Introduction: Food hawkers from representation to reality

Across the world, until very recently, most people living in cities bought their food in streets and markets. The history of those who sold this food and what was sold on the street, raw or ready-made, is almost entirely absent in historical writings. The history of food has focused almost exclusively on the serving and eating of food indoors and sitting down. Recipe books, menus, majolica plates, carving knives, and pastry cutters, almost entirely from elite contexts, have provided some of the evidence. The history of consumption has focused on the buying and selling from shops. Insurance records, bill heads, store fronts and interiors steer the historian into the shop rather than out on the street. Historical studies on markets have the tendency to focus either on the buildings in which the selling of food took place, or on just a few branches of food selling, mainly the provision of raw meat and fresh fish. The mobility of the food hawkers makes them particular difficult to track. In turn, the lack of material evidence means that there is almost nothing which survives of their activities.1 For the early modern period, there are few traces in museum collections of the trestle tables, awnings which sometimes shaded them, pots and pans in which to fry things or keep things warm, or the containers (possibly made out of paper, pewter, or jute) in which food was weighed out or served.