Orientation, part 12

My neighbor Lisa Mazzilli, who was always on a quest for American foods, said there was a place I should know about. “Hipercor is a gigantic department store with a whole grocery store inside,” she said, pronouncing the store’s name ee-per-CORE. “You can get some Kellogg’s cereals there, and they sometimes have peanut butter. My kids can’t live without that stuff.” The nearest branch was about twenty minutes away, south of Madrid, and she gave me directions to get there.

It was a little dicey finding the exit—I missed the it the first time around and had to circle back—but when I finally got to the gigantic shopping center, I was impressed. Normal Spanish grocery shopping is done in the old style: The housewife walks into the village every day and goes to the baker for her bread, the fishmonger for her fish, the greengrocer for her fruits and vegetables. In Pozuelo Estación you could drive to the village (but a parking place was hard to come by), and there was a little supermarket you could use instead of the specialty stores, but I didn’t like it much. The aisles were cramped, the selection of groceries was limited, and you had to wait in line for the fruit man to weigh your purchases and mark the price on a brown paper bag. This was shopping the way my mother had done it in the fifties, I thought. I wanted something much more modern, more convenient.

Hipercor was all that and more. There were huge shaded parking lots, as well as an underground garage. I chose the latter. As I approached the store entrance I found the grocery carts, which were hitched together using a method I’d seen in Stamford. Our Finast supermarket had once instituted a system that was supposed to encourage shoppers to return their carts. A little box on the cart had a sort of key that hooked it to the next cart. You had to insert a quarter in the box as a deposit to get the cart free. This had lasted about three months in Stamford, because the customers just hated it. But here at Hipercor you had to insert a 100-peseta coin—about 75 cents. That might be enough of a motivation to get me to return my cart, I thought.

To my astonishment, I saw that after you collected your shopping cart on the garage level you rolled it onto moving ramp—sort of an escalator without stairs. This made me feel silly, almost like I was on a carnival ride. A few seconds later the ramp delivered me to the grocery store level.

A bank of twenty-four cashiers was arrayed in front of me. I had never seen anything like it! I had to go all the way to the far side of the cashiers to get into the store. I rolled on in and started looking around.

Everything was colossal, bigger than anything I’d ever seen in the States. There were aisles of toys and clothing I went through before I even reached the groceries. This was like a whole Kmart, I thought with amazement. And just upstairs, I knew, was an entire El Corte Inglés department store!

The first food I saw was the produce—a tremendous courtyard full of it, beautifully arrayed, with colorful fruits everywhere. There were two kinds of bananas—you could choose between Central American bananas and Canary Island bananas. There were two kinds of tiny oranges—clementinas and clemenvillas. There were more kinds of beans than I’d ever seen before—green, yellow, flat, fava—I wouldn’t even know what to do with them.

Next up was the fresh fish counter. It floored me. I had never seen so much fish! The glass case went along one wall for about thirty feet. Eight or ten men were behind the counter, waiting on customers and custom-cutting the fish. Most of the whole fish there were unrecognizable to me, but I saw lots of octopus and squid, along with many large crabs. There was also a big pile of percebes. Mike had told me about this delicacy—actually little barnacles that were served cooked so that diners could pry them from the shells, sort of like snails.

I noticed with great surprise that this big, open-air fish area had no unpleasant smell at all—just a clean, briny odor. How do they manage that? I wondered.

Then I moved on to aisles and aisles of regular groceries—soap powders and cereals, cookies and diapers. The names and colors on the boxes were unfamiliar, so I took my time and examined whatever caught my eye. There were some packaged doughnuts that I thought the kids might like, so I got some of those. And I saw little shell-shaped madeleine cookies that looked interesting, so I threw a couple packages of those into the cart.

Then I came to an aisle that amazed me. It was filled with nothing but canned fish. Seventy-five feet of shelf space, four shelves from top to bottom, all canned fish. There were sardines and anchovies, tuna and salmon, which didn’t surprise me. But canned baby eels? Canned octopus? Multiple types of canned oysters? The selection was unbelievable! I think we’re not in Kansas anymore, I told myself.

Opposite this riot of canned fish were more items important in the Spanish diet—lentils, chickpeas and rice. And these three items filled their own side of the aisle. The rice was a stubby short-grained variety, and it came in 1-kilo vacuum-packed cellophane bags. The chickpeas and lentils were in bricklike vacuum packs, too, but you could also buy larger quantities packed in fabric bags.

After that came a whole aisle of the most important food in Spain: olive oil. There was nothing else in this aisle. There were many brands, many different-size bottles, many different labels, but inside was the thing used to cook and sauce virtually every dish made in a Spanish kitchen. As the U.S. government controlled the price of wheat, the Spanish government controlled the price of olive oil. And when there was a price increase, it was front-page news. Olive oil was the product of primary importance to Spanish farmers and was a critical item in the budget of a Spanish household. I could only stop and marvel at the pride of place it held there in the supermarket.

A little further along I found cookware, auto supplies, wine, and a whole aisle of the ultrapasteurized milk that my kids hated. But there were also refrigerator cases full of one-liter cartons of the fresh milk that I was having delivered to my house. There were cartons of fresh-squeezed orange juice, which I knew the girls would prefer to the juice-box kind I’d seen in other stores. And next to the orange juice was something I’d never seen before—a similar carton of gazpacho, cold vegetable soup. This was too intriguing to pass up, so I put one of those in my cart.

I rolled on to the meat counter, which looked pretty much like a service butcher at home. But there was a case full of pre-packed meats, too, and I noticed some unusual items in there—rabbit, partridge, quail. I didn’t buy any but made a mental note for the next time.

Next to the meat counter was a case with prepared foods. The item that caught my eye there was the row of tortillas españolas—potato omelets, some with sausage added, some with green peppers. I decided to try one of those, too.

Then came a whole store’s worth of cured meats. There was ham, chorizo and salchicchia sausages, and lomo (a cured pork loin) in vacuum packs. But the big statement in this department was the whole Serrano hams hanging from hooks near the ceiling. These large hams, as big as Thanksgiving turkeys, were arranged around the perimeter of the area in two rows—there must have been two hundred of them. The aroma of the salty meat was pungent but not unpleasant. A little further on was the narrow cheese counter, where a man cut Spanish cheeses to order. Lisa Mazzilli had advised me that hard-to-find cheddar was available here, so I took a number and waited for my turn.