You Have No Equal

I was making my roast cauliflower, caper and yellow raisin salad today. As I reached in my fridge for my giant bottle of Capers I saw a phrase on the bottle that I have consistently ignored, “Non-Pareilles” that I have read on many different brands of capers. Having just returned from Paris where my limited knowledge of the French language had been restored it finally dawned on me that “Non-Pareilles” was not some type of flower blossom or variety of caper, but the phrase, “Not parallel” or translated into better English, “has no equal.”

I don’t know how these capers got this high class branding but it made me interested in learning more about capers. What I found out was that the smaller the caper the better the flavor, supposedly. Since we are caper aficionados in my house we might beg to differ since we really like caper berries that are giant forms of capers with stems. But then I got to thinking that I have only ever eaten small, medium and berry sized capers and enjoyed them all.

I don’t have any medium sized capers in the house so I could not find a jar that said they were “Non-Pareilles” or not, but I am assuming those medium sized ones were just plain ‘ole capers- equal in everyway.

Why I am going down this rabbit hole is it started to make me mad that the small things were considered to “have no equal” when clearly every jar of the small caper that was labeled as “non-pareilles” was equal to another. Why was small better? Sometimes being larger is considered better, as in jumbo shrimp. Those little tiny salad shrimp have virtually no flavor in comparison.

I fully understand when sometimes something that is smaller tastes better because it may not be as tough, but just because something is small does not make it better. I want to stand up for all the big things on earth and say they have no equal also. Really, everything and everyone is unique and deserves to be considered special and not just in French. So you medium sized capers I declare you to be special too and I would do it in Spanish if I could, especially since that is where I have eaten you.

No matter your size, nothing is equal to you be you a flower blossom or a person!