Post by wordsworth on Apr 15, 2016 20:03:11 GMT
Hi all, have been visiting my in-laws in Basilicata, southern Italy for the last couple of weeks. One day we took the kids and their cousins out to the family orange grove for a bit of countryside fun. I took these photos of the oven, which I thought you might enjoy. My mother-in-law reckons it was probably built just before WW2, and it was the only oven for a large family for almost forty years. They'd generally fire it up once a week and bake everything for the coming week - about 30 to 40 kilos of flour per firing, apparently. Now that everyone has electric ovens in the kitchen at home it's fallen into disuse a bit, which is a shame, but it still gets used every now and then to cook up a batch of pies, pizzas, focaccias, taralli biscuits, and whatever.
There are two niches either side of the door - apparently they're for storing some of the ash from the previous firing. When your fire had burned down, you would pull the embers to the front of the oven, then spread the old ash over them - this would 'blind' and insulate the embers so you could load and unload the oven without burning yourself. You couldn't scrape the ash out of the oven entirely because it's so dry down there you would risk a field fire. Also, there's no ash slot - this is because the space under the oven doubled as the entrance passage to the small livestock enclosure behind the oven (there used to be a gate at the front underneath the oven entrance). The animals (variously either pigs or chickens) could shelter underneath and benefit from the residual heat of the oven.
I'm also told that the possession of an oven was a big class differentiator in the village with the 'haves' looking down their noses at the 'have nots', and also that the ability to build a good oven was the regarded as the litmus test of a good builder, source of much rivalries, jealousies, trade secrets, etc...
Thought you might enjoy a look.
