Pompeii's Missing Kitchens
Where did the people of Pompeii go to eat? I'm not talking about the rich in their huge villas with large kitchens and larger dining rooms, but about the thousands of poor people whose cramped dwellings show no sign of cooking facilities. Some have suggested that these made up 90-95% of the city's population of 12-15,000.
Dr Steven Ellis of the University of Sydney has come up with a novel approach to the problem. He recently counted the number of pubs in Pompeii - surely one of the driest pub crawls in history, not a single one of the 158 pubs he visited had any beer! They did, however, have evidence of where the beer used to be, in the form of counters, stacks of broken amphorae, and so on.
Dr Ellis was even able to use pictures from grave reliefs, showing the dead person at his place of work, to identify what ancient pubs looked like. What is interesting is that in the course of his research he found that virtually all of these drinking dens sold staple foods like soup or stew, legumes, dates and dry food like bread or biscuits.
In view of the fact that some of the more prominent pubs are adorned with graffiti indicating clearly that food and drink were not the only things on sale in these establishments, some have suggested that Pompeii's pubs were thinly disguised brothels, but Dr Ellis claims that his research proves that in fact the pubs were far more respectable and provided cheap eating houses and places for socialising.
Ingenious though his research is, I gravely doubt his conclusions. Certainly Pompeii's pubs may have been more convivial and less seedy than heretofore thought, but his figures indicate that every pub had an average daily clientele of 100, all wanting breakfast, dinner and tea at the same time. This seems improbable, but even more improbable is the thought that the city's poor would have been able to afford regular dining out.
Of course, that still leaves the problem of the missing kitchens, but Dr Ellis may have failed to realise that a separate room lined with chipboard "units" are not how the majority of the world's poor cook. A surprising number of people cook in pots resting on three stones or a couple of bricks, and these cooking places are located on the roof, in the corner of a room, in the courtyard or even out in the street. It would be interesting to know how many such "kitchens" have been found in Pompeii.
