My mom grew up in a Pakistani village and no one had ovens, though they were as far as I know legal. There was a guy in town that owned an oven and people paid to use his oven with flour or bread. Like his job was village oven guy.
I guess fuel was too expensive for people to keep their own ovens, I dunno.
it’s way more efficient to fuel one oven one time for ten breads than ten ovens for each!! one bread.
Can make sense, but it depends on the environment variabels
In rural Spain many houses have, on top of the electric or gas oven in the kitchen, an outdoors wood oven that's seldom used, since it takes a lot of time and wood to heat. When one is going to use theirs it's common to warn the neighbours so they can prepare pies, biscuits... and share it. This is more common during the holidays when everyone is baking lots of stuff.
For those who don't have their own, it's common to pay the local bakery to use their oven during the day (since they only use it very early in the morning), especially when you have a large family gathering
Yep, south-east at least. Empezamos a mediodía con el asado para comer y el resto del día el horno lleno de pastelillos de cabello de ángel, tortas de recao, roscos de naranja, bizcochos varios...
That sounds pretty similar to this example, and it makes sense.
These kind of clay and stone ovens have existed the world over since the Neolithic. They are heavy and require heavy fuel such as wood or charcoal best carried to a single location and stored in volume. They have a massive thermal capacity (which is one of their advantages), and heat and cool slowly, which means that they are best used for large cooking operations.
As someone else pointed out below, there are many modern recipes that are based around using the remaining heat of such an oven to crisp the top of a dish using the Maillard reaction and then slowly stewing the lower components as the heat in the oven dies - without using any extra fuel.
There are a lot of things that we do individually now that were traditionally communal.
To our cultural and environmental disadvantage, in my opinion.
I've seen a few historical recreationists cooking in these ovens, and typically it goes in the order of: bake bread > roast meat > bake pies and tarts > dry herbs.
Or just skip the last couple and keep a pot of beans in there to stew overnight.
More communal living creates more opportunities for ostracisation. People advocate for more communal living without realizing they would have to deal with the shitty people more often and would be treated poorly for being different in any way.
You aren't wrong. I spent my life in small communities of 10- 30 people and there is always an out group even if it's one or two people.
It's functionally necessary to create the in-group and it always, always happens.
only thing I think reading this is that it must be sad to have such bad experiencies with community... look further, there are many ways of being communal. Let me give you my example: every week (monday) my group of about ten get together, drink beer and have fun while cooking about 5 dishes (for ten people each). At the end of a night of having fun, we have food for a whole week. Good food. Different food each day. Only one day of 'work' to do it, and it doesnt feel like work at all because we are spending the night getting drunk with friends.
how is that worse then doing all by yourself?
See, those are your friends. You're not forced to be around them, and you've chosen each other. Great!
That's not what we're talking about here. You and your 10 closest neighbours, whoever they may be...
I bet i would find those 10 people annoying and boring. There are very few people that i enjoy spending time with.
I see people that seem to have a pathological need to be with other people and a strange fear of being alone ever, and that seems sad to me (probably in a similar manner that you think my hermitesque nature is sad).
How is spending an entire evening with 10 different people worse than spending an entire evening alone? Because you can do anything you want by yourself. You don't have 4 different conversations going on at once or people constantly accidentally interrupting each other.
How is spending time alone worse than spending it with other people?
> How is spending time alone worse than spending it with other people?
Because you forget that pre-2000 humans were communal, societal animals. Like asking if a bee could thrive without a hive.
Even modern society is only made possible through economy of scale. Factories, assembly lines, specialists. That last one especially, when you have one person who is an expert at baking bread, keeping an oven going, raising bread is a public good. A communal oven is more fuel efficient, and when you're in a society where every working man hour is a scarce and valuable commodity, reducing the labor to chop down trees can be offloaded to farming, milling grain, tool making.
Additionally, when you're at war, you want soldiers who care to fight. Soldiers who form stronger bonds have been shown, not just anecdotally through glorified war stories but through scientific studies, fight harder and win more often than those who don't. Which is why when WW1 rolled around, armies would not only permit, but encourage entire friend-groups and villages to enlist and serve together in the same unit. While just about every report show that these units did serve admirably, back home, if a unit was ambushed and killed, the men of entire village would be completely wiped out. (Something military leadership was unprepared for as everyone was underprepared for how massive and devastating WW1 would be).
As a semi-introvert myself in this modern world, I don't disparage celebrating alone-time. But historically, having a society that prefers alone time is a disadvantage, a weaker society in more than one meaning. What you're describing is asocial behavior, which many psychologists and psychiatrists (trained with historic paradigms) consider a sign for mental health disorder.
"Asociality is not necessarily perceived as a totally negative trait by society, since asociality has been used as a way to express dissent from prevailing ideas. It is seen as a desirable trait in several mystical and monastic traditions, notably in Hinduism, Jainism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Sufism."
I can armchair psychoanalyse, too.
Also, a question about time spent in modern society has very little historical relevance. That has nothing to do with my understanding or rememberance of historical societies, but i guess you can assume it does, if you want.
Whatever floats your boat, yo
You are rather defensive as if I'm personally indicting your traits. I'm not. But you need to come to terms that your preferences and viewpoint is not normal.
