Dear Diary:
Street food wasn’t always as exotic or varied as it is now.
“It’ll put you in the hospital,†mothers warned their kids back in 1942, when I was in junior high at Public School 40, on East 20th Street in Manhattan. Unfazed, many kids joyfully disregarded their mother’s finger-wagging and, at lunch on sunny spring days, ran to the street hot dog vendor.
Others chose the knish man, their only remaining option. He wheeled a waist-high silver cube that was actually a coal-fired warming oven. The show began when you handed him five cents for a knish. He opened a small door on the shiny cube and reached barehanded into its fiery innards to remove a warm, slightly misshapen, potato knish. He dropped it into a small brown paper bag, sprinkled it with exactly the right amount of salt and, for his coda, shook the bag with practiced vigor.
We’d eagerly snatch the grease-stained sack, push the knish up just enough to expose an edible morsel, bite into its zesty softness and repeat until it was consumed. Back then, that was al fresco dining at its finest.
Sadly, the itinerant knish man is now history. And so is his five-cent movable feast.
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