There are some homemade treats I enjoyed as a child. One is what some people may call a "peanut brittle". Pretty much you get brown sugar, peanuts and a few other things (grated ginger, for example)...throw it all in a pot so the sugar melts and gets everything sticky. You pour out the mixture on thin bits of parchment or cookie paper in evenly spaced blobs and let them cool. They ended up in circular style shapes, like cookies sort of.
As a kid on a Friday night we would sit on the porch, especially on the summers. Every Friday night at a certain time, you'd hear the whistle coming up the street and well knew what it was. There was a young guy in the neighborhood who would push a homemade cart with a small, slow burning wood fire box at the end. What he would do is go up and down every street... selling peanut based treats. You could get roasted peanuts still in the shells that he was roasting in the firebox. Those were warm, unsalted and smoky in flavor. The problem is, you'd have to shell them yourself. And hanging from the side of the cart was this hung ring of the individually wrapped peanut brittle in clear plastic bags.
So you'd stop the cart as he is going by...he'd never pull up to you front of your gate as a safety issue for him. If cars were passing he'd pull over into the other shoulder. Remember, this is traveling Street vendor with money on him - safety first. If you don't want any, you let him go by. He wasn't the only person who did this. Eventually, he added the coconut version to these where you'd grate the coconut into bite sized chunks and swap the peanuts out instead.
Anyone who really knows anything about shrimp knows you can both freshwater and saltwater shrimp. Freshwater shrimp are slightly different. We used to eat these too from small clear plastic bags. These were cured, then heavily coated with peppers and spices. You eat these whole - head and all. Best ones to eat where the pregnant female shrimp too. Yup, a traveling street vendor was how I would eat these, outside of road trips to near where the shrimp farms are.
Also, we had an ice cream man do this too, riding through with two large buckets of ice cream (surrounded by dry ice to keep the cream cold especially on blistering tropcial Sunday afternoons) on a bicycle. Same rules applied. We were working folk and never kept ice cream in the house growing up. I'd have ice cream either like this or when I went to mall. Mostly as a kid, this was how I ate ice cream...one a cone from a traveling weekend street vendor.
We got to knew our street vendors like this so even though there were quite a few traveling ones, we always bought stuff from the same guys. The young guy and his brother sold the coconut and roasted peanuts - Friday evenings. A middle aged man sold the ice cream - Saturday evenings, but mostly Sunday afternoons. And an wiry old man with a white beard on a Honda 50 bike sold the shrimp - Sunday afternoons.
So you saved your lunch money during the week and got the OK from parents to stop the street vendor when he we riding by at his scheduled time and got your favorite treat.
Good times...
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