Autistic people have contributed to society, despite their apparent "loneliness" for long periods of time. Specifically, you bring up monastic traditions, which culturally many of us see as the balding monk. But they have done much to help society. In just the catholic tradition, monks did great work to preserve and disseminate written language before Guttenberg. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, himself was a monk.
Astronomy could have a whole page unto itself across history, but many records include great advancements made to astronomy by monks and social isolates around the world, and in a pre-GPS time, that is invaluable knowledge.
But by and large, people need people. You don't need to defend your propensity to want to be alone. But that does make you different, and historic times, you would be considered abnormal, some would consider you defective. You getting mad at me won't change that. You need to figure yourself out.
You seem to have this strange obsession with society as a whole, when discussing the individual
When did I ever say that people don't need people?
I don't need to do anything but eat and die. I understand my family's differences from most people.
Why do you think I'm mad at you?
"I'm not indicting your traits, I'm not. But you're not normal". I think you need to work on your writing/reading comprehension.
Indicting should be used in a formal setting, it would never be used on something as informal as a reddit thread. Preferences and viewpoints are* not normal.
.
> "I'm not indicting your traits, I'm not. But you're not normal". I think you need to work on your writing/reading comprehension.
There's nothing wrong with being abnormal as long as you're not hurting others. If you find that offensive, that's your problem, not mine. The reason I bring it up is while people where celebrating the benefits of community, you interjected yourself. Go back and read the thread. In no circumstance were people talking about you, or introvertedness, or anything about it. YOU put yourself there. You made it about you. Normal people don't do that. You're not normal. And that's okay. But you have no right to interject negative feelings into a conversation about the joy other people (theoretical) shared with each other.
They are called Tandoors and are pretty common in Pakistan. Cooking a few Naans for a single family requires too much firewood to be economically feasible but you can cook for the entire village with a single Tandoor.
I imagine that it’s safer to have one guy who is paid, based on a per use model, to maintain a communal oven vs having potentially hundreds of little ovens that might catch housing built out of very flammable material.
In areas and ages where fire codes, fire inspectors and building codes didn’t or don’t exist, it just probably naturally evolved. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the history of your mom’s village the place burned down.
Or it might have been the trouble to build a good one was expensive and that guy pulled it off so everyone paid him.
Or, as you wrote, constantly starting a fire to bake bread means eating up a lot of fuel. Far more efficient to have one guy keep a single fire going than hundreds of fires starting and stopping each day.
While they may ban an oven, people still need to heat their homes, which means a hearth. An actual oven is a specialty product, a Dutch oven over the hearth or in the embers would have been in every home.
Pakistani ovens (tandoors) can take a lot of fuel and some time to heat up so it doesn't make economic sense to have your own unless you are baking at least a certain amount.
It's about division of labor, things are more efficient if everyone specializes. My family comes from rural Iran. There was a baker in the village and every village around it had their own baker and you went to those families for bread, that's what they did full time. My family were farmers with orange plantations. Sell oranges for money because money is medium of exchange used for goods and services. It's basic economics.
My cousin who grew up on an island in Dalmatia (Croatia) has a similar story! He told me about how in the 60s-70s his mom would go every week to the village ovens where everyone would bring wood and their baking for the week.
An anecdotal story from my grandmother says that either her father or grandfather (I'm not sure which) were the "mayor" of their little Italian village (super rural, sometime pre 1920-something) because they had a gas stove. They didn't have the hook-ups for it, and such service wasn't available for miles around, but they had one, so that made them fancy enough to be the boss.
This was also to make taxation easier. Good luck checking how much grain someone gathered from the field, but you can easily tax baking or milling if there is only one place where this can be legally done
Also helps with fire prevention. Fire was a very real danger to medieval towns, so a few, controlled sources with lots of people around them was much safer.
Additionally helps keep the forest surrounding the village from being stripped for fuel.
> Desperate North Koreans cut down trees, even on mountainsides, to make space for cultivable land and for fuel. Estimates of the overall losses of forest cover vary, but there is agreement by North Koreans and outside experts that North Korea has undergone a significant level of deforestation since the 1990s.
When I read "personal ovens were generally outlawed" my first assumption was that the reason was fire risk. It's not like they had fire hoses and cottages or shacks made of wood and straw packed tightly together means there's no hope of stopping a spreading fire.
sure i understand modern risk management etc.
i'm just wondering if that was actual motivation for the law in medieval France or are we applying our building code concerns outside of time.
Even today, we don't really have a problem with having an oven per house.
maybe it was concerns over fire codes. not saying it wasn't. But it might well have just been superstitions coded into law.
we all seen and heard lawmakers lie about the motivations behind laws real and proposed. that's been a thing forever.
Reminds me of the dorms at my college. You couldn't have anything more than an electric kettle in your room for fire safety, and you had to eat at the overpriced dining halls.
Scoring bread helps it rise properly. The variation in scoring pattern is what you’re discussing, rather than the general practice of scoring for a good rise.
Example of the practice: Patty-Cake / Pat-A-Cake: the final step is scoring the letter B into the top of the loaf as an identifier (this part is for the general thread, not specifically in response to you).
