Cooking during ancient times

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.

Very little is known about how these earliest nomads prepared their foods, but at some point between 1 million and 500,000 years ago, early man learned how to use fire to transform the raw into the cooked.

Cooking must be one of the earliest manifestations of the superior imagination of Homo sapiens. It exists in every know society, regardless of the general level of technical and social complexity and the entire of the resource base.

Ancient writers opinion that the practice of cooking art followed immediately after the discovery of fire, and that it was at first an imitation of the natural processes of mastication and digestion.

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.

Anthropologist hypothesize that the original form of cookery was roasting over open fire, quickly supplemented by baking in hot stones placed near the fire or in the ashes from the fire.

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.

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.

Numerous recipes, passed from generation to generation, have endured for centuries and come down to present time virtually unchanged.

Primitive barbecue entailed much more than simply tossing a joint of meat into bonfire. In the American Southwest, the ancient Anasazi Indians dug shallow kilns to roast agave cactus hearts, while Polynesia in Pacific Island brought along pigs as livestock, which they cooked wrapped in banana leaves.
Cooking during ancient times