Home -> Articoli -> Roma - Alimentazione e banchetti

Pompeian kitchens

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

POMPEIAN KITCHEN
The rising sun shone on the towns grouped at the Vesuvius’ feet and their kitchens were already engaged in the preparation of the dinner. In the meantime their citizens went around, each one busy with his own trade, but it was August, the fateful 24 of August of the 79 A.D. The Vulcan exploded. Today we still see the kitchens just as they were left by the fleeing Pompeians; there had been no time to save anything and in such a moment nobody could worry about pots and pans.
Kitchens then, lots of them (fig.1). Some were set in very small rooms and here nearly all the space was occupied by the masonry bank where Pompeians cooked their food. Others, instead, the wealthy ones were set in the part of the house destined to the servants with slaves quarters, courtyards, store rooms and so on. In this last case the cooking bank could stay either in a courtyard, (Villa of the Misteries) (fig 2) or in a big room (Centenarius’ domus) and around the place were long masonry blocks which were used as tables for preparing the foods and also, immediately after, for elegantly arranging the dishes on the trays that would be brought to the “mensa”. However little or big as the kitchens could be, in them always reigned the Lares.
It had not been always so. Once upon a time, when the atrium was still the principal part of the essentially simple Roman house, those domestic divinities, connected with the fire’s cult, were set at the atrium’s entrance. In those times this was the place where all the family life unwound. Here the young couples were married; here, when a baby was born, it was laid on the ground in front of his father feet so that the “pater familias” could lift the newborn in his arms and recognize him as his son; here, at their death, the members of the family were exposed for the wake, and, above all, this was the place where the family cooked and ate its meals.
However when the wealthy Roman houses were enlarged and the servants quarters were created, it was in them that the kitchen was placed. Then here was transported also the holy fire, the one always kept ablaze, and from which, everyday, the flame to start the kitchen was taken. It was then that also the Lares moved in and, also if, some time, in observance of the old tradition, a beautiful “Lararius” was left in the atrium, this was only one of the many little shrines set around the house . The real “lararius” was the one of them that stood in the kitchen. Small and unadorned as it could be, it was the more genuine one, and on all the cooking banks it always stood either in a little niche caved over the cooking surface or even painted on the wall over it.
Those cooking banks, protected by the Lares, were masonry ones and each day on them a bed of embers was prepared. We find them in nearly all the houses and, very often, to prevent the ashes from falling on the ground their level surface reveted by tiles was limited by a long line of “coppi” (hollow tiles with a semicircular section). Of course the banks could be small or large. Large and high they were in the wealthy mansions, while in the Pompeian poor houses, very similar to the modern Neapolitan “bassi” (basso = one room dwellings set at the street level or even under it) they were just a square and low masonry blocks, only seven inches high over the ground, very similar to the ones made with rough stones, and hardened earth in front of which the women of the ancient times’s peasants crouched to prepare their men’s dinner.
Pompeian kitchens were very practical and well organized and in them everything was always within reach: for instance the wood necessary to create the embers’ bed was kept in a series of arches existing just under the banc surface and, in some cases, as in the house of Fabius Rufus wood was still found stored there. Also all the pans with their concave bottom that could be firmly fixed on the embers were set on shelves fixed around the room. Then, later on, when the dinner was cooked and finished and when everything had been washed and dried, all the vessels were put aside. The point was that if they had to be set each one by itself there could never have been enough space. Thus they were made in such a way that they could fit one in the others until all of them were reduced to one large container, that would occupy only one place.
Another of the practical side of the Pompeian’s cooking bank was the fact that all their surface was utilizable. On them one could dispose a great number of pans, grills, sauce pans and so on and this was very important because at those times’ dinners were composed by many different dishes. Moreover there was the possibility to divide the surface of the cooking bank in differently heated zone. A part of it was kept leaving the embers uncovered and thus a very hot, a place where to put grills and frying pans; the other, covered by thick layers of ashes, was used to cook on a slow fire and there were done all those dishes as polentas, soups or stews that contained flour in their sauces, and therefore risked to stick to the pans.
Some time there was also the need to keep something warm, then the cooking pan was set on a stand and many of them were found in the Pompeian kitchens. In the wealthy ones those stands were metallic and mobile. In the more modest kitchens they consisted of bricks cemented on one side of the cooking bank in the shape of a C or an E. Always on stands was kept a cauldron full of boiling water to use either for cooking or, after dinner, for dish-washing.
Very often the slaves that were charged to clean the vessels used to do it in wooden or ceramic pails, but in some kitchen we even find masonry wash-basins: some of them high as the modern ones but more large than these; some other low on the ground. All of them had at their bottom an opening that, stopped during the dish-washing, was afterward opened. Water felt out on the kitchen floor but as this was slanted towards the street, it got out from a hole cut in the wall of the house and flowed out in the street.
Of course for cleaning the vessels servants usually used the cauldron’s hot water, but in many wealthy houses that, built just aside the kitchens, had private “termae”, with metallic boilers, dishwashing was done using their hot water. In some kitchens, as the ones of the Arianna’s house of Stabia and in the Labyrinth’s one of Pompeii, we still see the traces left by the pipes that from the boiler reached the faucet of the wash-basins.
However. before closing the argument, we must not forget another important fixture of the kitchens and a most used one. The oven. The more important kitchen had always an oven to roast meat, fowls and pies of which Romans were very fond; they were very large ovens where one could roast a whole boar, the animal that already in the I century B.C. seemed indispensable for every successful banquet. Often those oven were so large that to the boar one could add also many baking-pans and tins.
Some time, as in the Labyrinth’s House, or in the Centenario’s one and in the Mysteries ‘s Villa there was also a second and very large oven of the kind normally used to bake bread. This of course happened only in the houses that had a large domestic staff. Thus, as there lived many people that had to be feed, making bread was economically valid.
Normal people, instead bought their bread either on stands at the market place or in the bakeries, shops that were set all along the streets. Many of them were found at Pompeii. In all of them very large ovens for bread baking dominated the rooms that faced the streets with the large opening proper to all the town’s shops. Just in front of the oven there were mills made of the Vesuvius’s black lavic stone and nearby we often also see some huge “dolia” that contained the cereals to grind. Of course this was not all. In the bakeries there often was a hint of superstitious practice, and a request of help against evil eye. Thus, in a Herculaneus’s bakery, ovens and walls were well decorated with bas reliefs of excited male organs considered a powerful help to the yeast work and I am sure that this bakery had always splendid and well puffed loafs.


Bibliography

Scentific popularization
From a dossier by me on Archeo
- 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, cucine e triclini in L’alimentazione nel mondo antico. I Romani: età imperiale . Rome 1987, pp.70-140.
- 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.