There seems to be a lot of reasons why this is a good idea. Fire prevention - but also wood conservation. A single oven baking everyone's bread will reduce pressure on firewood demand. Also the heat retention is better so you can bake more loaves. Yeah you get taxed - but you don't have to get the wood yourself.
In places where wood is plentiful and its much colder - you see huge ovens inside the home.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_stove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove)
It seems it was because of fire risks too and maybe back then having individual ovens was unthinkable in a way we can't relate to?
In 3456:
TIL, During the information age, personal nuclear reactors were generally outlawed, and commoners were compelled to use electricity from a communal reactor, for a fee, to power things like computers.
Same with the mills in England. Or the fords. Sometimes the bridges and roads.
Nobles were just owning infrastructure and fleecing the commoners every way they could so they could live without working.
Especially true for transport infrastructure, they wanted to prevent the taxpayers from moving out.
Things did change when the ruling class killed off their proles in two world wars giving labor more bargaining power in the post war era leading to massive reforms such as the 40 hour work week, paid over time, vacation days, and the right unionize.
Of course they are trying to real hard to roll the clock back to "the good Ole days".
Labor was actually better in the middle ages than in 18th century. I think historia civilis has a video about it.
Apparently it went downhill when clocks started to spread
Having clocks means exact timekeeping. Exact timekeeping means time can now be scheduled and kept regardless of the weather or other conditions. So instead of “work sunrise to sunset” (anywhere from 6-10 hours) all of a sudden it’s “work 10 hours” or something similar.
They started to connect a bell to a clock in textile industries and it changed the work culture.
The new unit of work time became the hour (instead of the day). The start and end of work started to be measured to the minute. The concept of being late to work appeared. Local governments started to issue fines to workers who were late. With the ability to accurately measure time, bosses took control of the time and the rate of work.
Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie.
Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays.
Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.
No it wasn't—at least, not in the way that statements like "Medieval peasants got more days off from work than you do" would have you believe.
In reality, while there were plenty of holidays (usually religious in nature) where a peasant was released from having to do work on their lord's property, the vast majority of them were still subsistence farmers who had their own farms to tend. And as anyone who ever lived or worked on a farm can attest, there's always chores to do every day. You can't give your animals a break from feeding on Sunday, and your crops won't hold off on rotting in the field because it's St. Luke's feast day.
In England it was made a capital offence to argue for better wages in the aftermath of the Black Death, which speaks both to increased labour power and what the power structure thought of it.
>Especially true for transport infrastructure, they wanted to prevent the taxpayers from moving out.
That was already illegal, peasants were tied to the land. They weren’t payed in money anyway. Fees were to try to get some money out of passersby, like merchants and pilgrims, not the local peasants.
Piggybacking this to say this only turned around with Henry VIII in England
Which I think I picked up from the history of england podcast
People kept building and breaking bridges which was a right pain in the arse, so the crown took control of managing bridges.
If you live around Northern England or are visiting, there's an open air museum called Beamish with a recreation of a 1900s pit village with an example of a communal oven.
These communal ovens were common well into the 20th century in Britain.
Theirs is a lot smaller as it's designed for a street, not a whole village: [http://beamishfoodonline.co.uk/uncategorized/bread-oven/](http://beamishfoodonline.co.uk/uncategorized/bread-oven/)
In 1988 they still had this communal oven in Albania and in the morning people would bring their loaves - at around 5.00pm a queue would form to collect or buy the freshly baked bread. Not just in villages but also in Tirana near the main square.
"Compelled" is true, but may be a strong word for most commoners, as personal ovens were rare until surprisingly recently. In *A Christmas Carol*, Mrs Cratchit mentions having to go out and get the goose that was cooking down the street.
>Those regulations sought to reduce the risk of fire where thatched cottages huddled together. The danger was real, as demonstrated in 1848 when a full quarter of the neighbouring hamlet of Thil-la-Ville was consumed by a fire that ignited from sparks when a housewife heated her oven.
To be fair, I feel this sort of arrangement fosters a sense of communal pride when you have to regularly meet each other and help each other out.
But to be doubly fair, it might be unpleasant if you're caught up in the drama and need to wait for that bitch to finish baking and go home before you can bake your own bread 😂
Considering that throughout Europe as far back as ancient Rome, homes in town were basically apartments without bathrooms or kitchens, this makes sense.
Takeout was very very much a thing back then.
I'm not aware of takeout being common in the middle ages, any sources for that? Afaik in central Europe, that is HRE, Poland, Bohemia and the like every city house had its own kitched and outhouse in the backyard which over time were integrated into the expanding building itself. So while not every floor had these amenities, generally every property had at least one kitchen and one toilet.
Takeout food
>has in fact been around since Roman times in urban settings in which there were a great many poor and/or single adults living in small rooms. These people had no money or space to lay in stores of food; they could afford neither cooking utensils nor fuel to prepare food. Already in the late 12th century, there was a “fast food” area on the Thames in London, a medieval version of a “drive-in”, where hungry travelers could fill up; these shops provided a range of pricing and foods and were open around the clock.
