KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

consumption of meals in Pompeii and the Roman world acted as a social barometer. Larger
households had larger, better decorated, and more numerous dining areas, and a larger cooking
capacity, than smaller households. This was not only because larger households had more
mouths to feed, but also because their meals were social occasions to which guests were invited,
and at which status was evaluated. Owners of larger households, generally wealthier and more
involved in the civic life of the community, cultivated social ties over dinner. The number and
size of dining areas, the expense given over to their elaboration, the physical distance between
dining and cooking areas, and the social distance between free and slave household members, all
decreased toward the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. In the smallest shops, eating
and cooking were done informally in the same space, with no contingency for mealtime social
interaction with outside guests -- company was enjoyed at neighborhood meeting places, over
the snacks and drinks of lunch counters and diners. Within the household, cooking and eating
the evening dinner segregated its members -- slaves cooked and, in a separate area of the house,
family and guests dined. The act of the slaves serving the food connected those two groups and
yet reinforced their separation. Socially proximate individuals tended to eat together, in
environments that befit their status. The domestic activities of household slaves are particularly
invisible in the literary sources, and have also been invisible in "modern publications, which
rarely give more than passing notice to these relatively drab areas." 15 I have begun to remedy
the general omission by describing in detail areas of the house where slaves worked, and where
outside guests did not go.
To begin my study, chapter one provides a thematically-arranged background of cooking
and eating customs for the archaeological evidence. The purpose of this background is twofold.
First, it forms a cultural and historical context for the archaeological evidence -- Pompeians built
their kitchens and dining areas not within a vacuum, but within a socio-cultural system that set
boundaries and norms for their construction and arrangement. Literary evidence for those
boundaries and norms may be anecdotal, but they still provide (largely) contemporary attitudes
and opinions about why Romans cooked and ate the way they did. Secondly, this chapter offers
a brief synthetic summary of modern scholarship about Roman cooking and eating practices.
Socio-cultural issues central to the interpretation of the archaeological data are introduced, in the
form of five basic questions: What is cooked and eaten? How is cooking and eating done? When
is cooking and eating done? Where is cooking and eating done? Who cooks, serves and eats, and
with whom?
15 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 44.
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