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Roma- Ostia's kitchen

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Ostia’s kitchens
Kitchens were found also at Ostia, but what we find there is quite different from what we have seen at Pompeii and Herculaneus. For instance in the Campanian towns nearly each house had a kitchen where food was cooked either on high cooking masonry banks or at least prepared on a low earth, but we never locate them in inns or pubs, while in Ostia we never see cooking banks in private house while we find them in every pub and inn. How come?
The solution of the problem was not so easy to find. It took an accurate research in the sources, but at last we found that this facrt was due to a series of edicts that limited the activities of this kind of shops. It began with Tiberius who banned the sales of certain cooked dishes, and the edicts became more and more strict until, at the end ,the only things that pubs and inns could do were to sell wine and rent rooms. At the base of those laws stood the fact that emperors for fear of disorders or revolt didn’t want to encourage the agglomeration of many loafers and rebellious young men around a table. The penalties must have been very high including heavy fines and prisons terms if, for fear of them, all the innkeepers decided to abolish any reason of contendere and destroyed their kitchens, a fact that is very evident in all those large private house that prior of those facts had been bought and transformed in establishments that furnished meals to their customers. We still are able to find the room where once the cooking bank was set, but now it was not there.
Thus the mystery of the lack of cooking banks in the Pompeian inns was solved.
It was now necessary to explain why in the Ostienses inns we always found the masonry cooking banks: this was easily explained because at Diocletian times the ban to sell cooked food was lifted and inns became very popular restaurants. But why none masonry cooking range exists in its private house, and what is more - apart of some very rare exception that could be found all in Campania - none were found in the Latium or in all the rest of the Empire. And yet also there people must have dined.
It was not easy to find an answer to this simple question. We succeeded. only when we decided to see if in some parts or in some rooms of the Ostienses abodes we could recognize any particularity we had already noticed in the Pompeian kitchens. In Pompeii inding kitchens with their huge masonry banks had been quite easy. Luckily we didn’t stop our research to that and, we studied all the distinctive characters that made possible to recognize kitchen quarters also when there were no more masonry banks. To conclude we established a typology. It was through those findings that we succeeded in locating the Ostienses private kitchens.
Of course, as we soon found out during the research, not all the peculiar characteristics of the Pompeian kitchens were present at Ostia. For instance one of the more evident that allowed us to identify the Pompeian ones also when they were in very bad conditions and also when the cooking banks had been destroyed was the presence of a lararium on the walls in what were clearly the servants quarters. As this shrine was always near the earth, the cooking bank coud not be very far.
At Ostia we tried to use this mean of identification, but here there were no lararia. Maybe in the periods following the first century A.D. – Ostia’s more splendid period – these gods’s cult was less felt, or maybe the “lararia” had been modified becoming mobile ones and now these were there no more, either because transported by the citizens when they abandoned the town, or even –a more probable hypothesis – when after the population’s conversion to Chrystianity they were destroyed in a religious frenzy. Whatever was the reason we couldn’t find them.
Other elements that characterized kitchen and servants’s quarters were of no great utility because they could only be applied to a very limited number of cases. For instance the exam of the Pompeian servants’s quarters proved that, when in the houses there were private baths, kitchens were built aside them, but this criterion could be only employed to the most wealthy residences and, it was easy to understand, that they were very few. Luckily some other particular characters had been observed in the Campanian kitchens and the same were found in Latium..
For instance the study of the Pompeian servants’s quarters was fundamental for the research. Examining the arrangement of the most complex among them it was observed that they distinguished tehmselves by the passages leading to their rooms. In the sector of the wealthy houses where lived the owners their quarter was based disposing the rooms around the atrium or peristylia. In the servants’s quarters passages were arranged either around rough courtyard without porches or by long corridors. Another very important characteristic of the kitchens and even more of the servant’s quarters was to have a direct access from the street, more or less as what happens even to day with the servants’s door.
But the most important characteristic was to observe that the ancient kitchens were always strictly connected with the “latrinae” and that, in many cases, these were adjacent to the cooking banks
