Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bobthepanda 48 days ago
one thing to note is that while they may have consumed it they probably weren't making it. Particularly for urban dwellers, kitchens were very rudimentary if you even had one.
1 comments

Pretty much every castle, house, and hovel had a firesource, and cooking was centered around it.
Ancient poor Romans did not have kitchens, both for space reasons (Ancient Rome had a million people in it in a fairly tight spot) and for fire risk. https://liisaeyerly.com/2025/10/22/poor-vs-wealthy-dining-in...

Similarly, poor people in Victorian England often ate out or ate cold meals, either because they did not have the means to cook, or because they could not afford to; pots were not really cheap, nor was cooking fuel. https://victorianweb.org/science/health/health8.html

Certain types of implements, like ovens, were not super practical or cheap for a lot of people to have dedicated to their own house. https://food52.com/story/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-pub...