An Appreciation of Trader Joe’s.

The California chain now has infiltrated most of the United States with its cheerful stores featuring mostly, but not all, house brands. When its products are good they are good indeed, and quality control is uniform on a product by product basis. Trader Joe’s, however, sells some subpar items. Flowers are dirt cheap but scrutinize any bunch before you buy one because they range from spriteful to spiteful in terms of freshness. Produce in particular is unreliable. We have gagged on rancid cauliflower rice, while tomatoes have no taste and scallions range from pristine to brown, limp and weepy in plastic bags that do not permit much inspection of their contents.

Trader Joe’s practices ruthless inventory control, so busier stores run out of items with annoying frequency. All that cheer can feel forced and even annoying in the hands or voice of a clerk unskilled in projecting the trademark Trader’s affable eagerness, but then the eagerness is genuine. Ask anyone a question and she will drop whatever she is doing and lead you herself across the store to the answer.

Shiny happy people at Trader Joe’s.

The flaws are forgiven because, in contrast to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s offers convenience at a low price point. Prepared foods, refrigerated, frozen and canned, represent a real strength, bratwurst imported from Germany are exemplary, homely corn pudding is beyond reproach and so are cans of ‘giant beans,’ cannelloni in fact, sauced with tomato that make a refreshing change from traditional cans of sweetened baked beans. The house corn crisps, really small crackers in a bag, are addictive.

In contrast to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s stocks some products that embrace the foodways of the British Isles. One of few products that does not bear the chain’s name is a good one, Irish butter from Kerrygold. They sell at least four kinds of thinly sliced salmon, including the traditional smoked and an excellent pastrami cure.

The fully cooked pork belly in the refrigerator case, in a package big enough for two generous portions, is another outstanding item, leaner in a good way than a lot of belly, and while of course prepared it is prepared in a good way with nothing but water and sea salt. No colorings, chemicals, preservatives, stabilizers, sugars or corn syrup. Even so, the pork belly is very nearly a larder staple. It will keep for at least a month from the day of sale. Our recipe for cooking the pork with apple, onion, sage and hard cider appears in the practical.

The big surprise; savory pies, unabashedly described on the box as British and ridiculous value for money. Two frozen personal pies to a package, either a pair with chicken Balti or steak and stout fillings. The pastry is properly short, bronzed and flaky, its contents unimpeachably traditional and therefore good. Do, however, cook them for about ten minutes’ less time than the package recommends.

Parsnips represent one of the vegetables most closely associated with British cuisine--historically the French, for example, have hated them--and Trader Joe’s sells a bag of them, also under its own brand, that captures the inexplicably gingery tang of the winter root.

Trader Joe’s even stocks the best can of chowder (in a forgivable flight of anachronism “Pilgrim Joe’s”) that we have encountered, comfort food for the larder when work, weather or whimsy has caught you short. Even if you live in a historic neighborhood properly jealous of its independent shops, even if you are justifiably wary of national brands and miss the long-gone local butcher, the arrival of a Trader Joe’s is most welcome.