Love Me Tandoor

The tandoor, best known in this country as something to cook Indian-style barbecued chicken in, is basically a bread oven. Like the European bread oven, it’s a structure in which you can cook--and often do cook--after the fire is out. The massive material it’s made from (fired clay in the tandoor, brick in Europe) retains that much heat once it’s fired up.

But as a bread oven, the tandoor is exotic by European standards because the bread isn’t cooked horizontally, on the floor of the oven, but vertically, by being slapped onto the interior wall of the tandoor. Needless to say, it’s always a flat bread, such as an Indian tandoori naan.

This sort of oven, which is found throughout most of the Middle East and central Asia, originated in Babylonia. The name comes from the Babylonian word tinu^ru, which is related in some not entirely clear way to nu^ru, light, and nawa^ru, to radiate. The ancient Egyptians picked it up and called it taru^r. In Hebrew and Arabic, the word became tannu^r, and via the Arabs this sort of oven has spread as far as western China.

It’s basically a big clay pot with a hole near the bottom for ventilation and feeding the fire; the walls are often lined with something to give them a rough crystalline structure so that breads will stick to them better. You can buy the pots in markets in the Middle East and install them on your kitchen wall or floor. Or you can set one up in your backyard, as we would install a barbecue.

The pots look rather like the Mexican chimineas that are sold as a stylish sort of charcoal barbecue these days. But the connection between the tannu^r and the chiminea, if any, is obscure. The Arabs did bring the clay oven to Spain, but it didn’t give its name to an oven there. Perhaps because a tannu^r can be installed in the floor, the Spanish form of the word, atanor, means a tile drain.