Hungry in Berlin

A couple of my favorite products have vanished, as far as I can tell, from Berlin’s grocery shelves in recent months. Maybe this is just one angry person venting, but I want them back.

The first to go was HP Sauce. Okay, it’s not exactly high-end dining, but this brown British staple goes damn well with supermarket Bouletten, a guilty favorite of mine and definitely not high-end dining. (They were described to me when I first moved here as “a fight between the butcher and the baker which the baker won.”) I should probably learn to make my own, because homemade ones I’ve had have been excellent. But sprinkle some Tabasco into some HP and you have a good accompaniment.

Now, I used to score HP in the food floor of Kaufhof in Alexanderplatz. In fact, I’d check the supply if other business took me to Alex, just to save time. The new, “improved” Kaufhof Galleria actually seems to have fewer products than the old cramped one, but better art-directed. Still, it had HP. Well, it did until the day it didn’t. Figuring it was just a momentary lapse, I noticed that HP also made barbeque sauces, so I picked up the “hot spicy” one just for kicks. Turned out it, too, was excellent (with the addition of some Tabasco: wouldn’t want to torch an unsuspecting German palate).

Both are gone. There’s even an empty space on the shelf where they used to be, so maybe they’re coming back. But it’s been months, and no sign. I once asked at the old Kaufhof what had happened to some excellent sharp “farmhouse” cheddar they’d had from England and was told by a sneering cheese-lady that “Die Engländer sind schwach.” Weak? Poor? Feeble? Frail? Dim? Dunno just what she meant, but that may explain what happened to the HP.

Sadly, last night’s Bouletten were accompanied by an even harder-to-find (ie, impossible) condiment: Pickapeppa brown. Anybody know where I can score some of that here?

The other disappearance is even worse. Several years ago, out of curiosity, I picked up a new Volvic product that had suddenly shown up everywhere. Back in Texas, I’d been addicted to Artesia sparkling water with lime, even after my friend Joe Nick pointed out that it was made with San Antonio city water (a fact which now appears in tiny type on the bottle). There was just enough lime tang to make it interesting, and on those hot days, you could put back a lot of it. Now, all of a sudden, there was something called Volvic Citron, with lemon.

It was great. I went back to the market and there was Volvic Orange. I got some. It was not so great. The reason was simple: although both products contained sugar, there was really no need for the sugar with the orange flavor because oranges have enough sugar in them as it is. The lemon, though, was perfect. I consumed case after case of it, particularly in the summertime, when it beats out Coca-Cola (which doesn’t really refresh you because it leaves a sticky aftertaste) or beer or plain water for mid-day rehydration.

In the middle of this year’s “summer” it disappeared. And stayed disappeared. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the familiar bottle reappeared in the supermarket. The label noted it was now lemon-lime (could be an improvement) and had “improved taste.” Uh-oh.

Uh-oh was right. It was cloyingly sweet. I looked at the label. Curiously, it only listed 2% sugar. That’s not so bad, I thought. Then, one of the sleazier Internet cafes in my neighborhood had a bunch of bottled water out by the front of the store and I noticed some of the original there. They only charged me twice what it would have cost in the store, and when I got it home, I looked for the sugar content: 0.5%. “Improving” the flavor, apparently, means quadrupling the sugar.

I can, I guess, live without HP Sauce or its barbeque cousin, but this “improvement” on something that needed no improvement is an insult to my taste buds. The French didn’t seem to think it was so bad: half-liter bottles of Citron shared equal space in soft-drink vending machines all over the country, and teenagers, from what I could tell, were just as apt to pick it up as to pick up Coke. It’s not that I don’t like sweet things, but it’s that I also like non-sweet things, and fruits can provide both sensations, citrus fruits above all. Quadrupling the sugar blands out the sensation of drinking this stuff; it forces you to think in one direction, as if there’s only one way lemon tastes.

I don’t like it. I’m boycotting it. Like Danone Foods is even going to notice. But I’m not happy about it at all.

(EW)

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.