What’s Cookin’?
Shabbat 38
What did our ancestors’ kitchens
look like? What are all these terms thrown around in Shabbat and in Menachot:
tanur תנור, kirah כירה, kupach קופח, furni פורני? Are they at all parallel to the baking and cooling appliances
we use today? To answer that question I looked at three sources: Zeev and
Shmuel Safrai’s Mishnat Eretz Yisrael, Shmuel Avitzur’s encyclopedia of
traditional tools אדם
ועמלו , and Dr. Rafi Frankel’s
comprehensive article on baking in Talmudic time (Catedra 2011, link at bottom
of the post).
Safrai tells us that unless you
were very wealthy, no one in ancient times had a kitchen as we think of it. Not
only was most of the preparing, baking and cooking done outside in the communal
courtyard (everyone knows what is or isn’t in your pots!) but there rarely were
surfaces to work on. The women would squat or sit on the floor and the baking
and cooking “appliances” were on the floor too.
Safrai gives a short description
of a tanur, kirah and kupach. A kirah is basically two standing stones, placed
about 20-30 centimeters apart, with fire in between. On top was a slab with
holes in it for the pots. Often it was a box with an opening in the front for tending
the fire and openings on top for the pots. A classic one was discovered in
Masada:
Masada by Yigael
Yadin
A tanur was made of clay, often
with a cone like shape, wider at the top than the bottom. The fire was at the
bottom and sometimes there was a special compartment for baking at the top,
sometimes not. There were tall and short ones. The important thing about the
tanur was that it got much hotter than a kirah and could retain heat for much
longer.
A kupach was a smaller version of
a kirah, used for only one pot, although it was also sometimes used for baking
as well. Unlike the tanur and the kirah which were usually fixed in the
courtyard, the kupach was portable and could also be used for heating.
Frankel goes into much greater
details discussing the types of ovens used in the ancient world. He points out
that a tanur, both its basic shape and function, and its name, have existed over
millennia virtually unchanged. We find them in archaeological excavations going
back three thousand years and more, in pictures from ancient Egypt, and in the
traditional ovens still used in some places today. Even the Indian tandoor
comes from the same word and we find the word tanur in ancient Sumerian and
Akkadian texts.
In the most basic tanur you would
light a fire on the bottom, let the fire burn down so that there was heat
inside and then stick dough to the walls for it to bake. The fire was tended
from the hole in the bottom, the dough was put in from the top. Arabs in Eretz
Yisrael as well as olim from many Arab countries brought these traditional
methods with them. There are still a few places in Jerusalem where you can see
bakeries that make an eshtanur (esh is bread in Arabic, tanur is the oven) in
the old way, by putting the dough on the walls of the oven.
Wikimedia commons
Frankel goes through various
other types of ovens like a תנור
רעפים mentioned in Menachot which is similar to
a saj’, a metal plate placed on top of the fire and the dough baked on that or יוריות
ערביות similar
to a tabun: a hole in the ground with the dough inside and the fire placed on
top.
Another type of oven used more in
Roman areas was the פורני, the furnace. This was siimilar to a tanur
but instead of baking the dough on the walls, it was baked on the bottom of the
oven where the fire is:
blog.archaeology.institute
Avitzur adds that while a tanur
was meant for baking, because it retains its heat it served an important
function for Jews: keeping food hot on Shabbat, exactly the topic of our perek.
He also adds that fuel was usually either wood – branches, leaves, twigs on the
ground collected by women, not chopped trees like in the Old West – thorns, straw
or cakes of dung.
So if your biggest problem in
cooking for Pesach is finding enough eggs, be happy that you are not scavenging
for twigs and cooking on the floor in your backyard.
The article by Dr. Frankel is
excellent and includes many more pictures, you can see it here: https://www.ybz.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Rafi_Frankel_LR.pdf?fbclid=IwAR26uGmt4gNqEgPygBZ99g494adGxEbQFHqrb0fuddIr038GnpTfnUk2Q-Q
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