A way of travelling is also a way
of eating. If your travel is an inquisitive itinerary and what comes by chance
you will have different chance to encounter road food than if the only purpose
of the trip was to get from one place to another you will feed inattentively.
The asphalt highway is made for this kind of dining – you eat only out of
necessity like you stop for petrol.
Massimo Montanari
I was recently commissioned to write entries on street food
and roadside stalls for two upcoming food encyclopaedias.
Researching the street food entry was easy;
it’s popularity has risen as a counter to both fast food and high-end
restaurant food and also as a battle front for localism versus
internationalism, so there is a lot of academic and grey literature on which to
draw. Literature on roadside food, on the other hand, particularly academic
literature, is scant. Granted, street food in many countries is also roadside
food served from stalls scattered along highways and byways. But there is
little written about the other ways of provisioning the traveller. The notable
exception is
Fast Food. Roadside
Restaurants in the Automobile Age, a comprehensive and fascinating account
of the development of the various forms of roadside dining in the USA
.[i]
This lack piqued my interest even as it irked me. So I set
out, like Montanari’s attentive traveller, on an inquisitive itinerary ranging
from the dusty backroads of my bookshelves, to the recollections of friends and
far flung relatives, and on to the fast-as-thought trips along the information
superhighways, to discover and document what I could.
What follows is, as I have titled it, an impressionistic and
idiosyncratic contribution on the subject.
Provisioning on the
Putty Road: A vignette
It started at home; sandwiches, a thermos of tea, and
pre-mixed cordial all usually made by mum, to be consumed over the first half
of the seemingly day long trip down the hard top dirt Putty Road from Singleton
to Sydney. Then a stop at Boggy Swamp Creek Rest Area, little more than a
shapeless graded area of river flat just far enough off the road to be out of
reach of the dust stirred up by passing traffic and safe from all but the most
out of control vehicle. There were a couple of gum trees giving scant shade; a
threadbare handkerchief of grass on which mum spread a blanket inadequate to
soften the prickliness of the dry stalks and twigs underneath; and a barbecue
made from three upright plates of thick grease and fire-blackened iron and a
single metal grill, all low to the ground so you had to squat to cook on it. We
boys would collect kindling and dry branches enough for Dad to boil a billy of
water we had brought with us for tea, served with powdered milk and sugar into
which to dunk sweet store bought biscuits.
It was all over in under an hour. It was a long haul then to
the next stop at the cafe attached to the caravan park at Colo River for a
toilet break, drinks and ice cream before the last hour and a half journey and
dinner with the family friends we would be staying with while in Sydney. The sequence
was reversed on the way back home, the post lunch stop being at Bulga, a small
village just out of the long winding stretch though the ranges along the river.
The road is sealed now, the trip faster, the driving less
tiring. I don’t stop at Boggy Swamp. I grab a coffee and a croissant at either
end and drive the safety recommended two hours and have a break at a roadhouse
and I’ll probably grab a carton flavoured milk or some juice.
An impressionistic
history
We can speculate that pre-historic nomadic hunter gatherer
families carried surplus food with them as they travelled taking advantage of
the cycle of seasons. There is some basis for this speculation in the foodways of
the Wanniya-laeto, the nomadic hunter gatherers who are the oldest inhabitants
of Sri Lanka, who continued to dry meat and fish surplus to their immediate
day’s need as portable supplies along with yams and honeycomb well into the
first half of the 20
th century.
[ii] The food is local in the sense that it is
caught, hunted or gathered from where it was living/growing at the time. It
would have been carried in ready to use plant based carriers (scoop shaped
leaves or curlings of bark), skin pouches, spiked on a twig or threaded on a
vine/proto rope. It’s food eaten with the fingers either while walking or
perhaps at a rest stop during the day and at night, times when the traveller
recuperates from the soreness and exhaustion of walking for hours on end. +Either
way it’s food that is eaten leisurely to allow the traveller to physically
recuperate, with the meal perhaps giving the opportunity for conversation,
reviewing the day, planning the days ahead.
