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

The cooks in turn delay dinner by upsetting pots and pouring water on the fire; the resulting
risible racket may have been audible offstage during the performance. 174 In the Pseudolus, the
master tells his cook to "shut up, you talk too much"; his exact words (nimium iam tinnis) evoke
the clatter and clang of cooking pots. 175
The range of smell is sufficiently short to differentiate dining rooms on the basis of
whether the cooking meal could be smelled. I measure the shortest distance (whether through
windows, doors, or across courts) from the stove or hearth to the center of a dining room. Odors
(good and bad) of cooking had emotive properties. A favorable cooking smell possessed the
power of enslaving clients to their patrons, according to Juvenal: "You think yourself a free man,
and guest of a grandee; he thinks -- and he is not far wrong -- that you have been captured by the
savoury odours of his kitchen." 176 Bad smells are also associated with kitchens and their slaves.
Seneca for instance complains of the rank pollution from the city's collective kitchens. 177
Petronius compares professors to cooks when he says: "People who are fed on this diet [of
schooling] can no more be sensible than people who live in the kitchen can smell good." 178
Amenities
The placement of kitchens and dining areas depends to some degree on the availability of
amenities such as a water-source, drainage, heat, light, ventilation, storage and proximity to
latrines and baths (which require similar utilities). For dining rooms, environmental amenities
were primarily conveniences to make dining more pleasant and comfortable: light, heat in
winter, a kind breeze, a view. Wall, floor and ceiling decoration presented additional social,
cultural and artistic messages. In kitchens, amenities of a more practical nature supported the
174 Gowers 1993, 90-91, referring to Pl. Cas. 759-779 which include the lines: "the old man is shouting in the
kitchen, urging on the cooks"; senex in culina clamat, hortatur coquos, and "In order that the old man not dine,
the cooks overturn the cook-pots, they quench the fire with water"; ne cenet senex, aulas pervortunt, ignem
restinguont aqua (OCT text, author's translation).
175 Pl. Ps. 889-892; see above, p. 29, n. 121. See also Juv. 6.438-442 below, p. 49, n. 227.
176 Juv. 5.161-162: Tu tibi liber homo et regis conviva videris: captum te nidore suae putat ille culinae. Earlier, Juv.
5.149-150 makes the smell stand for the whole meal: "To himself and the rest of the Virros he [the patron]
will order fruits to be served whose scent alone would be a feast"; Virro sibi et reliquis Virronibus illa iubebit
poma dari, quorum solo pascaris odore (Loeb texts and translations). Gowers 1993, 216 rightly notes that the
miserable client can only feed off smells from his patron's dinner. Similarly, Mart. 7.27 wishes his
household gods to grow fat off the smells of a mythical boar he has killed, but he cannot afford the spices to
cook the beast. Ironically, he must not eat the boar, lest he starve afterwards. The fact that the gods can feed
from the smells of sacrifice and man cannot makes the lot of the client in Juvenal's poem seem all the more
pitiable.
177 Sen. Ep. 104.6 (see chapter two, p. 77, n. 101 for the text). Col. 1.6.11 also remarks generally upon the bad
smells that habitually eminate from baths, ovens, and manure piles.
178 Petr. 2: Qui inter haec nutriuntur, non magis sapere possunt, quam bene olere, qui in culina habitant (Loeb text
and translation). A slave at the start of the Mostellaria calls another slave, hiding in the kitchen, a "stinker"
(nidor). See Gowers 1993, 231-241, 290-291 for smells as symbols at meals.
42