It was a big surprise for me when I arrived to Canada that barley, spelt, millet, and buckwheat were so hard to find.
Right now, I have 11-12 different boxes of grains and pulses in my kitchen drawer, and I am not feeling much likes for exotic foods.
What’s harder to get are different types of flour, some of which are fairly regional. For example “Spätzlemehl” is commonly available in the south, but generally unavailable in the north. Italian Tenero 00 flour is only available in select places. Whenever Swiss friends come visit I ask them to bring some Ruchmehl - Standard Swiss wheat flour - as it’s generally unavailable in Germany (unless you order online at your friendly local mill)
That being said, in the US there are also plenty of interesting grains/lentils/legumes available in stores thanks in part to inherited culinary traditions: cornmeal, corn masa, wild rice, couscous, black beans, pinto beans, various types of quinoa, various types of lentils, etc.
Spelt seems less common there but there isn't a tradition of cultivation of it so that makes sense. I do think the bean selection here in Switzerland is lower than I would prefer, but a few specialty stores mitigate that.
And don't get me started on meat and butchers - I'm conviced that British people don't know what an actual butcher is. The biggest joke are always "butchers" in a meat isle like in Morrisons, who are only allowed to serve very specific cuts of the 4-5 meats they have on display. Try asking if you can just buy some bones for broth(sorry mate, not allowed to sell them), or the horror ask if you can buy some giblets, like chicken hearts or stomachs - nope, they never get them from "the factory". So....are you a butcher? Or a glorified cashier? And it's the same even at proper markets, where you'd think they'd have more flexibility - "nah mate, health and safety mate, can't sell you these". Just piss off.
I don't eat meat so I can't comment on the butcher thing.
How about chechil? I've looked high and low for that, and can't find anywhere that sells it. Oddly enough, i know one place in Oxford that does.
http://dachashop.co.uk/smoked-cheese-kosichka-soviet-standar...
I have vegetarian friends who use it all sorts of places that I might have used oats, lentils or rice.
Of course...brewing would be the finest use of it. :-)
Boil and eat it? Certainly good with heavier, fatter pieces of meat.
The thing is, I've lived here for 10 years and I haven't been able to find "an actual butcher" yet. Every single place that looks like an actual butcher shop ends up being just a meat store, where the meats are prepared and packaged elsewhere, and the people in the store just sell it. At best, they will have a large chunk of say pork loin, and they can cut a bit off for you.
My subjective experience is the quality ranges from "noticeably better" to "OMFG how have I never had something this good before better" than the supermarket offering, though clearly at a higher price point.
That's a slight exaggeration. My local large supermarket in London would have in normal times (i.e. a few months ago) in the baking aisle: several brands of white and wholemeal flour as mentioned, 00-grade pizza flour, self-raising and strong bread flour, malted and cake flour, rye flour, and a gluten-free flour-like substance. Elsewhere in the shop you'll likely find rice flour, chickpea flour etc.
There is also a healthfood shop where it's actively hard to find the (Shipton Mill and Doves Farm organic) wheat flours among the profusion of Spelt, Barley, Kamut, etc flours)
Some sort of Polish flour [2].
Butchers aren't allowed to sell beef bones, due to the 1990s BSE crisis, but the others are no problem. They may well not stock them, especially in a supermarket, where they are somewhere between a glorified cashier and an actual butcher. You would need to build a relationship with a local butcher to make your unusual requests worthwhile -- it might mean he orders them, or that while preparing the meat he doesn't throw them in the bin (at which point, they can't be sold).
> "Nah mate, health and safety mate, can't sell you these"
This is modern British English for "I don't want to" or "it's not worth my time" or "go away, you are complicated". It's rarely an actual rule.
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/256538041
[2] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/275505155
“Western culture” to me, when mentioned by the English-speaking world, has really just meant the shared ideals of the metropolitan parts of English-first first world countries (that’s a mouthful).
This would include major cities in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand but would also exclude their rural areas.
Not that I agree or disagree with it or that I’m trying to make a political statement - it’s just an observation I’ve found.
This is why Germany is considered Western.
apart from the political explanation there are also the philosophical roots of Greece as the birthplace of Western civilization. A country that builds on this can be part of the Western World. The books in this category give you a better picture of what belongs. Needless to say the English language or Anglo-Saxon culture is not a yardstick as to what belongs here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Taste_of_Empire/QMu...
And similarly, settlers who were living in placed like North America and Australia, with completely different growing conditions that what they were used to, ended up growing cash crops. But all they could buy with the money was flour and sugar and oil and other industrialized foods.