ALONG THE WAY

How to Make a Traditional Adobe Horno — and Other Important Lessons of the Southwest

I should have known. “I’m going to make a horno,” I told my editor. “A WHAT?” she shouted, cleaning out the phone lines from Phoenix to Tucson. She spends too much time around financially challenged writers. “A horno,” I repeated, incorrectly giving the word a hard “H” edge. “You know, one of those beehive ovens made out of adobe.” “Oh,” she sighed with either relief or disappointment. And, seeing stories everywhere, told me to get back to her with the results. My ability to create anything useful with my hands is absolutely nil. But we were talking mud pies here, and I would be part of a horno-making class given by the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. Perhaps with a few hours of hands-on instruction, I, too, could make something, anything, a brick. First, I was going to have to learn how to say horno. A Spanish word, the pronunciation is “or-no.” Saying it correctly would have eliminated any concern that I had embarked on a new career making badly lit movies that require no scripts. The Spanish brought the design for the outdoor domed ovens to this continent in the 16th century. In the Southwest, some Indians and descendants of the first European settlers continue to use hornos for baking bread. Newer settlers also have adopted hornos as decorative touches in their Southwestern decor. Our band of hornophiles met on a Saturday morning on the patio of the historic Sosa-Carrillo-Fremont House Museum in the old section of Tucson. Our leader for the day was museum curator Fred McAninch. Fred has many hornos to his credit, including the small one on the patio that would serve as our model. He also supplied the horno ingredients: dirt, straw and water. I knew about the dirt; that came from any Tucson backyard. Water came from a tap. The straw gave me pause. Make an horno on my own and I was going to need a horse. We set to the endeavor with great vigor, strong men and independent women moving to the dirt and trowels. Ah, this was the spirit that built an empire. Helpful children joined us in full squat under the everrising sun. We sifted dirt through metal screens. I excelled. We cut straw into 2-inch lengths a snap. We added water piece of cake. We beat the mud into the right consistency. Well, they did.

I had taken up my post on a bench, chugging water from my bottle. Wasn’t it getting a bit warm? The mud was now ready for the wooden molds, molds we would have to make when building our own horños. Really? Hands and trowels pressed the mud into the molds. The molds were lifted and, voila, a brick. No, make that three bricks. Our class of 14 adults and two children had spent no less than 45 minutes creating exactly three bricks. Or, as my editor later remarked, many bricks short of a load. I, too, had entered that state. The warm sun, the chirping birds, all that mud and straw had reduced me to pondering the story of the three little pigs and wondering why I couldn’t remember the building material preferred by the middle pig. No matter, my other option was waking up and watching mud dry. But the class had moved on, now discussing how you make something almost round out of things almost square. Fred produced a flip chart, drew diagrams. We were learning, someone was, how to make an arch, create a dome. A dome? Don't you make a pile of sand and put the bricks up around it somehow? Don't you? Oh no. This was high school geometry all over again. The guy on one side of me was drawing intricate little pictures in his notebook, straight lines and all, with a neat little thin-point pen. Another was taking measurements of everything with a snappy little metal tape. He lunged, he parried, I panicked. I was surrounded by ringers. These people knew what they were doing. I did grasp one concept. Fred said that plastering the interior of a small horno might require putting your head inside. My head in an oven? Yeah, right after I finish the arch. Our class concluded with a field trip to the home of a local artist who had built the horno of hornos. His had a decorative pattern of broken tile and an ornate ceramic door. The door, which he made, had a shelf big enough to hold a cup of tea for warming while the bread baked. Okay, let's see if I've got this straight. In addition to dirt and water, I need access to a barnyard animal for the straw, a carpenter to build the molds, a slide rule at the very least but preferably attached to an architect, a class in ceramics and one of those little thintipped pens to make me look good. And all this for a hot cup of tea? Please. After a day like this, I'll take mine cold.