Basing ourselves on these elements we succeeded in individuating some parts of Ostia’s or Rome’s private houses that answered to these conditions and then had to be the areas where the kitchens were placed. In some cases as in Ostia’s “Casette Tipo”, it was the evident that the roominess of the “latrinae” was excessive and was not suitable for the purpose. Contemporarily their direct access to the street, confirmed that those rooms had been the hadrianic “Casette Tipo’s” kitchens.
Not far away from these buildings, in the area called the “Case Giardino” - a kind of condominium built in hadrianic times - there was the “Casa delle Ierodule” that had a kitchen near the entrance. Not only in this room there was a wash basin but the floor in one of the corners appeared more light just as if it had been limed and there was no doubt that this was the place where once the kitchen range stood. Only the strong heat of the fire could do this to the flooring.
In the more drab parts of other houses we also observed long corridors very similar to the ones used in the Campanian servants’s quarters. Through them we reached bare courtyards with non signs of decoration: it was clear that once here had been placed the rooms where the meals were prepared. Little by little we were able to locate the remains of many of the kitchens of ancient Latium and it was also possible to find the servants’s quarters of the great imperial palaces.
Of course for the study of the imperial palaces there we had to keep in mind that we were studying extremely complex buildings. However we succeeded in doing it and located the servants area as the one where from one part concurred all the people lodged in the big slaves’ dormitories, and from the other side there was the every day arrival of all the fresh provisions necessary to the life of such a palace.
Now rested to solve the problem of why in any private houses there never was any of those masonry banks we always found in the Campanian kitchens. At the end we were obliged to accept that out of Campania the masonry cooking range either had never been in use or in the centuries after the I cent. A.D. had been abandoned and substituted with others appliances deemed to be more functional. If in the Ostian inns like the “Caupona del Pavone”, or the “Case Dipinte” hotel there still existed masonry cooking ranges and their cooks went on broiling food on the embers could only be explained as that those systems constituted an appeal for the clients. As a matter of fact it was well known that the Campanian cooking was much better than the Roman one, and I am pretty sure that both the cooks of the “Caupona del Pavone”, and the “Case Dipinte” were always boasting to be just out of Naples or Pozzuoli and that they cooked everything in the old-fashioned way just as it was done in Pompeii.
However we still wanted to know what was the kind of cooking range hat existed in Latium. For the moment we only knew that it was not an embers one and that maybe in Latium cooking on embers had never have been very popular. Already in the I cent. B.C.. many latin authors describe flames emerging from their cooking range. Horace for instance talks about his roof blackened by soot, while Seneca describe the cooks who in the sooty imperial kitchens moved against a flaming background. Soot everywhere, then, wherever food was cooked in Latium, . while in the Pompeian kitchens there was not such a thing. Here as a matter of fact frescoes were painted on the plasters set over the masonry cooking ranges, but, as embers did not produce smoke, stood always fresh and brilliant with their gay colours, just as they were painted.
We then are able to declare that the Roman cooking ranges worked with a wood fire. Now what still remained to understood what was that kind of appliance that has disappeared without leaving traces. The only explanation that was possible to accept was that they were metallic ones and that we never found them in the excavations because, as all metallic common use objects done with iron or pig-iron, materials highly perishable, were remelted and reused.
The representation of one of these kitchens was at last found on the cover of a II cent. A.D. sarcophage. In it we see a kind of cooking range that did not work by embers like the campanian ones but by fire. In the basrelief a young slave. kneeled in front of it, is feeding the flame that gush under a pan with a piece of wood. The shape of this cooking range and the cut that sharply divide it from the wall prove that it could never have been a masonry cooking range and that it was a metallic one.

Bibliography
Scietific popularization

- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Cibi, cucine e triclini in L'alimentazione nel mondo antico. I Romani: etá imperiale, Rome 1987. pp. 70-140

Academic Papers

- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Cucine e quartieri servili in epoca romana in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia,Vol. LI-LII, (1978-79, 1979-1980), pp. 237-294,
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Cibi, cucina e banchetti in Vita quotidiana nell’Italia Antica: vita in famiglia. Verona, 1993. Arnaldo Mondadori publisher, pp 111-144.