Often an oven would be shared by many families - or the local baker paid a small fee to bake the family's breads and baked dishes.
Looking through a stack of old photographs found when we cleaned out my grandmother’s home, I noticed one faded sepia shot of two young girls sitting by a large outdoor, beehive oven.
"What was that about," I asked my father, knowing it would jar a memory.
"Oh, we used to send our bread and some other baked goods there to be cooked," he replied.
In the small settlement where my father grew up, indoor ovens in individual homes were a rarity. Instead, in small communities without a commercial baker , there would be a large clay oven in the middle of the town for housewives to use communally. In larger towns, the local baker would – for a small fee – bake the family’s cheoreg, souberoeg or other baked dish.
In many ways, it wasn’t a bad arrangement. The communal oven gave the community a nice meeting place, my father remembered. Usually, he added, the breads and other dishes that required baking would be done on some sort of loose weekly/hourly schedule.
