The Egyptian Shop

Frustrated by the generally poor quality of fresh produce offered by our local supermarkets, I suggested to my wife one Saturday that we should maybe check out a store called Frukthuset (‘the Fruit-house’) that I’d seen not far from the offices where I work. I hoped that it was maybe a specialist greengrocer, or a fruit-’n’-veg wholesaler.

Well, the Fruit-house turned out to be just another supermarket, and a somewhat dingy one at that, whose produce was scarcely any fresher than the stuff elsewhere. On closer inspection, though, we noticed that many of the other product-lines it carried were quite different from what we could buy anywhere else in town. For example there were cheap bags of pistachios, cans of Anglo-Indian ghee, sheets of frozen filo pastry ‘Made in Sarajevo’, Jordanian soup mixes, Croatian cleaning fluids, German fabric softener, cans of condensed milk with Arabic labels, readymade sauce-mixes with Slavic brand names, Lebanese rose-water, Turkish yoghurt, Moroccan olives, frozen halal meat, cans of delicious Lebanese baklawa, and cardamom-flavoured coffee…

It was evident that this place catered to the local immigrant population, which (I think) comprises mainly Croats, Bosnians, Kosovans, Kurds, Turks & Iranians. At around that time my wife’s Dutch friend Ms D_______ was staying with us. We told her about this place and she said that there were similar establishments in Holland, which people there called ‘Egyptian Shops’. This phrase stuck with us, and, although it is quite unlikely that its proprietors have anything to do with Egypt, we have thought of it as ‘The Egyptian Shop’ ever since.

The cans of butter ghee (first picture, above) were a godsend, very often an excellent starting-point in our increasingly accomplished attempts to put together Indian-style meals. The bottles of rose-water and orange-blossom water (second picture, left) proved useful in some dessert recipes, most notably in a lovely Spanish-style rice-pudding dish we sometimes make. When I was hoping to make some mouhamara, I despaired of finding any pomegranate syrup, until I thought of checking the Egyptian Shop: of course they had some (second picture, right) - I never knew, until then, that that’s what grenadine is…

We’ll also sometimes just pick stuff up for the sake of it, merely because it looks interesting or (to us) unusual or exotic. Hence the can of Lebanese-recipe Foul Medammas (third picture, left - Egyptian and Palestinian recipes are also available), which I haven’t tried yet, and the jar of Basra Date Syrup (third picture, right - actually made in Holland), which I’ve no idea when & where I might use. And sometimes we are tempted to buy familiar things in unfamiliar packages, which accounts for the Šlag-hit (above), a Croatian instant dessert-mix, and the bottle of Arf-brand cleaning fluid (below). It would be hard for me to overstate how much I like Arf as a brand-name, and for that reason alone would love to see this stuff supplant such less-auspiciously-named brands as Vim, and, more especially, Cif, elsewhere in Europe.

It pleases me just to know that there is a supply-line into this place besides the usual, official ones; that there are goods we can obtain besides the standard-issue items printed with instructions for use in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish; and that there are logistical filaments connecting this Baltic port, even if only tenuously, with the Balkans, the Levant, and beyond.