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 -- hence the story's power and darkness". David Seed reports the novel is "universally praised . . . for its understated method, avoidance of melodrama and unusually oblique description of nuclear attack". M. Keith Booker declares that "Shadow on the Hearth" is "a relatively daring novel" and "a useful corrective to the heroic vision of post apocalypse life". Shadow on the Hearth Shadow on the Hearth is a science fiction novel by American writer Judith Merril, originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1950. It was her first novel. A British hardcover was published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1953,