Maybe it was laid out on leaves to keep the
dirt off, maybe it was just picked directly off whatever it was carried on. Water
may have been carried also in some kind of container like a hollowed out bamboo
stem, or the rest stops and night’s camp are made near a source of water. The
meal is eaten sitting on the ground or perhaps on a log or rock.
At some stage individuals began to travel for reasons other
than following food sources over the year, the first true travellers, if you
like.
Perhaps this began only after we
became sedentary agriculturalists and herders. The traveller would have set out
with some provisions but what did they do for food as they travelled further
and longer? Martin Jones in
Feast. Why
Humans Share Food suggests an answer. ’ (Syria circa 9000 BC) ‘would have
been a journeying landscape… (that) would have taken the traveller through many
different communities, living and sharing food in many different
ways…(according to) the regional traditions in cuisine…This was a world that
lacked the cities, towns, and entrepots where strangers meet, and which provide
facilities for people to eat, drink, rest, and sleep among those they have
never met. ..Thousands of years before such foci even existed those meetings
would have had something of a formal ritual structure to them. Someone in each
community would see it as their role to receive the stranger, and embark upon a
particular set of gestures, courtesies, and offerings to which both host and
guest would adhere.’
[iii] Jones
is describing here what Hans Conrad Peyer calls ‘hospitality with conditions’
which existed beside a more general ‘unconditional hospitality’ which included
‘lodging ,water, fire, and horse fodder, but no food’.
[iv] This is
food that is prepared at a home fire either indoors or outdoors and again is
food eaten leisurely, at a break from labour during the day or at night, with
perhaps the sharing of news, tales, songs, forming of alliances. Some of the
food now maybe served in a bowl from which the traveller may directly drink or
use a flat bread to scoop gruel or chunks of flesh. It has been grown in the
home garden, or collected from domestic animals or hunted/fished for within
walking distance of the home. It’s still basically fingerfood, but there also may
be knives now and basic spoons, but no fork such as we know it now as a utensil.
The meal is still eaten sitting on the
ground, though now there might be some floor covering – skins or rushes, say.
There may be water from a well or other kind of storage or brought up from a
nearby source in jugs. There may be some kind of fermented drink. Of course the
traveller may also have been carrying some food hunted and gathered along the
way and this may be shared with the host,
As more people began to travel, increasingly for trade, the
pressure on these kinds of private hospitality came under strain. What emerged was
forms of commercial hospitality, some of which that were government established
and/or supported. The Roman Empire had staging posts/inns along its extensive
network of paved roads; Horace (658BC) writes of making ‘straight for
Benevento, where an attentive host almost burnt his inn down while
spit-roasting some lean thrushes for us.’
[v] Herodotus writes about travellers’
hospitality along the Royal Road under the Persian king Darius in the 5
th
century BC:
‘Now the true account of the
road in question is the following: - Royal stations exist along its whole
length, and excellent caravansaries; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited
tract, and is free from danger’.
[vi] These
commercial hospitality ventures combined kitchens and dining rooms, sleeping
quarters, wash rooms and toilets, and usually stabling and feed for horses. With
the development of commercial coach travel, inns became stage posts where in
addition to meeting the needs of the traveller, coach companies could get food
and accommodation for their drivers as well, and of course feed and water their
horses or have fresh set readied for the next stage. Travellers and coach staff
ate whatever was provided:
‘... one ate
what one was given when one was given it. In every country, some inns were
better than others. In eighteenth century London, many of them had a
considerable reputation for their ‘ordinary’ - a fixed price, fixed menu table
d’hote dinner provided daily’.
[vii] This meal is still being eaten leisurely;
travelling by coach has its physical rigours, it takes time to rest or change
horses, and coaches often also had commercial goods to be off and on loaded.
The meal continues to be a time for socialising, planning, reviewing, telling
tales, singing songs, making deals. The food will now still largely be locally
sourced though there may be luxuries and rarities brought in from more distant
markets. Now the traveller is sitting on a bench at a wooden table shared with
other travellers. The food is presented in bowls or on platters from which you
serve yourself. There are knives for cutting meat and bread, or the traveller
has their own for the same purpose. Fingers are still in frequent use. Spoons
maybe used for soups, gruels and such. There may be plates or trenchers off
which to eat. The inn provides alcohol, both wine and ale, and there will be
water.