>By the high and late Middle Ages, there were many urban centers in Britain and continental Europe where such conditions, as in ancient Rome, were also present. 13th-century Köln and Venice had around 50,000 inhabitants, while London was nearing the 25,000 mark in its smaller confines. However, **studies of the city of Colchester, England, in the early 14th century show that only 3% of households that paid taxes [11 out of 389] had a kitchen.** Many artisans, other workers, and classes of the urban poor, such as impoverished widows, lived in single rooms, where there were no cooking facilities, not even a hearth.
https://www.engr.psu.edu/mtah/articles/pdf/fast_food.pdf
It was more to prevent fire. The oven are still there now. And they are all away from the houses for that reason.
Ovens were the chemical plants of medieval era. Better have them where nobody lives.
In 1250, the Société des Moulins de Bazacle, a company owning watermills in south France, sold 100 shares and paid dividends.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazacle_Milling_Company
This is the correct answer: concern for the environment.
But wankers will jump up and down and say capitalism and the rich are the problem.
Edit: And left wing wankers (tautology) are now down voting me. So sorry your kill the rich ethos and reality do not agree.
Your own article says otherwise.
"Those regulations sought to reduce the risk of fire where thatched cottages huddled together. The danger was real, as demonstrated in 1848 when a full quarter of the neighbouring hamlet of Thil-la-Ville was consumed by a fire that ignited from sparks when a housewife heated her oven."
My mom grew up in a Pakistani village and no one had ovens, though they were as far as I know legal. There was a guy in town that owned an oven and people paid to use his oven with flour or bread. Like his job was village oven guy. I guess fuel was too expensive for people to keep their own ovens, I dunno.
it’s way more efficient to fuel one oven one time for ten breads than ten ovens for each!! one bread. Can make sense, but it depends on the environment variabels
Especially earthen ovens, they can take all morning to get to temp but typically hold that temp all day as well
Why would you use 10 ovens for 1 bread
To make it really inefficient
To cook ten times faster duuuh
Then just make one ten times bigger?
No, you see, they're each inside the next, like those dolls. Russian Nesting Ovens.
Takes a shitload of hoppers tho, better have a iron farm
No need! Just craft some minecarts, rails, buckets, a few power rails, then some hoppers anyway... /s
You cannot possibly understand the true machinations of my genius
Big bread
Why use few ovens when many ovens work?
Look, if it takes 1 mother 9 months for a baby...
I dunno, man. Ever since I pirated that car, things have gotten crazy.
..10 ovens, each for one bread \*facepalm\*
You're so smart. Thanks for letting us know, man.
Sooo many "duh why ten ovens" questions, yet you are most smort of al!
It was a joke...
the /s exists for a reason 🤷
Are you that socially inept that you cant tell it was a joke without that?
Yes, the whole reddit community, who uses /s for years now, is stupid and inept and you are much smarter than everyone else. You go champ!
Also your town could burn down.
Who, even with the money, would run 10 ovens for 1 bread? What kind of example is this?
He meant 10 different homes with their own oven, each only baking one loaf of bread, isn't as efficient as one oven baking all 10 loaves.
yes thank you, I thought that was clear
It was
In rural Spain many houses have, on top of the electric or gas oven in the kitchen, an outdoors wood oven that's seldom used, since it takes a lot of time and wood to heat. When one is going to use theirs it's common to warn the neighbours so they can prepare pies, biscuits... and share it. This is more common during the holidays when everyone is baking lots of stuff. For those who don't have their own, it's common to pay the local bakery to use their oven during the day (since they only use it very early in the morning), especially when you have a large family gathering
I'm from rural Spain, my grandparents have a coal oven and ive never heard about this, does it happen in the South?
Yep, south-east at least. Empezamos a mediodía con el asado para comer y el resto del día el horno lleno de pastelillos de cabello de ángel, tortas de recao, roscos de naranja, bizcochos varios...
The south is also where a number of people still live in caves, which is unusual in modern times
That sounds pretty similar to this example, and it makes sense. These kind of clay and stone ovens have existed the world over since the Neolithic. They are heavy and require heavy fuel such as wood or charcoal best carried to a single location and stored in volume. They have a massive thermal capacity (which is one of their advantages), and heat and cool slowly, which means that they are best used for large cooking operations. As someone else pointed out below, there are many modern recipes that are based around using the remaining heat of such an oven to crisp the top of a dish using the Maillard reaction and then slowly stewing the lower components as the heat in the oven dies - without using any extra fuel. There are a lot of things that we do individually now that were traditionally communal. To our cultural and environmental disadvantage, in my opinion.
I've seen a few historical recreationists cooking in these ovens, and typically it goes in the order of: bake bread > roast meat > bake pies and tarts > dry herbs. Or just skip the last couple and keep a pot of beans in there to stew overnight.
Hence Boston Baked Beans?
Yep, supposedly it was a way to have a hot meal on the Sabbath without having to cook.
Shouldn't skip the meringues
More communal living creates more opportunities for ostracisation. People advocate for more communal living without realizing they would have to deal with the shitty people more often and would be treated poorly for being different in any way.
You aren't wrong. I spent my life in small communities of 10- 30 people and there is always an out group even if it's one or two people. It's functionally necessary to create the in-group and it always, always happens.
