The Convenient Gourmet

3.1
A Brief History of Cooking
Cooking goes back as far as a million years, to the earliest
hunter-gatherers who used the most basic forms of fire to
heat their food. It served as a way to make meat more tender
and sterilize foods; early tribesmen in Colombia learned
to remove cyanide from Cassava, a type of tuber (Essers,
1995). Fermentation of grains led to alcohol, and techniques
of salting and drying led to preservation of foods.
These early forms of processing raw food or fruits from the
wild eventually evolved once agriculture became a staple in
civilizations, and people started to seek new tastes and add
variety to their palates. The ancient Egyptians were also the
first to force feed domesticated geese to create what we
now call foie gras.
The art form of cooking only really started to develop in the
halls of royalty and aristocrats, where chefs were employed
full-time to serve their masters with the finest food and
drink, be it for Napolean the Great or in the Imperial courts
of the Chinese dynasties. Countries with a long history of
a large and stable aristocracy or ruling class developed the
most complex, highly refined, and elaborate cuisines (Bilet,
2011), some of which have perserved for hundreds of years,
and from which we cook derivatives of in the present.
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