Snacking

Street food says a lot about a place. The ubiquitous hot dog stands in New York, the little bicycle kitchens in Bangkok, the chip stalls in Germany and the chestnut sellers in London’s winter all bring character to a place.

There’s something similar here. At each street corner there will be several woman with mini-baguettes in a metal bowl. For people who cannot walk to get their food, such as security guards and maids, there are ambulant ones too. Their equipment is very simple: margarine, a huge jar of peanut butter and a knife. So you can buy your bread with or without filling. Less common are the mobile sandwich makers. They carry polony sausage, and for some reason seem to always be men.

The other main snack is boiled eggs. These are always carried piled high, like a pyramid, on top of egg crates, which are in turn carried on top of the sellers head. It looks incredibly precarious, but you never see any accidents.

For the more serious snackers, there are omelettes. Your typical omelette stall is a tiny table on which is a cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box is a primus stove, or possibly a gas ring. It is kept inside the box to prevent it being blown out by the wind, and the omelette is served on a metal plate with salt and chilli sauce.

And then, of course, there are the two stand-bys: bananas and peanuts. The peanuts are sometimes raw, but usually have been roasted in a dry frying pan and then salted. Their skins are slightly blackened.

The great thing about street food is it’s cheap and fresh. But for us high-end earners it’s not something that we often try, though I have a fairly regular stop at one of the bread sellers on my way home from work. She’s one of the few who gets her bread in the afternoon, and it is simply delicious.

Talking of snacking, there’s a very good bakery near one of the supermarkets where we often go for a post-shopping cappuccino and an almond croissant. It was after such a pleasurable, if expensive, break that she who must be obeyed was propositioned by the manageress when leaving: “you have to try our new bread,” while handing her a little piece to taste. There was something about her manner which suggested that everybody who is anybody was buying it these days.

The loaf was in complete contrast to the pure whiteness of a baguette – roughish in texture, brown, and even slightly burned at the edges, with strong peasant grooves across the top. (See the photo, with the standard street mini-baguette alongside it). The sales patter continues. The flour was made by a specialist miller in Belgium, and the loaf contains nuts.

“Delicious,” she said, and before you could say Jack Robinson was walking out of the shop with said loaf. That was when reality struck: looking at the change it was clear that she had been overcharged. But no, there it was, in black and white on the sales slip: one baguette, $1; two croissants, $4; one special loaf of bread $10. That makes it 50 times more expensive than the mini-baguettes that I buy. You cringe when you think about prices like that: it is almost wicked to spend so much on a mere loaf of bread, and not a big one either. But was it worth it? If you compare it with a bottle of wine of the same price, for some people the choice might be difficult. But will we buy it again? What do you think?