It’s a long, long time since I visited the Sainsbury’s at
Angel, Islington. I’ve nipped into the little one at Euston Station
occasionally to grab something before a train journey, or the one at Manchester
Piccadilly for the same thing in reverse, but that’s it.
However, after making a meat and potato pie on Sunday – the
perfect welcome for the autumn’s first
stay-in-and-curl-up-on-the-sofa-with-the-cats day – I was left with some spare
filling and plenty of pastry.
It was a question of finding the most convenient place in
which to buy a little extra beef mince to make up enough filling for a second
pie.
On a Monday, Henry the Broadway Market butcher is closed,
so I nipped to the Angel Sainsbury’s on Monday after work, where I remembered
they have a little ‘butcher’s’ counter.
I found myself wondering how on earth I’d ever managed to
keep my sanity when having to shop regularly in such places. And how anyone
else manages to do it now.
As I was about to enter, a mother was having to fight off a
screaming child, dressed in primary school uniform, who wanted what appeared to
be a bright cornflower blue lollipop that his mother was trying to keep just
out of reach.
Inside, I was met by cacophony combined with chilled air
from the cool cabinets.
Near the tobacco check out were shelves of prepacked
sandwiches, crisps, magazines and newspapers.
And then, taking the obvious route, fruit and veg, followed
by a vast aisle of what seemed to be largely ready meals and ready meal
components.
The ‘butcher’s’ counter was where I remembered it. It had
little variety and seemed to be exclusively prime cuts. If Sainsbury’s read
this, the young man who served me was very charming and entirely efficient.
The place was rammed. I needed milk and razor blades (for
The Other Half, not my wrists) and spent some time hunting the latter down.
The far wall of the store, for its entire length, now
houses confectionary. To be scrupulously fair, that means that this Sainsbury’s
at least doesn’t do the trick of putting the sweets next to the tills.
Then I noticed what looked like entire aisles of Mr
Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes (full of things you wouldn't bake with at home – who the hell would put vegetable oil in an
apple pie?). And aisles of crisps and snacks, of course. And fizzy drinks.
The sheer amount of which make the fruit and veg look insignificant
by comparison.
There were schoolchildren, picking up snack fodder and
adults picking up vast multipacks of crisps for their children. The place was
rammed. The queues were tedious.
I should point out here that Islington is not just a posh
area – it also has some very poor people. The customers in the shop were a
reflection of the area’s mix.
It could be said that one of the problems of thing and
reading about food seriously is that you start to see certain things.
In the Joanna Blythman book that I have just finished, she
talks of the vast numbers of Britons who eat on the hoof. In the couple of days
since finishing that, I have been surprised at just how much I’ve noticed this.
And it seems to defy most social categories. I suspect it
hasn’t only occurred this week.
The subsequent second bite of the meat and potato pie was
welcome: no junk; the only ingredients that were not homemade from scratch were
the HP sauce, Worcester sauce – and the ketchup (organic from Daylesford).
But the days other negative food experience had occurred
earlier in the day, when there was a slice or two of cake available in the
office – and I took advantage.
It was Victoria sponge – but after a couple of bites, it
went in the bin. The reason? Quite simply that it tasted as though it was at
least 50% sugar.
Even the layer of buttercream filling seemed to include so
much sugar that the texture was granular.
So there you have it: two food experiences I will be trying
to avoid repeating any time soon.
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