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

or testum, see chapter one, p. 19-20). Eventually the development of built masonry structures
allowed more consistent temperatures and a greater volume of baked bread to be achieved:
At first bread was cooked by warm ashes and a hot tile; then ovens (furni) were
gradually developed along with other devices, whose heat could be subject to
regulation. 48
Ovid sets the evolution of baking technology in a ritual context connected to the celebration of
the Fornacalia, the Roman baking festival held in early February:
Taught by experience they (the ancients) toasted the spelt on the fire, and many
losses they incurred through their own fault. For at one time they would sweep
up the black ashes instead of spelt, and at another time the fire caught the huts
themselves. So they made the oven into a goddess of that name (Fornax);
delighted with her, the farmers prayed that she would temper the heat to the
corn committed to her charge. 49
Frayn claims the fornax was "the large oven used for baking the grain after it had been harvested,
to improve its keeping qualities and to dry it so that it was easier to grind", but this definition is
too narrow. 50 A drying oven was needed only in the case of husked varieties of wheat such as
triticum dicoccum and triticum spelta, and these products were generally not baked into bread, but
made into porridge. 51 It was naked wheat such as triticum vulgare and triticum durum that were
ground into fine flour and baked into breads. 52 Ovens were suitable for drying as well as
cooking foods; no simple dichotomy that assigns 'drying' to fornax and 'cooking' to furnus can be
supported. 53 By the first century A.D., furnus was the primary term for an oven and fornax was a
suitable synonym.
Other foods besides bread were cooked in a furnus; it is in fact the term most commonly
used for a heating appliance in the cookbook attributed to Apicius. Peas, sweet cakes, chicken,
various sorts of birds, sow's udder, kidneys, ham, boar, kid, lamb, piglet, hare and fish can all be
48 Sen. Ep. 90.23: ...panem, quem primo cinis calidus et fervens testa percoxit, deinde furni paulatim reperti et alia
genera quorum fervor serviret arbitrio (Loeb text, Cubberley et al. 1988 translation).
49 Ov. Fast. 2.521-526: Usibus admoniti flammis torrenda dederunt multaque peccato damna tulere suo. Nam modo
verrebant nigras pro farre favillas, nunc ipsas ignes corripuere casas; facta dea est Fornax: laeti Fornace coloni orant,
ut fruges temperet illa suas (Loeb text and translation). The jurist Labeo, as quoted in Fest. p. 253M, defines
the Fornacalia as a holiday universal to all Romans, and not attributable to certain important families. The
common need for bread by all citizens might have precluded the control of the festival by any single elite
group.
50 Frayn 1978, 30.
51Mayeske 1972, 31-33.
52Mayeske 1972, 34-42.
53Columella, in his discussion of preserving wine, uses the term furnus to describe the drying of herbs and
spices that will be used to flavor and preserve the wine (Col. 12.21.3, 12.28.1) and the term fornax to describe
the process of boiling down the must (Col. 12.19.3, 12.20.2).
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