It was a nice little dinner ...being entirely furnished forth from the coffee-house
(Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)
Until I visited Pompeii - during a holiday on the Amalfi coast a few years ago - I had always assumed take-aways were a recent invention. But in the ancient Italian city devastated by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD the streets were lined with thermopolia, service counters opening onto the street where people could buy food to take away. There were more than 200 of these in Pompeii, and the remains of houses show few traces of kitchen and dining areas, suggesting that cooking at home was unusual.
