Accept substitutes!

Comfort food in a land of only one flavour of crisps

The people who can’t wait to tell you that they don’t own a television as a way to signal some virtue at you, mere mortal, are the same as the people who say they’ve never eaten prawn cocktail flavour crisps. To them, I say, whatever, you do you. Be happy without the added deliciousness of chemicals. But I like them.

There are no prawn cocktail flavour crisps in Portugal, though, so I only eat them when I am in England, go to Sainsbury’s with my mother, and sneak a bag or two into the shopping trolley when she’s not looking. I am aware that this is ridiculous for a 54 year old, but I’m still 12 on the inside, and sneaking crisps into the shopping just adds to the flavour of the prawn cocktail flavouring chemicals.

When you have grown up with a dizzying array of flavours of crisps and corn snacks to choose from, moving to a country that doesn’t value flavoured powders dusted onto snacks can be quite the shock. It’s not that I was expecting there to be all the flavours of crisps. I just hadn’t thought about it, because having many flavours of crisps and monster munch, to me, was like having oxygen. You don’t move to Portugal wondering if the oxygen is going to be the same, do you? When I discovered that crisp flavours didn’t even exist here, I had to take a moment to recalibrate.

At first I believed that the Portuguese were crazy. Why wouldn’t you want even a crisp basic such as the cheese and onion or the salt and vinegar? That’s madness. Back then, there were three kinds of potato crisps in Portugal: salted, ridged salted, “handmade” salted (there were also salted straw potatoes but they’re only really used for cooking so they don’t count). Over the years, some flavours and types have been added, including the invasion of the Cheeto and the occasional appearance of Salt and Vinegar which, for a while, were inexplicably called “Alpine” flavour, but it’s still mostly salted, and there will never be THE CRISP AISLE¹ like you get in Sainsbury’s/Tesco/Morrisons etc. The Portuguese even EAT the things differently, too.²

I now realise that it’s the British who are crazy, nobody needs that many crisps, but I do still craved a prawn cocktail crisp now and then, just as I craved other things I like that aren’t a thing in Portugal and it wasn’t just crisps. There are even SOME (non potato) VEGETABLES.

Despite my recalibrations, I still felt like I needed access to things that just aren’t a thing in Portugal, but that are a thing for me, like a kind of refuge, so I had a place in my cupboard and my fridge that were mine, for my things, for moments when I needed comfort. I lived in a village, with Portuguese minimercados, one supermarket 15km away which sold only Portuguese food, had a Portuguese husband and a Portuguese mother-in-law who were quite averse to change. There were so many struggles and battles about food, that surrender was the only option. I’ll write about those struggles and battles another day, but for now, suffice to say it was just easier to go with the Portuguese way. I already liked Portuguese food in general, but I came to love it, so much I eventually wrote books about it, but I still had a shelf of MY things.

I would bring back jars of things in my suitcase from England, and pray that they wouldn’t shatter. If we went to the Algarve, I would jump at the chance to go to the big supermarket that caters for the British crowd down there and stock up. There’s a shop that imports foods from UK and US mostly, that supplies quite an odd selection of stuff at high prices. When Lidl first arrived, it would have those English weeks occasionally, and I’d keep my eye on the weird stuff that was supposedly English, in case something I actually wanted appeared. Then, I would ration those things for myself, and worry about them running out.

But that was tiring, and after a couple of years of hoarding jars and tins of British things, I became more proactive, i.e. incredibly irritating to people who don’t like the smell of vinegar permeating the house.

I made jams and chutneys and pickles (not pickles) and jellies and fudge (see: the year I made fudge constantly for about 3 months and everybody I knew had it forced on them. I haven’t made fudge since, got it out of my system. Thank you, Portugal, for your patience in this matter) how I wanted them. I (weirdly) found a huge fresh horseradish in a market one day. If you’ve ever grated a horseradish you’ll understand why I never tried that again, and I luckily found really good (prepared) horseradish in the Eastern European supermarket that has been hiding in plain sight for 20 years, along with whole smoked mackerels and sour cream, and berries too, the ones that aren’t straw-, rasp- or bloody blue- (I will never understand the draw of the blue-). I’ve tried making my own bacon and cured ham for boiling. What is called bacon here is not what is called bacon in the UK. I’ll do a photo essay one day to explain that. I’ve considered making my own sausages (the machine is still in its box) but luckily Lidl’s mini bratwurst make a pretty good substitute for a sausage sandwich. I waited till about 2015 for parsnips to appear in small numbers on the Portuguese market, which is odd, as there’s a whole confraria (kind of brotherhood) da pastinaca in Covilhã, but the parsnip never seems to have left Covilhã. If I offer people parsnips for their lunch, they remain confounded. I have only once seen a swede in this country, and it was not intended for my consumption. Swede belongs to the list of things I only eat back in Devon, along with the prawn cocktail crisps and clotted cream, or any decent cream, really (please never think you will find good cream in Portugal, it’s not a thing).

25 years on from the Portuguese Crisp Shock of 1999, my shelf of not a thing in Portugal products is less important. There are still the unsubstitutable things that I really want in my life: HP sauce, Marmite, Lea & Perrins (I’ve never found a molho inglês that comes remotely close) and decent cheddar³ but I don’t panic if I run out. I’ll find them when I find them. I don’t bring things home from England any more. I’m not paying Easyjet an extra €100 to bring back a £2 jar of marmite in a suitcase (as marmite is a liquid in the eyes of the airlines, it can’t go in my hand luggage).

After all these years, I don’t need the refuge of my shelf of things any more. I’m perfectly fine… honest. I might just go and make myself (Heinz) beans on toast, with decent cheddar, and HP sauce for lunch, though.⁴

1. See also, the chocolate aisle and the biscuit aisle… we’d be here forever if I got onto them, but I’m not REALLY writing about crisps, anyway. In summary, though: Portugal has about 5% of chocolate range of the UK and 1% of biscuit range.

2. I’m trying to curb my footnotes, honestly, but I just don’t want to break my train of thought up there. Portuguese kids don’t have a bag of crisps stapled to their hand. Big bags of crisps are for sharing, and or eating with a meal instead of chips. Eventually I stopped missing the chips in these scenarios and surrendered to the crisp. If you get the right crisp on the right gravy, life will make sense to you.

3. Decent cheddar is my cooking cheese of choice. Lidl have a very good decent cheddar. they didn’t always. To sum up, god bless Lidl.

4. If you’ve come here to tell me that British food sucks, or that Portuguese food is yucky, you’ve come to the wrong place, whatevs, you are foolish, tedious and wrong.