The alternatives were to buy food in the markets and prepare
it yourself, or, if you were on good terms or could afford it, arrange for the
host to prepare it for you, or to eat from a roadside stall or kitchen, like
the still popular Indian dhabas, and
to make your bed at an inn or other lodging house, or indeed your tent.
Rail travel freed the traveller from the inn. Now the
traveller could have a snack or drink or a meal seated at a table or counter in
a station cafe/restaurant as trains changed drivers, offloaded cargo, took on
coal or water or were otherwise attended to and need never venture into the
town or village during their journey. Table and counter would now be replete
with crockery and cutlery across the range appropriate for different kinds of
food and drink. But travel was now faster and the emphasis was shifting to
getting from one place to another as quickly as possible. Schedules became more
demanding so there was less time for the meal and the meal correspondingly
became less elaborate. The traveller didn’t even have to leave their carriage
to feed: they could buy light refreshments from sellers who travelled on the
trains from station to station and back again constantly replenishing their
supplies, or who sold their wares from the platform directly to the carriage
window, the food packaged in a range of paper and cardboard products and eaten
with the fingers; on some journeys they could even enjoy a meal in the dining
car of the train itself, sitting in booths, using cutlery and crockery . Food
at the cafe/restaurant would perhaps now be more a mix of the locally sourced
and the imported, particularly as more processed foods came on the market that
made cooking simpler and quicker. At the same time, railway hotels became a
feature of major commercial or tourist centres providing accommodation and
board either overnight or for short stays and offered full board for guests.
This gradual growth of options for provisioning the
traveller got its major boost, however, with the automobile. Jakle and Sculle have
detailed the changes in the built form, proprietorship, food and drink in the
USA in
Fast Food. Roadside Restaurants in
the Automobile Age.[viii] At
first the automobile traveller turned to the railroad hotels for both overnight
accommodation and food. But soon, investor syndicates began to develop better
quality hotels with garages on site or nearby, the beginning of the motel.
These places often provided food through both
a formal dining/room restaurant and a more informal cafe, reflecting the dining
forms emerging generally
for residents
in cities and larger towns.
One of these forms was that uniquely American creation, the
diner. This was the invention of Patrick Tierny, a New Yorker, who in the late
1020’s wanted to upgrade the then popular lunch wagons into something more like
a rail dining car. By the 1930’s diners had moved out of the cities and onto
the highways traversing the USA.
[ix] The diner particular suits those wanting food
prepared and consumed quickly. The traveller can now also buy food in containers
and take it away to consumer while travelling or at a later stop on the road.
More people were travelling longer distances and as with
coach horses and trains before them, automobiles needed refuelling. The highway
petrol station emerged to fill the need and inevitably it took on the role of
provisioning the traveller too, the typical form here being the roadhouse. Here
also food is expected to be prepared quickly and eaten quickly. Depending on
the liquor laws there may or may not be a bar.
Food in these emerging roadside eateries becomes less and
less locally sourced and fresh and more processed, frozen, canned, intended for
longer shelf life and ease of portability from source to outlet. Franchises/chains
enter the picture, assuring the traveller of that they can get the same food
and the same standard of service anywhere along the road. Standardisation is
the norm. Here too an increasing proportion of the food is intended for eating
while travelling, packaged in single serves that can be eaten with the fingers
and hands. Much of this food is now self-service: the traveller gets the
packaged product themselves from a shelf or refrigerator and pays for it at the
counter or they may use an automatic dispenser where they put money in a slot
to free up food held in some kind of compartment. Sometimes they warm the food
themselves in microwave ovens located next to the food.
And where one provider goes, others invariably follow till
now the motorways, freeways and autobahns of the world host the new stage
posts, the off-road petrol station with its cluster of franchise food outlets.
An idiosyncratic
world survey
Most of the ways of provisioning for the road that have
developed over time remain options for travellers across the world with
differences reflecting the forms of travel, the distances travelled, the
purposes of travel, and the formal and informal markets that provide food and
drink.
