Mercado Central: Lessons in fruit
Strangely, I didn't discover until my second week in Valencia that I live across the street from the main market in Valencia, El Mercado Central! It's a huge gótico del modernismo building built in the 1910s, containing over 400 vendors (according to Wikipedia).
Typical Spanish ham (which you can also find hanging like this in the Carrefour or local Mercadona).
I witnessed this pescador cutting live eel... it still moved after he started chopping!
Everyone goes in with fabric shopping bags on wheels like in the picture below.
So far I've only bought fruit at the market. The first week I got clementines, persimmon, and figs. Since I hadn't learned fractions yet in Spanish, I ended up with a whole container of figs!
There are definitely some sellers that are more popular than others. The fruit seller I went to this week thankfully had a numbered ticket system. I waited about half an hour for my number to be called! It was a good way to practice my Spanish numbers I suppose!
I got the persimmon again, just to try them straight away from the market. They look oblong like the hachiya persimmon we have in the US, so I assumed I should wait for them to become soft to remove the astringency. I learned from my colleague at work that actually I can eat it straight away. In fact, I noticed the sign next to the persimmons advertised how duro y dulce they were.
This is the variant known as Ribera del Xuquer, also from Valencia. We are so lucky to be the source of so many great foods - citrus, persimmons, paella, and horchata!
