Food and dining in the Roman Empire and a pesto-like preparation, somewhat similar to pizza or focaccia. Maintaining a bread oven is labor-intensive and requires space, so apartment dwellers probably prepared their dough at home, then had it baked in a communal oven. Mills and commercial ovens, usually combined in a bakery complex, were considered so vital to the wellbeing of Rome that several religious festivals honored the deities who furthered these processes—and even the donkeys who toiled in the mills. Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was seen as complementary to Ceres, the goddess of grain, and donkeys were garlanded and given a rest on the
Shadow on the Hearth the Hearth" has ever been published, although a book club edition appeared. "Shadow on the Hearth" tells the story of "a Westchester woman and her two children after the explosion of a series of atomic bombs on New York". Merril described it as "a very political novel, ... written for political reasons". Merril began writing "Shadow on the Hearth" as a short story; "When it reached ten thousand words," she remembered, "I began to understand that it wanted to be a novel." Although she stopped working on the piece when it reached twice that length, needing to spend more time