Sunday, April 12, 2020

Shopping Instincts

Cairo, 2007.

I sometimes wanted pancakes for breakfast back when I worked at Teshkeel’s Egypt office. Something familiar for Sunday mornings in Zamalek, a touch of home in a world where Sunday was the first day of the work week, where I’d have to get to the office in Dokki by 9.

I knew how to make Euro-pancakes, the flat kind you use as a crepe, or put in Bavarian pancake soup, but that’s not what I wanted then. I wanted fluffy IHOP-type pancakes, the kind that kept me from desperately wanting lunch at midday, when the only nearby lunch options were McD’s, a Moroccan place (I spent many long lunches there with colleagues), and BYO.

There was one problem with my IHOP-mimic recipe. One of the ingredients was baking soda. Bicarbonate of soda.

My local supermarket nearest my apartment didn’t seem to have it. Nor did the other supermarket, the one across from the hotel I’d stay in for four months later that same year.

So I set out on a quest across the supermarkets of Cairo. I went to the suburbs. To the mall. To the upscale and local markets. I knew how to do this—I’d traveled the world enough times, lived overseas in Berlin, Australia, Barcelona, Kuwait, Uganda, Cape Town, Namibia. When you want to make something that tastes like home, you have to visit multiple outlets just to make breakfast.

In the end, I made a lot of Euro-pancakes without baking soda. Then one day, bicarbonate of soda showed up at my local supermarket. The first one I’d visited in my quest for pancakes.

I snapped it up, even though suddenly it was everywhere, like a giant container full of baking soda had found its way through the Suez last night.

This was no different from my experiences around the world, or how I’d lived in Kampala in 2005, once scouring ShopRite and Woolworths and Game stores in my quest for sesame oil, which was nowhere until it was everywhere.

This is all a longwinded way of saying I think I know why I bought this today, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be out of quarantine long before a single person with a bidet gets through 36 rolls.

I never did get through all that baking soda either, though I did use up the sesame oil.


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