Market Logic
There is a grammar to good markets. Once you learn to read it, you stop needing lists.
Mara thinks I spend too long at markets. She is not wrong. I have missed transport connections because of markets. I have arrived at restaurants too full from market sampling to order properly. I once spent an entire afternoon at a covered market in Halvern that I had entered intending to buy bread.
I bought bread. I also bought: a jar of something pickled and unnamed, four different kinds of dried pulses, a bunch of herbs I didn't recognise but the vendor assured me were essential, and a small clay pot from a stall that had nothing to do with food.
Mara has learned to build extra time into any day that involves a market.
A market is not a shop. It is a conversation between you, the season, and someone who got up at four in the morning because they believe in what they're selling.
What I've Learned
The queue is the review. Ignore the signage, ignore the display. Find the stall with the queue and stand in it. You don't need to know what they're selling. If people are queuing, there is a reason.
Ask what not to buy. A vendor who tells you something isn't at its best today is a vendor who will tell you the truth about everything else. This is the most reliable filter I know.
Arrive early, leave slowly. The best produce goes early. The best conversations happen later, when it quietens and the vendors have time.
Don't plan the meal before you shop. Let the market suggest the meal. This sounds impractical. It produces better meals than planning does.
Buy more bread than you think you need. You will need more bread than you think.
Mara has started coming to markets with me more often, which I take as a vindication of everything I have said above. She remains more efficient than I am — in and out in forty minutes, everything she needed, nothing she didn't. I am usually still there when she texts to ask where I've gone.
Last month she found a stall selling the same dried pulses I had bought in Halvern, here at our local market. She held up the bag. I told her I had no memory of buying those in Halvern. She produced a photograph from her phone.
The pulses were excellent.