Perhaps not a full fledged gourmet kitchen with a dozen cooks but even the poorest of the poor could start a fire and cook their meals. If they were buying from vendors, then that's a big reason they were poor.
Only the wealthy were able to broil or barbecue.
Finding that hard to believe, too. A stick over an open fire and there's your bbq. Bury that pig in a hole and you've got yourself another type of bbq. Last I heard a hole in the ground and a stick don't cost a thing.
Wood was hard to come by. Much of the area around Rome had been deforested (the Romans deforested many parts of their favorite colony, Spain, using wood either for firewood or for making charcoal for their BBQs). But at a certain point, you run out of easily available wood, and then cooking over fire becomes something the poor can’t afford. Hence, it was always normal and cheaper to buy already cooked food or to prepare your own and take it to a communal oven for cooking. This was even true in mediaeval Europe.
The Romans were good at “reusing” heat, though; the communal bakery ovens had water tanks on top, and the water heated by the baking process was then redirected through pipes to fill the baths. They also used it for radiant heating under their floors.
In their apartments?
Fire was a big problem in Rome so most of the apartments where the poor lived did not have fireplaces. Firewood would also be a major expense.
This was the reason most food was bought pre-made. Yes it was more expensive then raw but not as expensive as doing it yourself.
Not to mention taking the chance of burning the place you lived down.
Finding that hard to believe, too. A stick over an open fire and there's your bbq. Bury that pig in a hole and you've got yourself another type of bbq. Last I heard a hole in the ground and a stick don't cost a thing.
It wouldn't have been easy to pit barbecue, since Italian soil is rocky and Italian cities tend to be heavily paved over. The houses of the rich were square compounds with a paved courtyard in the center — tufa (lava stone) for the poor, and marble, travertine and terrazzo for the rich. Even the streets and sidewalks came right up to the foundations of the houses. Trees, in the cities where the wealthy Roman senators and elites lived, were planted in little open squares in the pavement, or in huge pots. The rich would not have wanted to live out in the countryside, but rather to congregate in cities, since they had servants to do all their busywork.