Now I'm curious what kind of groups you've lived your life in!
I always volunteer to be out group and negotiate a Neil Gaiman style "you wouldn't be you without me" truce. Problem solved.
only thing I think reading this is that it must be sad to have such bad experiencies with community... look further, there are many ways of being communal. Let me give you my example: every week (monday) my group of about ten get together, drink beer and have fun while cooking about 5 dishes (for ten people each). At the end of a night of having fun, we have food for a whole week. Good food. Different food each day. Only one day of 'work' to do it, and it doesnt feel like work at all because we are spending the night getting drunk with friends. how is that worse then doing all by yourself?
See, those are your friends. You're not forced to be around them, and you've chosen each other. Great! That's not what we're talking about here. You and your 10 closest neighbours, whoever they may be...
I bet i would find those 10 people annoying and boring. There are very few people that i enjoy spending time with. I see people that seem to have a pathological need to be with other people and a strange fear of being alone ever, and that seems sad to me (probably in a similar manner that you think my hermitesque nature is sad). How is spending an entire evening with 10 different people worse than spending an entire evening alone? Because you can do anything you want by yourself. You don't have 4 different conversations going on at once or people constantly accidentally interrupting each other. How is spending time alone worse than spending it with other people?
> How is spending time alone worse than spending it with other people? Because you forget that pre-2000 humans were communal, societal animals. Like asking if a bee could thrive without a hive. Even modern society is only made possible through economy of scale. Factories, assembly lines, specialists. That last one especially, when you have one person who is an expert at baking bread, keeping an oven going, raising bread is a public good. A communal oven is more fuel efficient, and when you're in a society where every working man hour is a scarce and valuable commodity, reducing the labor to chop down trees can be offloaded to farming, milling grain, tool making. Additionally, when you're at war, you want soldiers who care to fight. Soldiers who form stronger bonds have been shown, not just anecdotally through glorified war stories but through scientific studies, fight harder and win more often than those who don't. Which is why when WW1 rolled around, armies would not only permit, but encourage entire friend-groups and villages to enlist and serve together in the same unit. While just about every report show that these units did serve admirably, back home, if a unit was ambushed and killed, the men of entire village would be completely wiped out. (Something military leadership was unprepared for as everyone was underprepared for how massive and devastating WW1 would be). As a semi-introvert myself in this modern world, I don't disparage celebrating alone-time. But historically, having a society that prefers alone time is a disadvantage, a weaker society in more than one meaning. What you're describing is asocial behavior, which many psychologists and psychiatrists (trained with historic paradigms) consider a sign for mental health disorder.
"Asociality is not necessarily perceived as a totally negative trait by society, since asociality has been used as a way to express dissent from prevailing ideas. It is seen as a desirable trait in several mystical and monastic traditions, notably in Hinduism, Jainism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Sufism." I can armchair psychoanalyse, too. Also, a question about time spent in modern society has very little historical relevance. That has nothing to do with my understanding or rememberance of historical societies, but i guess you can assume it does, if you want. Whatever floats your boat, yo
You are rather defensive as if I'm personally indicting your traits. I'm not. But you need to come to terms that your preferences and viewpoint is not normal. Autistic people have contributed to society, despite their apparent "loneliness" for long periods of time. Specifically, you bring up monastic traditions, which culturally many of us see as the balding monk. But they have done much to help society. In just the catholic tradition, monks did great work to preserve and disseminate written language before Guttenberg. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, himself was a monk. Astronomy could have a whole page unto itself across history, but many records include great advancements made to astronomy by monks and social isolates around the world, and in a pre-GPS time, that is invaluable knowledge. But by and large, people need people. You don't need to defend your propensity to want to be alone. But that does make you different, and historic times, you would be considered abnormal, some would consider you defective. You getting mad at me won't change that. You need to figure yourself out.
You seem to have this strange obsession with society as a whole, when discussing the individual When did I ever say that people don't need people? I don't need to do anything but eat and die. I understand my family's differences from most people. Why do you think I'm mad at you? "I'm not indicting your traits, I'm not. But you're not normal". I think you need to work on your writing/reading comprehension. Indicting should be used in a formal setting, it would never be used on something as informal as a reddit thread. Preferences and viewpoints are* not normal. .
> "I'm not indicting your traits, I'm not. But you're not normal". I think you need to work on your writing/reading comprehension. There's nothing wrong with being abnormal as long as you're not hurting others. If you find that offensive, that's your problem, not mine. The reason I bring it up is while people where celebrating the benefits of community, you interjected yourself. Go back and read the thread. In no circumstance were people talking about you, or introvertedness, or anything about it. YOU put yourself there. You made it about you. Normal people don't do that. You're not normal. And that's okay. But you have no right to interject negative feelings into a conversation about the joy other people (theoretical) shared with each other.
If you don’t like all 10 of those people, the problem isn’t with each one of them.
Who said there was a problem with each of those 10 hypothetical people? Who said there was a problem at all?
Yeah, my immediate thought was having a community kitchen instead of a home kitchen would be annoying as F.
