International Marketplace

On the Web

This page contains the following entries:

Herbs and Spices

Penzeys Spices
We cannot say enough about Penzeys as a source for herbs and spices of all kinds. Considering the freshness and variety, you might expect these to be expensive. They're not. You can buy small samples at a nominal price. See our discussion of herbs and spices in Seasonings.
www.penzeys.com

From Italy

A.G. Ferrari Foods
     Paul Ferrari goes to Italy and brings back special foods from the smaller farms. He thus does for Italian regional foods what Kermit Lynch has long done for local French wines. (In addition to foods, Paul also has a few specially selected Italian wines.)
   You may browse this beautiful, simply presented site by region. Click on Sicily, for example: You find honeysuckle honey, and (surprisingly) a special dry white wine. Visit Toscana to learn about panforte and ancient farro, or emmer wheat.
     Prices do not seem unaffordable, especially considering the uniqueness of many of the items. This is quite an astonishing site, all in all. Enjoy.

Olive Oil
Here is your chance to purchase the same Tuscan olive oil used by Chez Panisse.
Click on the Chez Panisse site, www.chezpanisse.com, then Olive Oil.

From Spain

Tienda.com
A family-operated importer, and enthusiast for all Spanish foods. See our correspondence with Don Harris of Tienda in the Spanish Cooking Section.
www.tienda.com

Food from Spain
Buy authentic Serrano Ham, Olive Oil, Piquillo Peppers directly from this online store. The firm exports a wide variety of Spanish products worldwide. www.foodfromspain.com. (Retail store owners may contact the firm's export department.)

From Scandinavia

The Northerner: Explore Scandinavia
     This site might well set a standard for what a very large food shopping, regional website should be. Although offering 6000 products, food and much more, it somehow retains an informal feel, with no sense of crowding. The site is a pleasure to browse. It’s easy to find things, and the pictures are mouthwatering.
     Foods include cheeses, jam, bread, cookies, chocolate, fish, tobacco(snuff)!
     We clicked on cheese, finding Preast cheese, Your Lordship cheese, Norwegian Sweet Mountain cheese, mountain goat cheese. We progressed to Cloudberry jam from Lapland, pale in color like Queen Anne cherries; then saw Crisp, White Arctic Bread, used since nomadic times
     Each item is described in an informative manner, resonate–when appropriate-- with Scandanavian history. Consider Bothnia Cheese: "Hard gourmet cheese from the north of Sweden. Strong and unique taste, but not too strong. You find this cheese taste nowhere else in the world. The recipe was first developed during the sixteenth century but was in 1871 refined by a dairy woman, Eleonara Lindstrom, into the present flavour. The cheese is ripened for 10 months or longer before sold. An old Icelandic proverb says ‘Cultures are born and die, but the cheese is immortal.’"

Ordering:
     Prices are given in US dollars, and you may use your credit card.
     Many items here are not mass-produced.. The site warns that for some things you may have to wait a month for the product to be made. Sounds to us like it’s well worth it.

Non-food Items:
Food is only part of this large site. You may buy Swedish hand blown glass from the "glass kingdom". Or fashion items: Norwegian sweaters, Swedish clogs, fine Finnish jewelry, Viking masks. For the home look at crafts, pottery, metalwork, toys.
There is a section on travel, with a couple of unique Scandinavian weddings and honeymoons. Spend your wedding night on reindeer furs by the open fire in a Sami hut. www.northerner.com

From France

Les Delices
     Les Delices is the personal expression of Philippe Raynaud. He grew up in Madagascar, where his father managed a sugar-cane factory. His mother was an excellent cook, and he remembers many "original flavours" from her kitchen. Today, at 45, he owns a shop in Paris. He offers many proprietary items that sound most intriguing: marmalade of onion, original, with lardons, meadow mushroom, lemon, and hazels; marmalade of beer; and sage jelly, coriander jelly, angelic jelly, to mention only a few. www.lesdelices.com.
     The site has an extensive list of links (sites amis), international in flavor.
     There are French and English versions of the site. On my screen I can view the entire French version, but in English only "History." However, from the History section, I can access the catalog of products and ordering information.
     In addition to individual retail orders, M. Raynaud invites inquiries from retail stores.

