Food to-go is not a modern phenomenon! Check out this History a’la Carte to find out more!

Fast food Pompeii style

A richly frescoed thermopolium, the Roman version of a street food stand, 

has been fully excavated and will open to the public starting Easter 2021. The cafeteria-style establishment is exceptionally intact, from frescoes painted on the front of an L-shaped counter to the earthenware pots still containing the remains of the snack bar’s last dishes. People ate out a lot in Pompeii. Eighty thermopolia have been found there, but this is the first one to be excavated in its entirety.

Regency Era Coffee to Go

Today, we are used to enjoy coffee everywhere, and the caffeinated drink “to go” is an added delight to walking in the streets or riding on a train. In the late 18^th century, there were, of course, coffee houses in the cities. But would you have been able to take coffee with you on a trip or on a campaign?

Roasted chestnut sellers

In the fall and winter, chestnuts were roasted in a “huge iron apparatus…cooking a bushel at a time” or on “charcoal-pans” on the street. 

Roasted apples street sellers

In winter a pan or container of burning charcoal roasted apples or chestnuts on a tin plate as shown in 1820 by Rowlandson and described in Craig’s Cries of London 1804.  Sixty years later “Roasted apples used to be vended in the streets… but it is a trade which has now almost entirely disappeared.”

The Coffee Houses of Queen Anne’s London

By the turn of the eighteenth century the coffee houses of London had become the great meeting-places of the capital – for relaxation and for stimulation. Whether your drink of choice was coffee, chocolate, or expensive tea, it was here you met with your friends and encountered strangers; where you could exercise your wit, pick up the latest news, sound forth your political opinions, and hear the latest spicy gossip as it did the rounds. 

The “Kitchen Cars” and American Recipes for the Postwar Japanese Diet

From 1956 to 1960, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) sponsored a fleet of food demonstration buses in Japan (“kitchen cars”) to improve national nutrition and fuel the nation’s economic recovery with more “modern” and “rational” cooking methods and, most importantly, ingredients (i.e. American agricultural surpluses: wheat, corn, soy, and to a lesser extent meat, dairy, etc.). Along with the school lunch program instituted under the US occupation, the kitchen cars became one of the most important tools for marketing American farm products in Japan. 

That’s all for this month’s History a’la Carte. Tell me what you think in the comments!