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

Culina
In an architectural sense, culina can be defined as the kitchen, a specific room or area of
the house where cooking was meant to be carried out on a regular basis. A Roman kitchen could
have contained any of the stoves, hearths, ovens and baking covers listed above. Kitchens
usually appear as a separate room only in houses large enough to be subdivided into
functionally-defined spaces (see chapter one above, pp. 38-39). 62 In smaller homes, general-
purpose living areas included cooking amongst their other activities. Literary evidence for the
location of cooking areas is scarce and often fragmentary. The sources describe traditions of all
periods, and it is clear that no single location in the house was customary or even proper for a
hearth or a kitchen. The locations in the Roman house where written sources do mention cooking
(whether at a focus or in a culina) fall into four basic categories: 1) the entrance or threshold to the
house from the street (the vestibulum or limen), 2) the court of the atrium, 3) the back part of the
house (posticum) next to the latrine, storage and stable areas, 4) inside a dining room.
In vestibulo Ovid states that the hearth (the location where meals were eaten) was once
in the front part (in primis aedibus) of the house:
Formerly it [the hearth] stood in the first room of the house. Hence too, I am of
the opinion that the vestibule took its name; it is from there that in praying we
begin by addressing Vesta, who occupies the first place: it used to be the custom
of old to sit on long benches in front of the hearth and to suppose that the gods
were present at table. 63
In the architecture of Roman atrium-houses, the vestibulum generally means the space directly in
front of the actual threshold of the house, sometimes sheltered by a porch or provided with
masonry benches for those waiting to be invited inside the house. 64 We cannot assume that
62 For the Mediterranean in general, Scheffer 1981, 94 claims: "Before this time [5th-4th centuries B.C.], it
cannot have been at all usual to adapt a specific room in the house as the kitchen". Salza Prina Ricotti
1978/80, 247-248 posits a second century B.C. date for the appearance of the Roman kitchen. This date may
be pushed back to perhaps the turn of the third century on the evidence of the word culina appearing in the
Plautine plays Cas. 764, Mos. 1, Per. 631 and Truc. 615, in which the word has a clear sense of its own defined
space within a house. It is possible, of course, that those mentions of kitchens were simply translations from
the original Greek versions of the plays. Fixed kitchens were a feature of some houses in Classical and
Hellenistic cities such as Olynthus, Halieis, Eretria and Morgantina, although fixed hearths are not
necessarily present in those kitchens. Most Greek cooking appears to have been done with portable braziers
and cooking stands (Sparkes 1962; Scheffer 1981, 92-96; Robinson & Graham 1938, 185-197; Ault 1993, 10-11;
Ducrey 1991, 27; Tsakirgis 1984, 385-386).
63 Ov. Fast. 6.302-306: ...qui tamen in primis aedibus ante fuit. Hinc quoque vestibulum dici reor, inde precando
praefamur Vestam, quae loca prima tenet. Ante focos olim scamnis considere longis mos erat et mensae credere adesse
deos (Tuebner text, Loeb translation).
64 Masonry benches flanking the entrances of houses are present in the following examples from the
archaeological sample: I.6.15, I.7.10-12, I.8.17+11, I.10.4, I.10.7, I.10.8, I.10.11, I.10.18. See Förtsch 1993, 127-
134; Allison 1992b, 41; Adam1984, 318-321; McKay 1975, 271. Serv. A. 2.469 defines the vestibulum as the first
part of the door (prima ianuae pars), and offers two etymologies: 1) the vestibule "clothes" (vestiat) the door
with its two supporting columns (for the porch), or 2) the vestibule is sacred to Vesta (goddess of the hearth)
and that is why married girls cannot touch the threshold upon entering the house.
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