Kathmandu:

The Fresh House was the first great place for food. Located in Kichha Pokhari and run by a bunch of happy Shresthas one could get meat freshly brought from Calcutta in a refrigerated truck that went to and fro every alternate day. You could get Heinz foods and Campbell soups and all manner of goods things. Today Fresh House has opened Duh! below Suwal Video Parlor and the food range is staggering. My favourites are Japanese baked products that include delicious bread. Duh! carries a bewildering range of goods.

As do Bluebird, Bhat Bhatini, Gemini, Namaste and latest of all Saleways.

In Bluebird, near the Bagmati bridge, you get a sugar-free range of biscuits and chocolates that include a Double Fudge Cookie and a biscuit chocolate sandwich that make for delicious midnight snacks. You can pick up Nina and Hager meat products including a fantastic British breakfast sausage.

Gemini has a huge branch in Bouddhanath but I still go to their Jawalakhel branch where Biswo Maskey or his wife presides. They stock everything from momos — sometimes from my friend Niti Rana’s Momo’s and more — to Tabasco sauce, which became a household word in America in 1870 because the McIlhenny family who invented it went into mass production of the fiery red sauce made by Edmund McIlhenny who obtained some hot pepper seeds from a traveller from America and came up with the sauce.

All the supermarkets have frozen foods now. Thanks to Clarence Birdseye, who in 1916, while working in Labrador in the Artic noticed that fish could be frozen on ice and then thawed and eaten. In 1924 he launched Birdseye Seafoods, Inc and began the frozen food industry.

At the Vineyard in Baber Mahal Revisited, you get all manner of frozen foods a tad cheaper than you would outside. At Vineyard you also get cheeses galore — occasionally you get a Roquefort which in 1411 Charles IV of France allowed the village of Roquefort-Sur-Soulzon to make exclusively. That the cheese comes from Australia and would not amuse Charles IV or any right thinking French person, doesn’t detract from its availability, however unoriginal. God what a pompous sentence.

Bhat Bhatini, which seems to be everyone’s favourite, has so many shelves of food that you require a little rest between aisles. There are enough brands of Marmalade to strike Robert Keeler in awe. He was the creator of Marmalade in 1790 when he received a assignment of bitter oranges which his wife turned into the first bitter Marmalade.

Namaste, which has moved into the old Narayani Hotel, has everything from chocolates to sauces including the original Worcestershire sauce — Lea and Perrins — discovered in 1838 by the pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins, who bought a recipe from Sir Marcus Sandys (late of India) that tasted awful at first but improved into deliciousness with age.

All supermarkets stock breakfast foods and Saleways has a whole lot of it like Bluebird. They owe it to John Harvey Kellogg who along with his brother worked at a sanatorium and after quite a bit of experimentation in 1895 developed a breakfast food that was easy to chew. Thus, Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

But my favourite range of canned and bottled foods was started in 1876 and first served to me in Kathmandu at Fresh House in 1975. Heinz. Started by Henry Heinz, a second generation German-American, who began by marketing horseradish and went on to mass marketing pickle products and tomato ketchup.

Henry started making beans in 1895 and much later the slogan ‘Heinz Meanz Beanz’, captured the world just as ‘Supermarkets Mean Superfood’ should be a new jingle for a new time.