Food When I told the check out person that I'd travelled all the way from Liverpool to visit Booths near Burscough (I'm terrible at small talk) and she gave me the requisite bemused interest, I knew it was probably a good thing I didn't mention it was just to buy a sandwich because that would have been silly. But nevertheless for the purposes of this survey I did indeed travel to Ormskirk then walk for three quarters of an hour to a non-descript retail park just off the A59 in order to taste what this particular supermarket had to offer in the way of a festive butty.
My first encounter with Booths was at Windermere Station during my week of daily commuting to the Lake District to complete the final few venues from the Public Art Collections in North West England book back in September 2014. Then during lockdown 2020, when the only home deliveries we could achieve were through Amazon's Fresh service, we found ourselves getting Booths groceries (this was before they signed the deal with Morrisons) which still seemed shockingly privileged, as though we were shopping outside of our social class.
Which was silly of course. After years of attempting to take over Booths, Waitrose began a purchasing agreement with them in 2008, which is presumably why so much of the merch is nearly identical to what you'd find in their Formby shop. But Booths list of twenty-seven locations shows that they've gravitated towards areas with a particular potential clientele, the sort who'd expect to find whole pheasant or Wild Mallard plastic wrapped in the fridges, the packaging on the latter stresses that although every effort has been made to remove the buckshot from the carcass to proceed with caution.
For all the that, their Ultimate Festive Feast sandwich is bland. On opening the package all you can smell is the sage and onion stuffing and that's also all you can taste even though as the photo shows and the product description says it also contains pulled turkey, streaky bacon, Brie, cranberry sauce, spinach and gravy mayo (which is just mayo with a gravy flavouring implanted via numerous additives). The bread is nice and soft but also slightly too thick for the filling and if that's the best part of the sandwich, something has gone wrong.
The cruelty of this process is that a single sandwich will represent an entire range, but on the flipside of that, every sandwich should be perfect and identical. Also, why the Brie? Why the spinach? I appreciate the approach to these sarnies isn't always going to be an attempt to replicate everything which is likely to be on the dinner plate in a traditional Christmas meal, but these seem like foreign objects especially since they essentially exist to bulk things without adding anything to the flavour profile.
So it's a surprise to say that the Spar sandwich is nicer despite presumably being made on a much larger scale and at the same price of £2.95 (unless when I pitch up in Waitrose in a few weeks it turns out they have an identical range of sandwiches with different labels). Going forward I wonder just how much variety there'll be between these sandwiches and how easy it'll be to find different ways of describing them. They're all going to be roughly the same I imagine. But if anything is to get me in the Christmas mood, it'll be this.
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