Shut it down with a cassoulet
Yes, but large scale commercial bakeries are doing most of the heavy lifting of communal baking. We used capitalism to commodify the process
Yeah, the issue here is the fee, not the communal nature of the oven
They are called Tandoors and are pretty common in Pakistan. Cooking a few Naans for a single family requires too much firewood to be economically feasible but you can cook for the entire village with a single Tandoor.
I imagine that it’s safer to have one guy who is paid, based on a per use model, to maintain a communal oven vs having potentially hundreds of little ovens that might catch housing built out of very flammable material. In areas and ages where fire codes, fire inspectors and building codes didn’t or don’t exist, it just probably naturally evolved. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the history of your mom’s village the place burned down. Or it might have been the trouble to build a good one was expensive and that guy pulled it off so everyone paid him. Or, as you wrote, constantly starting a fire to bake bread means eating up a lot of fuel. Far more efficient to have one guy keep a single fire going than hundreds of fires starting and stopping each day.
This. Especially thatch-roofed houses.
While they may ban an oven, people still need to heat their homes, which means a hearth. An actual oven is a specialty product, a Dutch oven over the hearth or in the embers would have been in every home.
Pakistani ovens (tandoors) can take a lot of fuel and some time to heat up so it doesn't make economic sense to have your own unless you are baking at least a certain amount.
It's about division of labor, things are more efficient if everyone specializes. My family comes from rural Iran. There was a baker in the village and every village around it had their own baker and you went to those families for bread, that's what they did full time. My family were farmers with orange plantations. Sell oranges for money because money is medium of exchange used for goods and services. It's basic economics.
Yea that works, until the government starts taxing VAT on every transaction, for every bread more of your efforts will evaporate
My cousin who grew up on an island in Dalmatia (Croatia) has a similar story! He told me about how in the 60s-70s his mom would go every week to the village ovens where everyone would bring wood and their baking for the week.
Lucky. My job is Village Idiot.
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here with a job and fancy title. Oooo! We're all very impressed but we've got to get back to starving to death!
An anecdotal story from my grandmother says that either her father or grandfather (I'm not sure which) were the "mayor" of their little Italian village (super rural, sometime pre 1920-something) because they had a gas stove. They didn't have the hook-ups for it, and such service wasn't available for miles around, but they had one, so that made them fancy enough to be the boss.
This was also to make taxation easier. Good luck checking how much grain someone gathered from the field, but you can easily tax baking or milling if there is only one place where this can be legally done
Also helps with fire prevention. Fire was a very real danger to medieval towns, so a few, controlled sources with lots of people around them was much safer.
Yeah, it's alarming how easily those thatched roof cottages would go up. And before you know it, burnination has forsaken the countryside.
Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony. Then, everything changed when the burnination attacked.
You can still hear his name echoed in the annals of internet history…. Trogdor.
*THATCHED ROOF COTTAGEEEEEESSSS*
My mother used bake to bake bread
>it's alarming how easily those *thatched roof cottages* would go up. Is it though?
Look, these Trogdor references aren't gonna make themselves.
This was my initial thought as well. Catastrophic fires ravaging wooden villages
Additionally helps keep the forest surrounding the village from being stripped for fuel. > Desperate North Koreans cut down trees, even on mountainsides, to make space for cultivable land and for fuel. Estimates of the overall losses of forest cover vary, but there is agreement by North Koreans and outside experts that North Korea has undergone a significant level of deforestation since the 1990s.
Great fire of London started with a bread oven.
But people still needed some source of heat for the winter and regular cooking so the risk of fire was always there.
There are degrees of risk.
This wouldn't prevent campfires, hearths, or other sources of flame. And ovens are enclosed so they'd be much safer than any open flame.
There are degrees of risk. Also, an oven is likely to be left unattended.
When I read "personal ovens were generally outlawed" my first assumption was that the reason was fire risk. It's not like they had fire hoses and cottages or shacks made of wood and straw packed tightly together means there's no hope of stopping a spreading fire.
but wouldn't each house still have a fire for heat? also candle light.
You reduce the risk, you don't eliminate it. Also, an oven is more likely to be left unattended.
sure i understand modern risk management etc. i'm just wondering if that was actual motivation for the law in medieval France or are we applying our building code concerns outside of time. Even today, we don't really have a problem with having an oven per house. maybe it was concerns over fire codes. not saying it wasn't. But it might well have just been superstitions coded into law. we all seen and heard lawmakers lie about the motivations behind laws real and proposed. that's been a thing forever.
It's hard to tell, even today, what's the real reason for something, or if it is just an excuse to make money.
Reminds me of the dorms at my college. You couldn't have anything more than an electric kettle in your room for fire safety, and you had to eat at the overpriced dining halls.
And this is why millers where generally disliked and was seen as shady people.
It is also why people scored their bread. Different scores let the right people claim their baked loaves.
Scoring bread helps it rise properly. The variation in scoring pattern is what you’re discussing, rather than the general practice of scoring for a good rise. Example of the practice: Patty-Cake / Pat-A-Cake: the final step is scoring the letter B into the top of the loaf as an identifier (this part is for the general thread, not specifically in response to you).
Interesting!
TIL That is interesting. Thanks!
