AromaCookery: Hawker History

This article, published in The Straits Times on 4 December 2004, provides an interesting insight on street hawkers of yesteryear and the eventual inception of hawker centres.

Picture: Hawkers like this one in Tiong Bahru were a common sight in the 1950s and 1960s.

BEFORE air-conditioned foodcourts, Singaporeans ate in a more humble setting - by the roadside.

In the 1950s and 1960s, street hawkers were a common sight. They sold a huge variety of food from pushcarts, tricycles, from rattan baskets balanced on the ends of a bamboo pole and from stationary stalls.

They announced their presence by tooting a horn, banging bits of bamboo or wood together, or simply shouting.

Each regular hawker could be identified by the particular sound he made. So much so that if one heard the toot of a horn passing one's house, one knew at once it was the fellow selling mangkok kueh (a small fluffy steamed cake-cum-bun). And that tick-tock sound was the Hokkien noodles seller.

Then, kueh kueh (cakes) and otak otak (grilled fishcake) sold for 10 cents each, and a paper cone of kacang putih (sugared peanuts, but usually a variety of local nuts) was 5 cents.

Patrons of itinerant hawkers had to squat by the roadside or perch on a bangku (wooden seat) provided by the seller. Dishes such as noodles were eaten with the bowl cupped in one hand and chopsticks in the other, or taken home.

However, stallholders who based themselves in a specific spot provided rickety wooden tables and chairs, usually right next to a drain, so traffic along the road would not be held up.

According to a 1968 survey, there were about 18,000 itinerant and fixed street hawkers, 12,000 of them in Chinatown alone.

The kind of set-up these people ran was not the most hygienic. The bowl for your noodles could be, and often was, washed in the same basin where many others had been rinsed, because the source of fresh water was some way away.

To clean things up, the Environment Ministry began to re-site hawkers in covered centres with proper facilities in 1970. By 1986, all of them had been taken off the streets.