My dear college roomie is a Salvadoran-American living in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kent, with her English husband. She is currently 36 weeks pregnant, and as you may imagine, is desperately craving the foods of her Salvadoran childhood. As you may also imagine, these are not easily purchased in the rural country store two blocks from her house, the one with the sheep grazing next to it. (I know, I just visited her in March and brought a suitcase full of canned goods and various dried chili peppers. Her husband now thinks I’m trying to kill him.)
She says such things (masa harina, fresh jalapenos and cilantro, plaintains, etc.) are obtainable in London and other places where there are large immigrant communities (and luckily some ingredients are also used in Indian and other South Asian cuisines), but she is by far the most ethnic thing for 150 km around, and what with the big belly, lack of a drivers’ license, and additional 2-year-old child, she isn’t so mobile these days to trek into London to go grocery shopping.
Her brothers and I would love to be able to send her a care package now and then, but shipping from the States (and her brother once tried shipping from El Salvador) is prohibitively expensive, plus fresh things wouldn’t make it through Customs or would be completely inedible by the time they did. So is there somewhere near her where we could order this stuff and have it sent to her?
I guess my first stop would be to see if the supermarkets most likely to be in your friend’s area carry the kinds of things she’s looking for. They all deliver (within reasonable distance) so it’s a question of what they stock and who is nearest to her – you’ll need her postcode (zip code) to discover that. Take a look at these most likely candidates and post again if that doesn’t work out (although I’m not sure what Plan B is yet):
The large supermarkets (and Sainsbury’s in particular, damn them) seem to carry quite a range of ‘exotic’ fresh produce nowadays; you may be out of range of their online shopping deliveries though.
this looks like it might be of some use, as does this, this and this.
There’s probably more to be found by plugging combinations of words like delicatessen ethnic speciality food into Google (and adding Site:.uk on the end)
Thanks, guys; each of the sites seemed to have one or two of the things my buddy is craving, although Sainsbury’s doesn’t deliver to her area (I told you she was in the middle of nowhere!) and Tesco wanted me to inout not only a postal code, but register with a full home address and phone number before the site would even let me browse.
Waitrose seemed to have the widest selection of items not easily available elsewhere, including a decent assortment of chili peppers and even potted cilantro plants so they can grow their own on the windowsill! Bears further investigating, but please keep at it with the brainstorming! Gotta run now; I’ll check back later.