When Gary and I were in college at the University of Washington, Starbucks was a brand new store at the old Public Market, Pike Place. We did not drink coffee, but I shopped in Starbucks for spices and chocolate at the original store, and then later at University Village, at their second store. Spice and herbs were put up in little sealed plastic packets kept in gallon jars. Those jars filled a wall of shelves. The chocolate was broken into fist-sized chunks from ten kilo blocks imported from Europe. All the coffee was roasted locally.

Italian delis in the Market stored candied citron, lemon, and orange peel in enormous glass jars. These fruits were nothing like the gumdrop candied fruit found then and now in chain grocery stores. The lemons were the peel of half a lemon, with a bittersweet bite of lemon. I used these candied fruits and others when I baked our wedding cake in 1974 from a traditional 100-year-old fruitcake wedding cake recipe (white cakes were called “Bride’s Cake” back in the day). I found all the ingredients I needed at the Market.

By the time we’d moved to Oregon (a return home for me), we began drinking coffee, starting with instant. However, once we tried Starbucks, we could not drink anything else. For a time, we received coffee each Friday that had been roasted the day before in Seattle. Then the new CEO took over the company, and everything changed. Coffee was roasted not in NW Seattle but some other part of the country and we never enjoyed fresh-roasted beans in quite the same way again. For a time our coffee orders were the envy of our neighbors.

We also used to order from an Oakland, California deli-style food store when our boys were young. I ordered, actually, it was on me. In the late fall I went through their lengthy catalogue, searching for unusual food items like pappadams and pomegranate molasses. It was a holiday tradition, at least in my mind, to place a big order of unfamiliar foods,  spices and sauces and lovely pasta. The large box would arrive and I would unpack all those wonderful and strange foods. Food for Christmas.

The import food store I ordered from in the 80s was established in 1897, but these days all they deliver is sandwiches. I don’t remember when it became impossible to order foods from Ratto’s (the 90s, or later?) but somewhere along the way, we lost that habit.

Everything is available on Amazon now. And that is not the same somehow.

This year I found a small company selling the brand of imported tarragon mustard we like best and a lot of other good things. Yesterday, a big box arrived.

Some of the items from that box will be gifts—the tiny marzipan fruits are something I would have loved as a child—but two bottles of the mustard went straight onto my pantry shelf. Pasta went into my cracker and bread drawer, because even though I like making pasta from scratch, the striped bow ties were just too sweet not to order. Orange flower and rose water put up in glass bottles. The sweet olive oil Ines Rosales Tortas are crispy wafers that make a luscious breakfast with goat cheese and fresh raspberries—my favorite since I discovered the combination in Ashland when I was there for a Shakespeare workshop.

It might have been Thoreau or Emerson who said the only proper gifts were food and flowers—items that were useful and consumable, implying no obligation other than being edible and beautiful. We do not need things, but these packages of food are marvelous and entertaining. We will eat them and they will be gone.

[A nice detail is that everything was packed in paper, ruffle-cut waste kraft paper—you can see it off to the right in the photo above.]