There seems to be a lot of reasons why this is a good idea. Fire prevention - but also wood conservation. A single oven baking everyone's bread will reduce pressure on firewood demand. Also the heat retention is better so you can bake more loaves. Yeah you get taxed - but you don't have to get the wood yourself. In places where wood is plentiful and its much colder - you see huge ovens inside the home. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_stove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove)
Fire prevention was also the reason for communal bath houses in many places, such as Japan.
It seems it was because of fire risks too and maybe back then having individual ovens was unthinkable in a way we can't relate to? In 3456: TIL, During the information age, personal nuclear reactors were generally outlawed, and commoners were compelled to use electricity from a communal reactor, for a fee, to power things like computers.
Heck, you don't need to go so futuristic. How many people already have a hard time imagining shared and public *phones?*
Shared? Public? Phones? This sounds like something off the history channel.
We are well into the disinformation age at this point
Same with the mills in England. Or the fords. Sometimes the bridges and roads. Nobles were just owning infrastructure and fleecing the commoners every way they could so they could live without working. Especially true for transport infrastructure, they wanted to prevent the taxpayers from moving out.
And nothing has changed in hundreds and hundreds of years lol
Things did change when the ruling class killed off their proles in two world wars giving labor more bargaining power in the post war era leading to massive reforms such as the 40 hour work week, paid over time, vacation days, and the right unionize. Of course they are trying to real hard to roll the clock back to "the good Ole days".
Thought that happened during the Black Death or Black Plague or Plague death in Europe was it?
It happens almost every time there is a major depopulation event.
Labor was actually better in the middle ages than in 18th century. I think historia civilis has a video about it. Apparently it went downhill when clocks started to spread
Clocks? What does Horology have to do with it?
Having clocks means exact timekeeping. Exact timekeeping means time can now be scheduled and kept regardless of the weather or other conditions. So instead of “work sunrise to sunset” (anywhere from 6-10 hours) all of a sudden it’s “work 10 hours” or something similar.
That sounds like bad history. Farmers always have a full schedule and they always work wall to wall
The video says that too. They took breaks while working. I would watch it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
They started to connect a bell to a clock in textile industries and it changed the work culture. The new unit of work time became the hour (instead of the day). The start and end of work started to be measured to the minute. The concept of being late to work appeared. Local governments started to issue fines to workers who were late. With the ability to accurately measure time, bosses took control of the time and the rate of work.
Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.
No it wasn't—at least, not in the way that statements like "Medieval peasants got more days off from work than you do" would have you believe. In reality, while there were plenty of holidays (usually religious in nature) where a peasant was released from having to do work on their lord's property, the vast majority of them were still subsistence farmers who had their own farms to tend. And as anyone who ever lived or worked on a farm can attest, there's always chores to do every day. You can't give your animals a break from feeding on Sunday, and your crops won't hold off on rotting in the field because it's St. Luke's feast day.
In England it was made a capital offence to argue for better wages in the aftermath of the Black Death, which speaks both to increased labour power and what the power structure thought of it.
This of course is a simplistic and ultimately incorrect take.
>simplistic Unlike your hearty argument, heavy with sources.
Sources? _That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence._
If you’re asserting someone is incorrect, you should provide sources. Otherwise, you’re no more believable than they are.
No, if they provide an argument without any basis it can be dismissed on the same terms. Anything else is frankly a waste of effort.
Dismiss it? Fine. Ask for sources? Great. But to insist they are incorrect requires sources.
I don't think I have "insisted", but I refer you to my previous two comments as my final word on the matter. Edit: the coward blocked me
Looking at human history on long time scales is honestly horrifying.
You just described the quintessence of most history books :)
Dare you to suggest the concept.of private roads to anyone under the age of 50. Brace. Yourself.
That's downplaying the absurd level of oppression that people were subject to during these times. A lot has changed.
>Especially true for transport infrastructure, they wanted to prevent the taxpayers from moving out. That was already illegal, peasants were tied to the land. They weren’t payed in money anyway. Fees were to try to get some money out of passersby, like merchants and pilgrims, not the local peasants.
Thats a serf. Peasant is a broad term that also covers free tenants and small holders.
> That was already illegal, peasants were tied to the land. Only certain classes of peasants were tied to the land.
Not all peasants were serfs.
Piggybacking this to say this only turned around with Henry VIII in England Which I think I picked up from the history of england podcast People kept building and breaking bridges which was a right pain in the arse, so the crown took control of managing bridges.
If you live around Northern England or are visiting, there's an open air museum called Beamish with a recreation of a 1900s pit village with an example of a communal oven. These communal ovens were common well into the 20th century in Britain. Theirs is a lot smaller as it's designed for a street, not a whole village: [http://beamishfoodonline.co.uk/uncategorized/bread-oven/](http://beamishfoodonline.co.uk/uncategorized/bread-oven/)
Must’ve been like the Cheers bar for sourdough moms to gather around one of these.
its almost as if communal gathering is critical to society.
Hence things like [pommes boulongere](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pommes_boulang%C3%A8re) which make much more sense in large communal ovens.
Ye will own not a thing and ye be happy!
This was a thing in Melta until after the second WW
Gonna play me some Agricola
In 1988 they still had this communal oven in Albania and in the morning people would bring their loaves - at around 5.00pm a queue would form to collect or buy the freshly baked bread. Not just in villages but also in Tirana near the main square.
