The phrase ‘eating out’ does not always conjure up memories of dining in smart restaurants. For me ‘eating out’ is literally that, eating outdoors in the many cities I have been lucky enough to visit.
It is a way like no other of experiencing that particular culture, because one is eating with the people who live there, eating what they eat every day. Hawker stalls in Singapore, dai pai dong in Hong Kong, the night market in Taipei, Bogota’s famous abastos on the city’s outskirts, eating arepas and chichas in Quito, empanadas in Galicia have provided some of my most vivid gastronomic memories.
My first experience of street food was in Nigeria, where as a school-leaver I taught for a year. Long drives over unmetalled roads would be made less tedious by stopping at a roadside village where food was being cooked over open fires.
Bean cakes were the snack of choice, deep-fried and golden, with onions and chilli buried deep inside. Until recent times, it was never considered the done thing to eat in the streets in Paris, except for perhaps a crêpe or two, but now sandwich shops abound, and baguettes are to be seen being munched in the smartest streets.
And in Italy, apart from gelato, it is still rare to see ‘street eating’. In Spain, though, we love to stop for a crisp churro dipped in hot chocolate at a stall outside the market in Jerez. In Valletta, after lunch at Rubino, our friends tempt us to a bag of freshly-fried imqaret on the way to the car park; we could not possibly be hungry, but in the interests of gastronomic research, I had to try this unique speciality.
One summer in New York I was astonished to see as much as 15 blocks of main Manhattan arteries, Third Avenue one day, Lexington Avenue the next, closed off for the purpose of street festivals.
Traditional New York street food and drink played an important part, homemade lemonade, egg creams, smoothies, roasted corn, pretzels, hot-dogs, burgers, devilled turkey drumsticks looking like small hams, funnel cakes and doughnuts. In fact, food seemed to be the main reason for these Indian summer festivities.
The perfect example of street food is fish and chips. Certainly, ‘street food’ was available from city cook shops throughout Britain from the middle ages, but it was the age of the railway which brought fish to inland cities at lower prices, and fried fish soon became a favourite fast food of the factory workers of the Industrial Revolution.
As a child, family outings to Bridlington and Whitby would not be complete without a hot fragrant parcel of fish and chips, comforting as the wind whipped in from the North Sea.
We might think of fish and chips as a British ‘invention’, but it was a Belgian who persuaded us to eat chips with our fish, Edouard de Gurnier, who opened a stall in the old Green Market in Dundee in 1874. They rapidly caught on as an ideal partner to the crisp, battered, deep-fried fish already being sold.
Belgian gastronomic magazines seem to devote a good deal of space to the origin of the chip. Chef Pierre Wynants believes it should not be called the French fry but rather the Belgian fry.
Some claim that the first instructions for frying the chip in two stages came from the Belgian kitchen, although others claim that the chip was popularised in Belgium by French refugees after 1851, following Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état.
I like the story, which goes back about 200 years, that the poorer inhabitants of Namur used to catch small fish in the Meuse, which they would deep-fry. When the river froze, and cut off their supply of free food, they would cut up potatoes in the shape of the small fish, and fry them instead. The French philosopher, Barthes, however, claimed that the chip was a gastronomic symbol of Frenchness: “La frite est le signe alimentaire de francité.”
What is very evident is that street food has come in from the cold, to find itself on the best tables. One of Anton Mosimann’s signature dishes for receptions was miniature fish and chips in paper cones.
At Ta’ Frenċ and at the Phoenicia, imqaret are served as petit fours. The favourite dish at Bar Boulud in London’s Mandarin Oriental is the burger with foie gras. And much street food can be scaled down to perform as appetisers to serve with drinks.