Cooking is the oldest of the arts. It is of all arts that which has most signally advanced the cause of civilization; for the need of cooking taught is the application of fire and by means of fire man became lord over nature.
One theory is that an out of control fire burned down a hut and accidently cooked some pigs. People wandered in, tried the cooked meat and liked it.
Another theory is that a forest fire first roasted meat; still others think that cooking was a more deliberate, controlled act by humans. In any case, now there were more options than raw bar and tartare.
It was cooking but how about cuisine? Cuisine can be defined a self conscious tradition of cooking and eating, with a set of attitude about food and its place in the life of man.
So cuisine requires not just a style of cooking but an awareness about how the food is prepared and consumed.
It must also a wide variety of ingredients, more than are locally available and cooks and diners willing to experiments which means they are not constricted by tradition.
In modern times, humans are the only animals that cook food, but archeological evidence indicates that this was not always the case.
In the past, other, now instinct species that were related to modern Homo sapiens, such as Neanderthals, also cooked food.
Indeed, cooking almost certainly existed 2500,000 years ago, and it may have existed 1.5 millions years ago, well before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species.
Roasting over an open fire probably the first cooking method. Pit roasting – putting food in a pit with burning embers and covering it - might have come next.
Then spit roasting, when hunters came home with the animal already on a spear and decided to cook it by hanging it over the fire and turning it.
With sharp tools, meat could be cut into smaller pieces to make it cook faster. Food could be boiled large mollusk or turtle shells where they were available, or even in animal skins, but pots were not invented until around 10,000 BC and there were no sturdy clay boiling pits until about 5000 BC.
The invention of pottery cookware that was both waterproof and heatproof, allowing food to be easily boiled and stewed. Food was eventually enclosed in ovens; the earliest ovens discovered so far have been found in Egypt and date to about 3000 BC.
The first references to frying date from about 600 BC.
History of Cooking
