20 Street Foods With Surprisingly Ancient Origins

The first depiction of a pretzel is attributed to 12th-century nun Abbess Herrad of Landsberg, who included it in an illuminated manuscript she compiled called Hortus Deliciarum. Pretzels were a common treat in Europe by then: German bakers’ guilds claimed them as their symbol as early as 1111. They were dipped in an alkaline lye bath prior to baking, a trick that gives pretzels their signature dark brown, shiny exterior, and were made without dairy or lard to comply with the Catholic Church’s fasting edicts. But the story about how a praying monk came up with the idea is largely a product of modern marketing.

The lazzaroni, or working poor of Naples, did not have ovens in their homes, so in the 18th century, street vendors sold small, flat breads that were either folded into quarters or deep-fried as a quick snack. What became the Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba was originally a street stand, opened in Naples in 1738. Its pizzas were topped with lard, garlic, salt, and inexpensive tomato sauce, not mozzarella cheese. The legendary tale of Queen Margherita’s tomato, mozzarella, and basil pizza wouldn’t arrive until 1889, some 150 years after street pizza was already being served in Naples.

By 1484, butchers in Frankfurt were smoking pork sausages, called Frankfurter Würstchen, for coronations and street fairs. They were brought to New York in the 1860s by German immigrants, and in 1867, a man named Charles Feltman started selling them on a pushcart at Coney Island, putting the sausages inside soft rolls so that people who were out for a walk wouldn’t have to eat them from a plate with a fork. Nathan Handwerker, generally credited as the inventor of the hot dog, opened his stand decades later in 1916. Feltman got there first.

In Cornwall, where miners dug for tin in arsenic- and copper-dust-coated tunnels, they wanted a meal that didn’t require them to wash their hands. By the 1700s and 1800s, Cornish bakers had developed the Cornish pasty, a braided and puffy crust stuffed with beef, potato, swede (rutabaga), and onion. The miners would grab the pasty by its thick, crusty edge, take a bite out of the meat and vegetables inside, and toss the crusty part. The crust itself was never meant to be eaten.

Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal brought battered fried fish to London, as observed by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, where fish was sold on wooden trays by street vendors. Some vendors in East London and Lancashire added deep-fried potato chips to the mix, a style similar to French and Belgian fries, and one vendor named Joseph Malin combined both, wrapping hot meals in newspaper for factory workers. Britain’s national dish, really, was two immigrant foods that met on a street corner.

In Spain, the churreros, or traditional churro makers, prepared their fried dough over open braziers using a scalded batter of flour, water, and salt. No yeast was used, and there was no need for an oven. Instead, the batter was pushed through a star-shaped nozzle just prior to frying. The ridges were essential because they allowed steam to escape during frying so the dough wouldn’t encase air and explode in the hot oil. Many stalls began serving churros alongside cups of thick hot chocolate. Spanish colonization brought churros to Latin America and the Philippines. Some have suggested that a related Portuguese fried-dough snack came from Chinese fried dough sticks, but that link remains unproven.

Back in 19th-century Alexandria and Cairo, the fawwalin, the street vendors of the time, mashed dried fava beans with herbs and spices. They then shaped them into patties and deep-fried them in big iron cauldrons of oil, before stuffing them into pita with tahini. Ta’amiya was a popular, high-protein meal for working-class Copts, or Coptic Christians, as both an occasional Lenten treat and a normal workday meal. Deep-fried food items like ta’amiya don’t appear in historical records until the 19th century, even though the ancient Egyptians were already cultivating fava beans.

The Persian merchants on the Silk Road ate a fried pastry called sanbosag as an easy-to-carry food, and it was usually filled with meat. When the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta ate at the court of the Delhi Sultan, he recorded a type of sambusak that was stuffed with minced meat and almonds and spices. The potato didn’t reach India until the Portuguese got there centuries later, and after that Indian cooks began stuffing samosas with potato. And that’s how the vegetarian snack everyone eats today came to be.

Shahjahanabad, now Old Delhi, established by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the 1630s, has had roadside vendors selling tangy and spicy chaat since its inception. While not a single dish, chaat covers a broad range of popular street foods, including papri chaat and dahi bhalla, typically consisting of fried dough mixed with tamarind, red chili, and yogurt. According to culinary lore of Old Delhi, royal physicians recommended eating these dishes to aid digestion and street vendors adopted the practice.

Arab and Indian Muslim merchants brought the Middle Eastern kebab to Java, today’s Indonesia, and local street vendors turned the concept into satay. With small charcoal braziers hanging from bamboo poles draped over their shoulders, they grilled spiced meat on skewers made of coconut fronds on the street and served it with a spicy peanut sauce. There was no stall, no specific location, and no chilled meal. The Thai version of satay, which some people think is the original, was actually a copycat of the Indonesian street snack.