From the British Isles

Thorntons Special Toffee
Alison, Brandon's fiancée, returned recently from visiting her grandmother in England. She brought back a little package of toffee. This is a classic in England, the company tracing its roots to a sweetshop in Sheffield founded by Joseph William Thornton in 1911.
We are used to a friend of ours who used to return from Switzerland to give us a little bottle of Kirsch. This is England, so Alison brought Thorntons toffee. To our taste, this toffee is just fine, full-flavored and slightly chewy, what you would like toffee to be. It is apparently not available in the US, but can be ordered from the website www.thorntons.co.uk.

From the Arctic

Arctic Wild Harvest Company
Get into the avant-garde of web shopping, with food from the Canadian Arctic. Try tinned caribou meat, birch syrup, and much more. A lovely web site. www.arcticharvest.com Description in preparation.

From New England

Nervous Nellie's Jams and Jellies
     I love living in California, but miss the Maine blueberries I knew growing up on the East Coast. Oregon blueberries are okay, but not like the tiny, sweet, flavorful Maine variety. I haven't seen these for decades, but here they are at Nervous Nellie's, in the form of preserves. I've tried these, and they're the real thing, absolutely. Long live the Web!
     When she's not putting up blueberry preserves, Nervous Nellie makes a bunch of other intriguing things in her tiny, white, window-boxed cottage on the edge of a meadow on Deer Isle, Maine. I can recommend the Hot Tomato Chutney, and the Hot Pepper Jelly. These are both full of flavor, a great hot-sweet combination. These are the kinds of productions that should win prizes.
     I also ordered Cranberry Peach Chutney, Blue Razz Conserve, and Blueberry Chutney, based on Ms. Nellie's descriptions, in which I am gaining growing confidence. Any of these make great gifts, at Christmas or any time. www.nervousnellies.com

Vermont Country Store
     This catalog has a special interest for busy home cooks. Most of the pages are devoted to nostalgic clothing, but there are always a few small kitchen appliances, buried like little gems in a basket of clean laundry. These appliances are not generally available elsewhere. If they were, they wouldn't be in this catalog. See KITCHEN TOOLS for some of the items we have found here over the years.
    Foods are interesting as well. You can buy Vermont maple syrup and cheddar cheese (including sharp and extra sharp). They also feature nostalgic goodies such as Walnettos that you thought were gone forever.
     The Vermont Country Store, PO Box 3000 Manchester Center, VT 05255-3000. Ph. 1-802-362-8440. Fax 1-802-362-0285. Website www.vermontcountrystore.com.

From the Southwest

Cibolo Junction
     Here is your entree to the distinctive flavors of the Southwest.
     You would expect to find salsas here, and you do. There are three traditional southwest salsas, rather hot: Sabrosa, Southwest Style with New Mexico green chiles, and Tomatillo and Habanero.
     In addition three fruit salsas, with milder peppers, are available. Try Mango Papaya salsa with tomatillos, peppers, and a touch of chipottle chile. Or Cranberry Apple salsa with mild chiles and serano peppers.
     There are nine fruit and chile preserves. These include their top seller and award winner Habanero Peach Preserve, also Jalapeno Orange Marmalade. These preserves tend to the sweet and spicy, ideal for appetizers on crackers with cream cheese; relish with chicken, fish or pork; or poured over yogurt or ice cream!
     The soups and stews sound irresistible. These are mixes to which you add water and meat or chicken. How about Green Chile Stew: Idaho potatoes, green chiles, 8 herbs, spices and seasonings.
     Of the bread mixes, Indian blue cornbread with Jalapeno chiles and lime, is a featured item.
     Their herbs and spices section includes a list of chiles a mile long. You may buy whole pods, powders, or crushed flakes. The list begins with ancho and cascabel and continues through to pasilla and pequin.
     (This is important news for anyone wishing to experiment with Mexican cooking. If you look into Dana Kennedy’s classic, The Art of Mexican Cooking, you will see that most recipes require one or another specific kind of chile, unavailable generally in US stores.)
     A number of flavored sour dough pretzels are offered.
     The website is clean, sharp and colorful, a pleasure to browse. There is also a glossary of New Mexican foods.

