Walking into the original Asian Food Market on Spring Street never failed to put a smile on my face: I knew that Aunt Catherine and Uncle Ray Taintor had to be whirling in their graves.

For decades, it had been Taintor’s Grocery Store, a classic mom-and-pop operation: Uncle Ray’s father had opened it, and Ray had carried on the tradition as both owner and butcher. Aunt Catherine presided over the cash register once their children were grown.

They were “courtesy” aunt and uncle: childhood friends of my grandparents. I have only slight memories of their store — I was in grade school when it closed, unable to compete with the newfangled supermarkets. The store was pristine — as my grandmother said, “So clean you could eat off the floors” and probably the most ethnic foodstuff on the shelves was a box of Creamette Spaghetti.

I loved Aunt Catherine and Uncle Ray for diametrically opposed reasons. Uncle Ray was quiet, steadfast and one of the nicest adults I knew. Aunt Catherine, on the other hand, was fun — and easy to make fun of. She was petite and cutesy — not traits found in my closer female role models. And the older she got, the more she clung to those cloying traits. Without much prompting — and sometimes in the face of actual discouragement — she would trill her “signature” song “My Little Sweet Alice-Blue Gown.” Shortly after my husband, Peter, and I announced our engagement, she showed up with magazine clippings and ideas about how Peter should “style” his hair. The best, though, was when she waved a PlayGirl centerfold in my grandmother’s face: she was shocked and totally horrified. My grandmother didn’t have the heart to ask why she had the magazine in the first place.

The Asian Food Store couldn’t have been a more radical contrast. Shelves, freezers and refrigerators held a huge variety of ingredients — more often than not with indecipherable (at least to me) labeling. The offerings were Pan-Asian: Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian (Thai, Vietnamese, etc.,) as well as Indian and even Mexican and South American items.

Friday and Saturday were the best days to shop; on Thursdays the owners made a buying trip to Chicago, and the floors held an even more bewildering assortment of boxes and coolers brimming with fresh produce, roast ducks, thousand-year eggs, live blue crabs crawling over each other and various fish and animal parts — some of which I could identify, and many more I couldn’t.

Eventually, the owners moved west to a larger facility. A few years later, they sold the retail operation (the most profitable part of the business had always been selling wholesale to area Asian restaurants). The selection became even more diverse, and the refrigeration capacity dramatically improved. But everything was totally destroyed by the March 2006 tornado that struck Springfield.

These days, Little World Market (see below) has filled the gap. It’s as ramshackle as the original, and provides almost as many esoteric ingredients — everything except that delicious irony.

Contact Julianne Glatz and [email protected].