Today I went to the Ipercoop in Sarzana.
It’s odd, but in the US you find that all supermarkets are pretty much the same, huge size. It’s like they save money by reusing the same plans all the time.
In Italy, there are stores of a reasonable size, like our local supermarket, which has everything you could want and manages to hold it all in a three aisle store. That’s because they don’t carry 86 varieties of toilet paper. They do carry 86 different pasta shapes, and nearly that many cured meats, but those are far more interesting, don’t you agree?
Anyway, there are also these huge “hyper markets” in Italy. You can buy a television and then amble over to the seafood section and gawk at the ugly things fishermen with advanced technology scrape off the sea floor. Then you can go buy some screws and electrical tape to fix the refrigerator. Of course, if you can’t fix it you could also by a new refrigerator.
Martha hates the Ipercoop. It’s a religious thing. She wants to support the lonely vegetable salesman with the little shop in the corner. Trouble is, the corner is now home to McDonalds and the little man who ran it is long gone. It’s a shame. I like talking to people while I contemplate my dietary intake of greenery. But they’re disappearing fast.
Buy a house now in Italy. It’s going to look like Cleveland soon.
Ok, so let’s talk about what’s (still) different at the Ipercoop from the generic supermarket in America. First of all, you can get all of the animal. Yeah, I’m talking hearts, liver, spleen. Maybe spleen. I don’t know the word for spleen. Ok, so maybe there’s no spleen.
(It’s a Roman tradition to eat the “fifth quarter” of the animal. You can experience this in the Roman neighborhood of Testaccio, which used to be the stockyards of Rome. I’m sure you can get spleen there.)
In any case, the variety of things that come from animals you can eat without keeling over will astound you—or make you feel slightly ill, depending upon how close to your food you’ve been raised.
These are things you often can’t find in the US. They disappear into hot dogs and are dried and ground up to add to the feed of the new breed of cannibalistic critters we’re cultivating. See what happens when you don’t eat your liver? It’s just like mom said, “they’ll be forced to shove it down the throats of the animals in the same family, honey, and the meat that comes out of this can make you sick. You don’t want that now, do you?”
You can also get a huge variety of fowl at an Italian market. In the US, you might get those scraggly industrial chickens—and frozen turkey at “special” times of the year, while Italians are filling their carts with ducks, guinea fowl, quail, pheasant, and piccione, which is squab, a word made up so you didn’t have to hear that foul word “pigeon.”
And believe me, when your sweet honey refuses to eat beef or pork, all this fowl is sweet variety to you.
And you can get sausage. I’m not talking about those foo-foo sausages you get in America. There’s no “chicken turkey sausage with dehydrated bell pepper, sun dried tomatoes, and edible wallpaper paste filler” in the Ipercoop. Italians like it simple. It’s pork. It’s seasoned with a little salt. Maybe pepper (although some signs state proudly “non si usa pepe!” or “we don’t use pepper!” as if it was the ultimate sign of good taste. In Italy, less is more.
So what does the sausage cost? Today the sign said €4,90. If you translate to dollars, you might say, “not bad.” But remember, your money in Italy gets you a kilo of stuff. That’s 2.2 pounds. So it’s €2,23 a pound. Notice the comma. That’s not a mistake. In Italy, the comma is our decimal point. Remember this if you’re coming to Italy. (Recently some Italian ATMS forgot this point and started treating the commas as we do—as place markers worthy of eliminating in a machine calculation. As a result, folks who thought they were taking €80,00 or 80 Euros out of the bank were recorded as having withdrawn €8000. The comma is important in Italy.) Read more about How to Write Italian Numbers.
In any case, our sausage, at today’s exchange rate, lightens your wallet by $2.99 a pound. And if you go to the right place, they grind the pork daily and stuff it into that intestine fresh as all get out. You can’t escape offal. Don’t even try.
There’s also a huge wine selection at the Ipercoop. But that doesn’t make it much different than a California supermarket. The prices do. You can often buy a decent Sicilian Nero d’Avola for less than €2. I splurged on a wine I’ve had before, called “Pecorino”, a word usually reserved for a cheese made from sheep’s milk, but in reality a dry white wine that, if I remember correctly, goes very well with sea food. I paid €3,49, or around $4.68.
So there you have it. I’ve been to the Ipercoop. I’ve waited in the “express” check out line for what seemed a week to pay for my wine, my duck breast and some Greek style yogurt. I don’t understand it. Checking out is faster in America. It’s that American efficiency that everyone talks about, which seems to occur most frequently when they’re extracting money from you.
I gotta go.
Wanna know what I did with the food I bought yesterday? Well, since Martha is gone to Puglia and I’m alone, I amused myself by making a video of me cooking up a deviant Pasta all’Amatriciana in my Lunigiana kitchen. Check it out. I didn’t dress fancy or anything. It’s just plain home cookin’.