daf bit: Menachot 63

[cellio]

The torah describes several different ways of preparing the meal-offering, all of which are valid. But you have to stick to what you said you'd do: the mishna teaches that if a man said "I take upon myself to bring a meal-offering prepared on the griddle" he can't bring one prepared in a pan or vice-versa. What's the difference between a griddle and a pan? R' Yose the Galilean says the pan has a lid and the griddle does not. R' Chanina b. Gamaliel says the pan is deep and what is prepared in it is spongy, while a griddle is flat and what is prepared on it is hard. And if a man said "I take upon myself to bring a meal-offering baked in an oven" he must not bring what is baked in a stove or on tiles or in the fireplaces of the Arabs. R' Yehudah says a stove is ok. According to notes in the Soncino edition, a stove is a small oven that can hold only one pot, and the fireplace of the Arabs is an improvised fireplace, a cavity in the ground laid with clay. (63a)

Today's daf is 62.

Comments

[hlinspjalda]

The early Arab oven is a tannur, the ancestor of the tandoor oven. I imagine the kind of stove they're talking about is similar to the Roman one, whether built-in like the ones at Pompeii or portable like the ones found at Roman army sites.

[cellio]

Thank you! I wondered how the Arab oven worked -- was it fired clay and you dug a pit of the right size, or bricks, or what? The Roman-style oven sounds plausible to me; I don't know what the portable ones are like, but the built-in ones seem to be a suitable size for what they're talking about.

[hlinspjalda]

The tannur could be freestanding or sunken. I think by the time of the medieval Islamic cookbooks some of them are metal, but fired clay lining was typical earlier.

Here's a link to a really big image of a repro portable Roman stove.

http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/imagelarge89685-.html

The one I worked with a couple years ago had several sliding crossbars on the front half so it could be a rack for flat pans or a straight-up grill for meats. (We also used my round-bottomed Roman clay cookpot in one of the round supports, not the conical metal ones seen here.) Used with hardwood coal, it's really great for camp cooking when you can't have a ground fire.

Roman ovens (as opposed to stoves) looked a lot like the ones you saw us using in Buðgarðr, of which I gather there are many more at Pennsic nowadays.

[minoanmiss]

Because I'm terrible, I especially appreciate the information on cooking technology.

[cellio]

Nothing terrible about that. I'm interested in it too. :-)