"From Soup to Nuts" came into my mind. Maybe someone said it last night at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Horticultural Society meeting. These are great garden meetings - many people, many projects, much discussion. It is as though I've been transported decades back in a time machine when gardens were vital to the social fabric of a town. An example is their multi-year project is to plant daffodils for cancer in special gardens in town. There are 100,000 daffodils ready to bloom. The ceremony is this Sunday at 1:00pm.
Back to "Soup to Nuts": This phrase stuck in my mind and I started to ponder it. I know it is a metaphor for 'from beginning to end'. We still serve soup as a first course. But nuts? The latter part of the 20th century did not have nuts as a dessert course. What cookbooks have anything on the "nuts" course? Some of the references say 'desserts with nuts in them'. If something is to have such a clear meaning, it should be universally understood. I was still questioning desserts of nuts from the descriptions I read.
Origin: For centuries, any foods served at the beginning or end of a meal stood for the entire thing: the start and finish and everything in between. This expression was “from eggs to apples” and “from pottage to cheese.” In the United States in the middle of the 20th century, the expression developed into “from soup to nuts.” At many meals, soup is often the first course and a dessert with nuts is sometimes the last. The expression does not have to refer to only to meals, however. It could be the selection of goods for sale or classes offered. ...
According to most of the British authors I read, the last course of a meal is port and nuts. But only for the men, I believe. I think the women had to go sequester themselves elsewhere and drink coffee or something until the men got tired of drinking port and joined them. Which of course begs the question, how did *that* get started? At any rate this is a British custom, and “from soup to nuts” is an American idiom. But still it seems clear that in some form or another nuts were considered the last course in a good meal, while soup was the first. And I think that covers this one from soup to nuts.
This is their warning at the bottom of the column. It is a delight in itself:
"STAFF REPORTS ARE WRITTEN BY THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD, CECIL'S ONLINE AUXILIARY. THOUGH THE SDSAB DOES ITS BEST, THESE COLUMNS ARE EDITED BY ED ZOTTI, NOT CECIL, SO ACCURACYWISE YOU'D BETTER KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED."
Today's picture is Wisteria. I checked this one around the corner from me. Many wisteria in Niagara are grown as small shrubs, like this one. It is a mystery flower - there are no flower buds as though no wisteria will bloom. And then - POP - plump little buds will appear. We're in such a late spring, it may be a few weeks away.
The history of the word grocery begins this way: these were dealers who sold by the gross - in large quantities at discounted retail prices. This was in medieval England. There was a Grocer's Hall in London in the early 15th century, and the French word grosser, meant a 'grocer's shop' by 1828.
But that seems so far away to what is now the supermarket. I looked down the last aisle of the Sobey's yesterday and it was a wall of large glass doors of freezer goods. It seemed eerie.
The shelving and food storage may have changed, but the large self-service store with food and household goods has been with us for 100 years. Vincent Astor founded the Astor Market in 1915 in Manhattan, creating an open-air mini-mall that sold meat, fruit, produce and flowers. While it was not successful, Piggly Wiggly stores opened in 1916. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Team Company started just after.
There was a debate in the U.S. over who opened the first 'true' supermarket. The Smithsonian Institute along with Heinz researched the history and determined that the first supermarket was opened by Michael J. Cullen in 1930. The stores were called King Kullen. The slogan was: "Pile it high. Sell it low." And that has been the dominant theme of supermarkets - reducing overhead costs to deliver competitive prices.
The supermarket was a staple of the MBA program. It has perfected all the techniques in controlling purchasing behaviour through layout, circulation, coordination and convenience. There is also a principle about colour psychology. Did you know that yellow is known to 'evoke energy and increase appetite?" The grocery store layout principles are explained here at realsimple.com. This is an example of a site whose goal is to bring shopping behaviour to the attention of consumers.
I fall into the category of the consumer who is looking for a few specific things. I spend time up and down the aisles looking for a single item - this week it was Kosher salt which I didn't find.
"Many stores have layouts that can seem unnecessarily confusing - this is another trick that grocery stores use. When shoppers go into a store looking to buy a few specific items, they end up walking through the entire store looking for those items if the layout is confusing. They’ll be exposed to more products, spend more time in store, and likely spend more money."
This interesting-looking plant was at the Denver Botanical Garden last year. There is one blooming in my greenhouse with long spikes of insignificant flowers. It is bukiniczia cabulica - a member of the plumago family that grows in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got it last year at a sale at the Ontario Rock Garden and Hardy Plant Society from one of the members. Being a biennial, it will die after this flowering. My job is to save the seed and return to the grower who will start some new plants.
