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Switzerland third priciest for home comforts

The Local
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Switzerland third priciest for home comforts
Shopping photo: Shutterstock"

It’s the question on everyone’s lips: Which country in The Local's network offers the best value for wistful expats craving comfort food and drink from home? Well friends, wonder no more!

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Our mission was this: hit the streets of Vienna, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, Lausanne and Oslo and fill a basket with 14 items that fill the hearts and clog the arteries of Anglophone foreigners everywhere.

When in Rome, why not sample some stracciatella soup, a plate of succulent osso buco, all topped off with tiramisù? 

Forget about it! Where’s my Jell-O! 

THE SHOPPING LIST IN PICTURES:

14 Shades of Brown: Food and booze expats miss

Photo: Mikey Jones

What then will it cost to get hold of these delicacies in cities across Europe? Scroll over the heat map below to count the cost of foodie homesickness.

How we tracked down the goodies

Thank goodness for Scandinavia! As so often in these kinds of comparative surveys, Switzerland's blushes were spared by the sheer insanity of prices in oil-rich Norway, while Sweden just pipped the Swiss to second place. 

Many of the items on our shopping list were tricky to track down, at least in Lausanne where we wielded our basket largely in vain. Readers in Zurich or Geneva can probably tells us where to get these goodies without resorting to the internet for Marmite or Kraft mac and cheese. 

Coop in Lausanne stocked six of the 14 home comforts we sought: the baked beans, marmalade, peanut butter, HP sauce, Marmite and, mercifully, some Sam Adams beer to wash all that down. 

The rest we were able to source online from Jim's British Market and American Market

We weren't able to find the one thing some might say we most urgently needed to galvanize our palates against this onslaught: a bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey. Using sophisticated guesstimation technology, we priced a 70cl bottle of the popular Scotch at 22.60 francs. 

Use the scroll bar on the chart below to see all the prices. 

Incidentally, we're aware that we've navel-gazed somewhat and overlooked a lot of nationalities. Please let us know what you miss from your country in the comments or on social media. Can you give us the ingredients we need for another article?

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