96. A lost list: the Austin, TX edition

Shrimp, shrimps or prawns? And what on earth is BoBo meat?

Sep 16, 2023

Dear Reader,

I was thrilled when Mary B of Thrivin’, not Drivin’ sent me her snap of an abandoned shopping list she’d found in a supermarket in Austin, Texas. Mary knew that this would be right up my street, and she has kindly given me permission to use her picture here.

Picture courtesy of Mary B of Thrivin’, not Drivin’, right here on Substack.

I wonder who had left this list behind? In my June 2023 post ‘A lost list’ I had named the list maker ‘Sam’, and – not for gender-stereotyping reasons, but simply because I am a female list-maker – Sam was she/her. I’m going to continue the theme by calling the writer of this list ‘Austin Sam’.

Austin Sam had been shopping at Central Market, Mary’s favourite supermarket. That’s where Mary’s husband had taken her straight away right after she had first landed in the city, and, she tells me, ‘it’s been in my heart of hearts ever since’.

What I’ve learned about the brand in my research makes me want to move not only to Austin, but into the store itself!

Central Market is an American gourmet grocery store chain owned by H-E-B Grocery Company. Most locations also have a full-service kitchen, offer cooking and wine classes in their culinary school, and offers catering services. The chain has ten locations, all in Texas. The original store opened in 1994 in Austin.
Central Market deliberately limits floor space allocated to packaged products, allowing more space for fresh produce, meat and seafood, bulk products, and chef-prepared items. The produce section stocks items such as crab-apples, Meyer lemons, sweet limes, and pink lemons that are hard to find at other stores. The limited space for packaged products is devoted primarily to items that cannot be found at other supermarkets. Other aisles follow the same pattern with an emphasis on local, imported, organic, and gourmet brands rather than standard supermarket products.
As appropriate for a store that first began in Austin, the self-styled “Live music Capital of the World”, most Central Market locations feature a patio with live music on several nights each week.
Taken from Wikipedia.

Reader, what an AWESOME place to shop!

Two things that had struck me immediately about Austin Sam’s list are that there are no items of the kind of snack food I’d expect to see when someone is shopping for school-age children – who as we all know need regular application of snacks to make sure their batteries don’t lose their charge – and that no drinks are listed.

And I don’t mean booze, but all drinks – bottled water, soda, iced tea – any tea, for that matter, and to my very British horror, not even tea bags! Perhaps in September, though, nobody in Texas would be drinking the kind of steaming cuppa that is ubiquitous over here, even in a heatwave? 🤔

Sherlock Holmes might deduce that Austin Sam lives in a thirsty household containing no snack food, but Reader, I’m keeping my options open until I get to know her a little better.

Austin Sam clearly likes to cook from scratch. She’s shopping mainly for protein, unspecified salad items and vegetables, and I can see that there are likely to be some delicious flavour combinations working their way into her meal plan this week.

I wonder what Austin Sam means by ‘cheese’? On my own shopping list, the grocery item represented by the word ‘cheese’ is always extra mature cheddar – a very versatile pale yellow, salty, slightly crumbly hard cheese with a moreish grainy texture – that I use in all kinds of dishes. Any cheese other than cheddar gets added to my list by name instead: brie, stilton, cream cheese, etc.

But look: Austin Sam was shopping for bagels and smoked salmon, too, so I’m assuming ‘cheese’ this time means ‘cream cheese’, to go with them.

I had at first assumed that Austin Sam has specific plans for what exactly she might be going to make with her grocery haul, but it seems some indecision has crept onto her list.

Is that ‘pork chop maybe’, or is it ‘maybe frozen fish’? I wonder. 🤔

And, Reader, what on earth is this?

At first I had wondered whether Austin Sam has a dog or cat – or, just because the name would be an absolute gift to one, a boa constrictor – named Bobo, and adding ‘Bobo meat’ to her list had been simply a reminder for her to pick up pet food.

Ah, but hang on. The word is BoBo, not Bobo. Perhaps it’s not a pet’s name after all?

I turned to Google.

I thought I’d struck gold pretty quickly with Bobo’s Meats – ‘Your local beef, pork, and venison processing plant located in Belleville, Kansas’ – and wondered whether they might supply Austin Sam’s branch of Central Market. Sadly, though, in none of the many appearances of the name ‘Bobo’s Meats’ on the company’s website does that second B appear in upper case.

I cast the net wider, and found Singaporean food manufacturer and exporter of various fish and meat products Ha Li Fa BoBo.

Here’s what BoBo have to say about their products:

A Celebration With Every Bite. With a fantastic range of BoBolicious treats, let’s celebrate the big & small events that bring us happiness & joy!

Austin Sam is after BoBo meat, so I narrowed my search to the only one of the six product categories containing both ‘BoBo’ and ‘meat’, temptingly titled: ‘BOBO MEAT BALL SERIES’.

So, had Austin Sam been shopping for any of these?

Never mind ‘a celebration with every bite’ – Reader, by this point I was checking Austin Sam’s list for antacids.1

(Still, at least we know that Austin Sam loves salad – sorry, SALAD. As her only list entry written entirely in upper case, she clearly rates the stuff.)

Leaving her BoBo curveball aside, with her obvious penchant for strong flavours Austin Sam is my kind of cook.

This is what’s packing a punch on her shopping list:

Ginger
Garlic
Capers
Red onion
Yellow onion
Jalapeno
Soy sauce
Limes

Hang on a minute, though: multiple capers and limes, but just a single jalapeno?