In Song Dynasty China, street vendors in such cities as Beijing and Tianjin sold tart hawthorn berries on bamboo skewers coated in melted sugar. As the sugar hardened into a glassy shell, it kept the fruit fresh during brutal winters and gave passersby a sweet-tart, digestive delight to enjoy while strolling along the streets. There is a popular legend that says the treat was invented by an imperial doctor to cure the concubine of a sick emperor, and that street hawkers then copied the recipe. But the fruit, not the legend, is what we can document.

The geographer al-Sharif al-Idrisi, who traveled extensively across North Africa and the Middle East, recorded in his 1154 treatise that market stalls in Marrakech sold sfenj, fried dough rings, made by bakers called sufnajeen. Plain, unsweetened yeasted dough was pulled into rings, deep-fried, and then threaded onto strings of palm fronds for commuters to buy on their way to work. People enjoyed the fritters plain, hot, or with a drizzle of honey. This record is almost 900 years old.

Buckwheat arrived in Brittany, a region in northwestern France, following the Crusades, and flourished in the area’s poor, acidic soils that often were too inhospitable for wheat. Peddlers on the streets and at open-air markets cooked up buckwheat pancakes by pouring thin layers of batter onto round, heavy iron griddles known as billigs, then folding them around eggs, salted butter, or ham for customers strolling through the market. Today’s sweet white-wheat crêpes came about much later. Crêpes, originally, were savory street food from Brittany.

One of the oldest recorded recipes for empanadas was written in 1520 by Catalan chef Rupert de Nola, in his cookbook Llibre del Coch. De Nola described the turnover-style pies as filled with seafood and wrapped in a pastry shell that could be easily packed to withstand a long journey. The term empanada derives from the Spanish verb empanar, to wrap in bread, and workers and travelers throughout Spain were fond of the easy-to-carry food. Later, when Spanish colonizers brought their love of turnover-style baking to the New World, the dishes evolved, with vendors adding fillings ranging from spiced beef to chicken or corn.

Municipal court documents from Istanbul indicate that simit was being baked as early as 1525. The 17th-century traveler and chronicler Evliya Celebi noted that there were hundreds of vendors, simitci, on the streets selling the bread, supplied by dozens of bakeries. The vendors would dip the bread in grape molasses, roll it in sesame seeds, and put it on wooden sticks that were strung with lanterns to attract customers coming home from work at night. It has been claimed that Sultan Suleiman was the one who first created simit, but that legend remains contested.

In Shaanxi province, northern China, round wheat flatbread known as baijiamo goes back to the Qin Dynasty, and a way of braising meat in a spiced stock, called la-zhi-rou, predates that. Street vendors baked these flatbreads in clay ovens, cut them in half, and filled them with minced pork braised in ginger, star anise and cloves, providing a hand-held meal for merchants and workers traveling along northern trade routes. This combination, known as roujiamo, existed centuries before many similar bread-and-meat traditions emerged elsewhere.

Although plain steamed bread, mantou, had been made in China for centuries, it was filled steamed buns, baozi, that Meng Yuanlao, a memoirist from Kaifeng, went to some trouble to describe. He wrote of specialized market stalls selling hot meat and vegetable buns to city workers all year round in the Northern Song capital. Steaming the dough in stacked bamboo baskets over boiling water allowed the vendor to keep the food hot and portable, without requiring a large oven. But the tale of a famous general inventing the stuffed bun is legend, not record.

South Indian cooks have been making dosas, batters of fermented rice and black gram that they pour onto hot iron griddles, for more than 2,000 years, and references to them first appear in ancient Tamil poetry. Then, in the Middle Ages, a king described these thin, fermented pancakes in a Sanskrit encyclopedia, explaining that the long fermentation process broke down the grains to make them easier to digest and more nutritious, as well as allowing them to be quickly cooked on the street. But the potato-stuffed masala dosa that comes to mind today is a much more recent invention, developed in 19th-century Udupi restaurants after the Portuguese introduced potatoes to India.

Centuries before Europeans arrived, native chefs were pounding soaked kernels of maize between two large stone slabs called metates, and baking the resulting mass into flat corn cakes on clay griddles, or budares. Galeotto Cei, a 16th-century Italian merchant, described in his manuscripts the sale of these hot disks at local markets, split in half for passersby to eat. The instant corn flour that cooks rely on now wasn’t invented until 1960, millennia after street vendors began crafting these corn cakes, known as arepas, in the traditional way.

Long before the Spanish Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún recorded Aztec life in his Florentine Codex, tamales were nourishing hunters, armies, and marketgoers across Mesoamerica for millennia. Sahagún described lively market stalls in Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, offering scores of tamales stuffed with turkey, fish, beans, fruit, and chili sauce. They were made with corn that was soaked in alkaline lime water to release its nutrients, wrapped and steamed in clay pots and sold warm. It wasn’t until Spanish colonizers arrived that pork and lard joined the mix.

This content was created with the help of AI.