Food Shops

In most medieval towns and most Scarterran towns, similar businesses are usually clustered together and streets are usually named after the businesses on them. You might have a street of a blacksmith shopss or a street of carpenters. Food shops tend to be clustered together too.   With food shops clustered together, this means its fairly easy for locals or visitors to make a complete meal from multiple shops. A person can buy a complete and varied meal by hitting multiple shops, buying ale, meat, bread, and cooked vegetables from four different shops all near each other.   Even the largest Scarterran towns are unlikely to have two streets of blacksmiths or two streets of carpenters but they are going to have more than one "Eating street". While there are dozens of "Bakers Street" in England alone, Scarterran food street are a little more varied. Rather than all the bakers clustering together, bakeries are likely to pop near meat shops, ale shops, or soup dispenseries to make it easier for customers to build complete meals. Typically Scarterran "Eating Streets" are unofficially separated by social class with low income, middle income, and high income streets offering different quality levels of food from each other but with shops offering relative uniformity with their neighbors on the street.

Since most Scarterran food shops don't have tables or indoor seating, they have to take food with them. Disposable to-go containers are fairly modern concept, though bread trenchers and pie crusts, especially barely edible trenchers and pie crusts act as a loose equivalent to disposable to-go containers.   Most Scarterrans perusing food shops bring their own cups and bowls and carry their own knives and spoons. Most Scarterrans carry a knife just as useful tool and eat with the very same knives they carry as tools. Spoons are usually simple and crude compared to what we think of with modern spoons, carved from whatever wood is available. Metal spoons are mostly seen by the upper classes only and even then, metal spoons are generally left at home and not taken to food shops (wooden spoons are lighter and easier to carry and a new spoon can aways be made on the road pretty quickly).   In the real world, forks didn't really get used much in Europe until well in to the Renaisance era. Most Scarterrans do not eat with forks because forks are a fairly frivolous use of resources given that it takes labor and metal to make forks. Dwarves have metal tools in relative abundance, so they commonly eat with forks. Humans living in lands that border dwarf lands are likely to adopt the custom of using forks.

Since most Scarterrans prepare most of their everyday meals at home, if they are perusing food shops there is usually good reason.   In a lot of cases its is because craftsmen are too busy with their day jobs to take time to make their own meals or they work outside their home so they don't have a proper kitchen in their workshop. Even walking to the food shop streets and back can be a serious inconvenience. Delivery boys (or less commonly delivery girls) can help. Many delivery boys are the children or nieces and nephews of the owners of the food shops.   Craftsmen and other town locals can make arrangements with local youths to bring food to them at predetermined times. Delivery boys usually work for fairly small tips but even children are expected to bring money to their family to the best of their ability.