which are great for stews (if this damned autumnal weather we are all so excited about ever arrives). I bought one aubergine instead of two after the second one went slowly soft and brown in the bottom of the fridge last month, and I did the same with a pack of Tofoo. I am highly susceptible to what food writer Priya Basil calls ‘food moods’ and two indulgences this time around were crab meat and pork mince, which, after watching Saturday Kitchen and seeing chef Ching-He Huang make pork and crab noodles on there, decided I absolutely must have (Though on delivery day they substituted the 20% fat mince I ordered with the lower fat variety so I sent it back)
Some people might say this is boring, but I think you can learn so much from these details. In August I talked to Lucy Dearlove for her brilliant podcast Lecker about moving house and kitchens – you can listen to the episode here and find a transcript of our conversation here – and we had a great discussion about building up a kitchen and then taking it apart, the process of putting together a store cupboard and then running it down before you move, using up the frozen peas, defrosting that old chicken stock, and the strange emotional tenor to all this work. Before I moved back home, I left my friend Anna with the contents of the spice cupboard I’d built up during my time in Belfast; it was years’ work and it felt like I was passing on a particularly precious legacy.
When I was interviewing women for my PhD research about their experiences of the Troubles, they were sometimes surprised at how interested I was in such minutiae, at my questions about what and where they ate and where they shopped for food: I was researching a conflict, why did I want to know whether they ate in the kitchen or not, or who did the food shopping? But these are the places where you learn, not just about the small stuff, but about the big stuff too. About how people feel about their houses, their neighbourhoods, whether they are worried about money, or feel safer in one shop than another, or one part of the house than another, about who is doing what work in the home. This is true during a time of war, but it is also true all the time.
During lockdown in Belfast in 2020, when supermarket delivery slots were like gold dust, a couple of my friends with cars often did the Big Shop on my behalf and it was a peculiarly bonding experience. I was not the only person they were doing this for –Anna, for example, shopped for her parents and one of their neighbours – and one evening in the summer of that year we had a long conversation about the particular intimacies of being given other people’s shopping lists, about what you learn about them. My friend Alison recited a list of items that appeared regularly on my list: ‘McCain Oven chips, cherry tomatoes, a jar of anchovies, fresh parsley’ remembering the particular choosiness I have with certain items ‘frozen mixed berries – not summer berries’ and I loved that she knew all this about me. it felt like the Big Shop had brought us closer.