The exception is the kind of private hospitality that
provided the bridge between self-reliance and the emergence of inns. Travellers
may still experience private hospitality, but it is most likely to be through
invitation from someone they meet during their travel and not as an expected
social obligation.
So, let’s go travelling and see what we find.
In China's far west, along the Silk Road, there are oasis
bazaars with stalls that sell mutton kebabs, hand-made noodles, yoghurt,
dried fruits, nuts and melons, round flat oven baked bread. In Kasghar the
local specialty is dàpánji, a big plate of chicken. Petrol stations just sell
petrol but they are shouldered by small eateries. There is still no franchisee
push into the area but it may not be long in coming.
In Peninsular Malaysia there are highway rest stops with petrol,
toilets and a cluster of stalls that emulate a traditional hawker market or
food court. These sell normal rice, noodles and curries. There are some franchises
also - KFC and Macdonalds. In Sabah or Sarawak there are no highways and petrol
stations are located in the towns en route. Travellers refuelling can eat and
drink at nearby coffee shops or restaurants.
In
Italy, along the autostrada, travellers can stop at the Autogrill Pavesi, many on
a bridge over the roadway so they can be accessed from both directions. Here
the traveller will find toasted sandwiches alongside regional specialities they
can buy for picnics, as souvenirs or presents. Being Italian the coffee will
always be good. On secondary roads the traveller can plan their journey around
stops in towns and villages and eat at a local trattoria or cafe.
Food along French highways is similar: sandwiches and coffee
at a petrol station or a meal in a restaurant at bigger rest stops, mostly self
service hot meals, like chicken, beef, fish, pasta, vegetables and desserts and alcohol, small bottles of
wine and also beer. In some regions our traveller can again pick up some
regional specialities. The Bresse region is famous for its poulet de Bresse which
is available in roadside restaurants.
Spain has its truckstop roadhouses where jamon hangs at the
counter and is sliced on demand for a bocadillo (sandwich). North of Zaragoza turron
(Spanish nougat) is a popular purchase at truckstops.
In Papua New Guinea highway stops combine markets where
stall holders sell fresh vegetables,
fruit, fish and also packets of sago and taro cooked in banana leaves, stalls
that sell snack food and drinks, and other stalls that grill lamb flaps,
saveloys, corn or sweet potato.
In Australia the freeways are dotted with rest stops
combining petrol stations and clusters of mostly franchisee fast food outlets.
Elsewhere, petrol stations sell snack and fast food, towns are close enough for
a traveller to move between and stop at a cafe or restaurant. Roadside stalls
are few, victim of ever more stringent hygiene laws. Farm gate selling is booming as travellers
look for locally sourced products that also cut out the wholesaler and
retailer.
Postprandial
Now over to you to fill out the history and survey and keep
the exploration going of this neglected topic. There are roads to travel and
stops to make for feeding and watering and foodways to preserve.
[i] J.A Jakle K.A Sculle, Fast Food. Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. The John
Hopkins University Press. Baltimore. 1999
[ii]
C.G.
& B.Z. Seligmann, The Veddas Elibron Classics 2007, first published 1911; R.L. Spittel,
R.L. Vanished Trails. Oxford
University Press, London, 1950
[iii]
Martin Jones, Feast. Why Humans Share Food, Oxford Uni Press, Oxford, 2007
pp137-139
[iv]
Hans Conrad Peyer, The Origins of Public Hostelries in Europe, in Jean-Louis
Flandrin & Massimo Montanari (Eds)
Food.
A Culinary History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999 p288
[v]
A
Dalby & S Grainger, The Classical Cookbook, The British Museum Press. London, 1996, p65
[vii]
Stephen Mennell. All Manners of Food. Eating and Taste in England and France from the
Middles Ages to the Present. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and
Chicago, 1996 pp136-137
[viii] J.A Jakle K.A Sculle, Fast Food. Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. The John
Hopkins University Press. Baltimore. 1999
[ix]
Jakle and Sculle p36