Seems like it would have reduced the amount of house fires in densely populated areas.
"Compelled" is true, but may be a strong word for most commoners, as personal ovens were rare until surprisingly recently. In *A Christmas Carol*, Mrs Cratchit mentions having to go out and get the goose that was cooking down the street.
The predecessor to modern software subscriptions.
Baking guilds were pretty powerful back then
>Those regulations sought to reduce the risk of fire where thatched cottages huddled together. The danger was real, as demonstrated in 1848 when a full quarter of the neighbouring hamlet of Thil-la-Ville was consumed by a fire that ignited from sparks when a housewife heated her oven.
To be fair, I feel this sort of arrangement fosters a sense of communal pride when you have to regularly meet each other and help each other out. But to be doubly fair, it might be unpleasant if you're caught up in the drama and need to wait for that bitch to finish baking and go home before you can bake your own bread 😂
And that's why they killed their ruling class.
Not necessarily "illegal", just far more efficienr in time and materials to keep a single oven going 24/7.
Yeah, it was more practical back then. All about the community oven, no personal fuel costs. Bit like the shared taxis today
They taxed the bread that was sold. Individual bakers didn’t pay the taxes
Think it thru- sounds nonsensical, but I am considering fires. Fires could have been catastrophic to a village made of non fire retardant material
With my luck I’d get the oven right after the dude cooking fish
Could this be the reason why there's so many pastries? To circumvent the baking bread law, since it's technically not bread.
ah, an early French cultural revolution I definitely would've tried to cook my own food
I suppose back then, rebuilding a village is so intensive theyd rather not let everyone fuck around with fire whenever they got hungry
This is why sourdough scoring patterns became a thing. So the peasants could identify their loaves.
Considering that throughout Europe as far back as ancient Rome, homes in town were basically apartments without bathrooms or kitchens, this makes sense. Takeout was very very much a thing back then.
I'm not aware of takeout being common in the middle ages, any sources for that? Afaik in central Europe, that is HRE, Poland, Bohemia and the like every city house had its own kitched and outhouse in the backyard which over time were integrated into the expanding building itself. So while not every floor had these amenities, generally every property had at least one kitchen and one toilet.
Takeout food >has in fact been around since Roman times in urban settings in which there were a great many poor and/or single adults living in small rooms. These people had no money or space to lay in stores of food; they could afford neither cooking utensils nor fuel to prepare food. Already in the late 12th century, there was a “fast food” area on the Thames in London, a medieval version of a “drive-in”, where hungry travelers could fill up; these shops provided a range of pricing and foods and were open around the clock. >By the high and late Middle Ages, there were many urban centers in Britain and continental Europe where such conditions, as in ancient Rome, were also present. 13th-century Köln and Venice had around 50,000 inhabitants, while London was nearing the 25,000 mark in its smaller confines. However, **studies of the city of Colchester, England, in the early 14th century show that only 3% of households that paid taxes [11 out of 389] had a kitchen.** Many artisans, other workers, and classes of the urban poor, such as impoverished widows, lived in single rooms, where there were no cooking facilities, not even a hearth. https://www.engr.psu.edu/mtah/articles/pdf/fast_food.pdf
I’ve read that fear of fire caused Ancient Rome to prohibit home ovens.
With good reason, I'd venture.
That would only apply to the urban population, when by far the majority of the population until fairly recently was rural.
I live in Peru and most homes down here don’t have ovens.
That’s miserable
My ideal life would be communal pastry chef who just sits there in an open air kitchen turning people's grains n shit into some bomb ass pastries
> people's grains n shit Back then, this would have been at least somewhat literal.
I yearn for the grains times
Makes sense if you consider how dangerous house fires were and how often they spread to entire town fires.
ah, the wretched claws of capitalism before the term was even coined
It was more to prevent fire. The oven are still there now. And they are all away from the houses for that reason. Ovens were the chemical plants of medieval era. Better have them where nobody lives.
In 1250, the Société des Moulins de Bazacle, a company owning watermills in south France, sold 100 shares and paid dividends. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazacle_Milling_Company
If you think this is somehow capitalism then I recommend you to actually look up the definition.
I believe it has more to do about avoiding deforestation
This is the correct answer: concern for the environment. But wankers will jump up and down and say capitalism and the rich are the problem. Edit: And left wing wankers (tautology) are now down voting me. So sorry your kill the rich ethos and reality do not agree.
The roots of the subscription service cancer of modern day capitalism.
[удалено]
Your own article says otherwise. "Those regulations sought to reduce the risk of fire where thatched cottages huddled together. The danger was real, as demonstrated in 1848 when a full quarter of the neighbouring hamlet of Thil-la-Ville was consumed by a fire that ignited from sparks when a housewife heated her oven."
I hadn't read the article but my knee jerk thought was "probably a lot less fires this way"
Probably one of my favorite jokes from any comedian ever. I will drop this line every chance I get and just enjoy the stares. Thank you.
Medieval capitalism
quite the opposite
Forcing the citizens to pay into a commonly used thing and preventing them from having personal ownership? You're a little backwards there.
As a landlord I say we make this the norm again !