by Zoë Pollock
Annia Ciezadlo visits Beirut bakeries. How the Lebanese civil war changed bread-making in the city:
During the war, cooking gas would periodically run out. When that happened, Beirut
returned to a tradition as old as the city itself, the habit of the communal oven. The practice of sharing an oven goes back to the ancients, when Babylonian temples fed their subjects on the leftovers from the feasts of the gods. But the urban public oven came into its own in the medieval Mediterranean. In cities all around the Middle Sea, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Armenians alike brought bread and other foods to the oven at the pandocheion, a Greek word for inn that means ‘accepting all comers’. For a small fee, the public baker would cook your food, saving scarce heat and fuel for all to share – a kind of culinary carpool. Private ovens encouraged segregation; public ovens led to mixing, cross-pollination, and negotiation – in a word, relationships.
The Dish 