History: Cibolo Junction takes its name from a landmark building in Panna Maria, Texas. In 1991, Susan and Brian McKinsey began their love affair their with the flavors and seasonings of the American Southwest in the Cibolo Junction Saloon and Country Store.
They created a dish called Bowl O’ Red, a fiery chili that became known far and wide. In 1994 they set up their business in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with one product. There are now hundreds. Some they manufacture themselves, for some they act as distributors. www.cibolojunction.com

From Mexico

MexGrocer.com
     Unlike most site in this directory, Mex Grocer is a large supplier. This is a nation-wide (meaning US) bilingual online grocery specializing in traditional, non-perishable specialty foods, household items and cookbooks from Mexico.
     I checked out canned foods - lots of beans, most available locally. But soups (menudo) sound truly Mexican, spicy and containing inexpensive ingredients; such as, hominy, pork and tripe(!) Tomatillos (green tomatoes) come in many forms, spiced or unspiced.
     Ingredients for Mexican cooking feature dried chiles, corn husks, and bottled lime juice. The latter is a feature of many Mexican dishes.
     The six culinary regions of Mexico each have their distinctive specialty. The North (La Frontera) is known for spicy meats. Central Mexico provides the well known mole poblano and the west, menudo and tacos.
     The Gulf area, not surprisingly, features foods with a European or Caribbean influence. The south provides the sweet spices, cinnamon, cloves and the like. In the Yucatan Peninsula the very air is redolent of Mayan achiote seasoning. I looked this up on the site and found it is a paste made of Annato seeds. What they are was not explained.
     The section on Salsas is the most fun. They make a meal dance, and the jars and bottles are dancing on the page. There are degrees of spicyness to suit every taste. The gift baskets feature collections of them along with other goodies, for example, a sampler of twenty items for $24.95
     There are over 50 cookbooks offered on site, ranging from the general - "The Taste of Mexico" - to the specific - "Beginning with Chiles." They come in Spanish or English and sport colorful jackets, perfect as gifts with or without one of the samplers.
     MexGrocery was founded in 2000 by Ignacio Hernandez, and headquarters is in San Diego(!) The grocery is allied with Royal Crown Foods, the largest distributor of Mexican foods in the U.S. The "nation-wide" referred to above, means the U.S. The site is colorful, and easy to navigate. Each page is divided into three parts, the index, the description of the products with color photos, and the details for ordering. Each section has its separate scroll bar. This eliminates the annoyance of having to click on the "back" key several times to get to the section you want.      www.mexgrocer.com
         --Nina King

Nuts, Extracts, Meats

Rodger's Walnuts
The unique attraction here is black walnuts, shelled. You can also buy English walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, and almond butter, fresh from the farm in Red Bluff, California, all in one pound bags. Friendly website. www.rodgerswalnuts.com

Karen Goodale's Watkins Site
Karen Goodale offers on-line shopping from her personal web site at gourmetco.com. She is an independent associate with the Watkins Company. She wrote us as follows:

"I would have to say that my very favorite Watkins products are the extract and flavoring selections. Many would be very difficult to find in a grocery store. Watkins has been known as the vanilla experts since 1895 for their premium-grade Madagascar Bourbon vanilla beans used in their Original Double-Strength Vanilla. Other extracts include Almond, Banana, Black Walnut, Butter, Butternut, Butter Pecan, Caramel, and many more."

High-quality extracts do seem to have a special relevance in low-fat diets. You can substitute a fruit or nut flavor for the vanished butter and cream. Then, they are always available on the shelf, a natural for the busy home cook. On Karen’s site, you can ask a question of her directly.
One of Karen's favorite recipes is Cranberry Pecan Pie (see Share Recipes, Recipes).

Niman Ranch
Niman Ranch offers an alternative to the mass production of meat on "factory" farms. Its pork, beef, and lamb are of exceptional quality, and seem to have become a standard for gourmet-quality products. Meats cannot be ordered directly from the ranch, but the website lists local shops for Northern California, New York, and a few other areas on both coasts. www.nimanranch.com