🤔

green chili peppers in close up photography — These (plural) were *not* on Austin Sam’s list. ‘I’ll just have the one, thanks.’ Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash

For me, the most fascinating item on Austin Sam’s list is ‘shrimp’: a word which according to my British English sensibilities is as singular as her lonely chilli.

When my brother and I were children we would take our shrimping net down to the beach at low tide to see what we could catch.

Reader, I don’t recall ever catching a single shrimp. But no matter how elusive they were – or how useless our attempts had been to catch them2 – we had definitely regarded them as a collection of individuals. They were shrimps, always with an -s suffix to denote their plurality.

Well, is it ‘shrimps’, or ‘shrimp’? Her single jalapeno aside, Austin Sam was surely after more than just the one bite-sized crustacean to put in her shopping cart?

I sent an e-mail with the following title to my sister-in-law, Vanessa, who’s from Oklahoma:

‘Shrimp are like sheep, right?’

She must have thought I was crazy.

I went on:

‘As an American user of our mutual language, what is your understanding of ‘shrimp’? Does the word ‘shrimps’ ever get used? I get the impression that shrimp are like sheep – in that lots of shrimps are still shrimp! Am I right?’

Vanessa replied that ‘shrimp’ is already singular and plural.

🤯

British shrimp (one) 🇬🇧 vs American shrimp (lots) 🇺🇸

Asking a UK online grocer (Ocado)

When I entered ‘shrimp’ into the website search box of the online grocery delivery service which I use for my own weekly shop, only three product descriptions that had landed on my screen actually contained the word ‘shrimp’:

Seafood & Eat It MSC Potted Brown Shrimp
Happiee! Vegan Shrimp
Reader, this one doesn’t contain shrimp(s).
Mr Shrimp Peeled Prawns
Okay, this one’s clearly cheating, because that packet contains self-confessed prawns. ‘Mr Shrimp’ is shrimply3 the brand name for a product that identifies as something else. 🙄

The remaining 37 of the 40 packets I looked at – in my search for ‘shrimp’, remember – were printed loud and proud with the word ‘PRAWNS’. And there we have it: that’s the word that we in UK generally use for shrimp(s), unless we’re actually shrimping for the live critters.

#curveball 😲

Asking a US online grocer (Walmart)

In my web searches for both ‘shrimp’ and ‘shrimps’ across the pond, I got results showing packages of multiple shrimp labelled ‘shrimp’.

When I then searched for ‘prawns’, again the results overwhelmingly showed packets labelled ‘shrimp’. However, this time I was surprised to find three products – none of which were intended for human consumption – where ‘prawns’ was included in the description.

All were fish food. 🫣

Sword prawns, anyone?

Ultra Fresh Marine Fish Food, 75% Sword Prawns + Squids, Natural Protein, Color Enhancement, for Large Saltwater Fish, Marine Shrimp Patties L 2.12oz

Now, I’m pretty sure that this is not what Austin Sam was looking for when she had made the entry ‘Shrimp’ in the ‘Dinner Meats’ section of her shopping list. I certainly hope not.

And don’t get me started on why one of the ingredients listed – ‘squids’ – has that plural -s suffix, when in British English calculations one squid plus one squid equals two squid.4

Okay, so what are prawns, then? Aren’t they just ~~shrimp~~ shrimps?

Here in UK, the word ‘prawns’ covers everything from the tiny, naked little pink commas of fishy protein that you’d find in a prawn mayonnaise sandwich in the chiller of your local lunch-to-go place, right up to middle-finger-sized king prawns in their shells to pop onto the grill.

Is there even a difference between prawns and shrimp?

Shrimp and prawn are different species of crustaceans with recognizable differences, but generally, they can be used interchangeably in cooking. In the U.S., shrimp has become a blanket term for both, and prawn colloquially encompasses both in the UK.
Taken from ‘The US and UK Way to Say 15 Food Names’ on foodandwine.com.

Right then.

Well, the Mac emoji menu seems to agree that ‘prawn’ and ‘shrimp’ are interchangeable:

Reader, I’m throwing this question out to you!

Results next Saturday!

Over here I can buy prawns (yeah, shrimp, shrimps, whatevs) – either raw or cooked – chilled or frozen. I asked Vanessa whether she would ever expect to buy her shrimp fresh. Here’s what she said:

‘I’m from a landlocked place, so frozen is the only way that we get shrimp. It’s too hot in Oklahoma and too far to transport fresh seafood safely. Coastal places like Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, etc will have a fresh shrimp culture.’

My own knowledge of US geography being limited at best, I had a look at how far Austin, Texas is located from the sea. Here’s what Quora turned up:

Austin is 1400 miles from the Pacific Ocean, 1050 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and 215 miles from the Texas Gulf Coast. All numbers are approximate.

Is it safe for chilled shrimp to travel 215 miles? Well, even in UK, where nowhere is further from the coast than 70 miles, I buy my prawns frozen5. And because her list tells me that she has other business in the freezer section, I’m assuming that Austin Sam does, too.

I’ll leave you with this bottle of temptation, courtesy of Vanessa.

‘Do you know about cocktail sauce? Even the label has a shrimp on it because it’s a perfect pairing! Think ketchup with horseradish.’

Now, that’s something for Austin Sam’s next shopping list.

Love,

Rebecca

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