table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Superbowl Street Food

Quality football-grade eats, devised especially for this Sunday

(Jan. 29, 2009)  With our real national holiday approaching, let’s talk about food for a Superbowl party. Here’s an idea for a substantial meal you can set out and leave on the kitchen stove or table for people drifting in during commercials and at half-time. It’s kind of the same idea as wandering down a street, with vendors and stalls ready to serve tempting delicacies. A meal of street food.

“Street food” is not always actually purchased on the street, of course. It’s more a concept than a literal requirement. And with our obsession for culinary hygiene, the U.S. is a difficult country for street vendors and impromptu stalls, the romance and chaos of which inevitably suffers under rigid bureaucratic control. Still, Arcata’s Oyster Festival is proof it can be done.

GALLERY >

But we pale beside the cornucopia of street food around the world. Is it always sanitary? Um, frankly, almost never. Experienced world travelers say that the most dangerous thing you can consume is local water; second is uncooked vegetables that have been washed in that water. Yet street food has flourished, brimming over with in variety and taste.

The world capital of street food is said to be Singapore, to which have drifted the specialties of Thailand, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and China. The civic authorities, recognizing that they couldn’t simply ban vendors, instead built vast public arenas, where they can create their delicacies under perfect sanitary conditions. Calvin Trillin, writing in The New Yorker, says, “It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant.”

At home, some of the best street food I’ve eaten has been at lunch stands, tiny stand-up storefronts or bars. Or pool halls: at the Dante Billiard Parlor in North Beach, I had a warm Gorgonzola and red onion sandwich on oven-fresh sourdough. Then there was the char-grilled carne asada taco at a Nogales bar, sausage-and-pepper loaf in Manhattan’s Little Italy and, my ultimate decadence, paper-thin, blood-rare roast beef from Carnegie Deli, piled high on a Kaiser roll, slathered with Russian dressing.

Oops. Actually, that sandwich isn’t really street food — it demands a table, or a place to put the other half, not to mention the garlic kosher dill pickle slice. And too many books titled “Street Food” are simply excuses for exotic recipes. One book includes a Guatemalan tamal described in such terms, even though it is a plateful of food tied up and steamed in banana leaves, and another offers biryani, a lavish preparation of rice mixed with rich curry, often gilded (that’s right, coated with a paper-thin layer of gold leaf!), usually part of an Indian wedding feast. Not street food.

I guess I should come up with some definitive definition, so here goes. “Street food” is walking food (not car food, a whole different thing). It’s something you can: One, eat standing up; two, eat without utensils, condiments, anything but a cheap paper napkin, and/or; three, take with you. Perfect for that Superbowl party.

The U.S. has become truly lame in this aspect of our culinary culture: It’s ironic that “fast food” is part of our history; it was not the invention of McDonald’s or Colonel Sanders. All they did was to perfect mass-production and mass-marketing, serving stuff so cheap that small burger stands, chili joints, barbecues and chicken shacks couldn’t compete (quality be damned).

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