cooking, the act of using heat to prepare 

food for consumption.
Cooking is as old as civilization itself, and observers have perceived it
as both an art and a science. Its history sheds light on the very origins
of human settlement, and its variety and traditions reflect unique
social, cultural, and environmental influences. The following article
traces the evolution of cooking to the advent of national cuisines. See
also cuisine; grande cuisine; nouvelle cuisine; molecular
gastronomy; culture sections of assorted country articles.
Origins: from hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists

The precise origins of cooking are unknown, but, at some point in the
distant past, early humans conquered fire and started using it to
prepare food. Researchers have found what appear to be the remains
of campfires made 1.5 million years ago by Homo erectus, one of the
early human species. In fact, anthropologists such as Richard
Wrangham have argued that cooking played an essential role
in human evolution. Cooking foods makes them more digestible, so
the calories and some of the nutrients in them are easier to absorb.
Thus, cooking allowed early humans to tap a wider variety of food
sources and gain more nutrition from them.
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Food Around the World

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Archaeological evidence of food preparation, backed up by knowledge

of how modern-day hunter-gatherers prepare their food, suggests that
the first cooks did little to their food in the way of preparation or
technique. The flesh of animals was either roasted over a fire
or boiled in water to make it tender, fruit was gathered and peeled,
and nuts were shelled. Necessity, rather than flavour, usually dictated
how hunter-gatherers of the past prepared their food. Some foods had
to be prepared carefully to remove toxins. Native American tribes
in California, for example, developed a procedure to
make acorns edible by removing their bitter tannic acid. Farther south,
native peoples in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela learned to remove
the cyanide from cassava (also called manioc), a starchy root used to
make tapioca and a staple crop across the tropics.

Hunter-gatherers processed foods to preserve them. Because some

hunter-gatherer societies faced uncertain food supplies, particularly in
winter, they developed techniques such as smoking and drying to
make foods last longer. They also created preparations such as
pemmican (a mixture of meat, fat, and sometimes fruit) to preserve
foods. Alcohol required elaborate preparation as well, and societies
around the world perfected means to ferment fruit or grain into
alcohol.
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Agriculture was invented independently at different places and times

around the world, as people learned to domesticate local plants and
animals and began to live a settled life. That advance was a major
turning point in human history, as farming fed people more reliably
than hunting wild game and gathering wild plants, though farming
was hardly easy or without risk in its early days. It also had a major
impact on the development of cooking.
Crop failures, which were frequent, meant famine and death, and
overreliance on one or a handful of crops resulted
in malnutrition when those crops lacked the
necessary vitamins or nutrients. The archaeological record reveals that
starvation and vitamin deficiency were among the most-prevalent
health issues for early societies. Gradually, however, agricultural
societies improved their farming skills, increased their productivity,
and decreased the risk of famine. Farming became more productive
than hunting and gathering.

Yet agriculture made diets boring. Whereas hunter-gatherers relied on

a wide variety of plants and animals, which changed with the seasons,
farmers were more restricted in the crops they could plant and thus
routinely ate the same foods. That motivated people to come up with
ways to make their diets more interesting and palatable, giving rise to
a new reason for cooking: improving the taste and variety of food.
Because agriculture freed at least some of society from the task of
providing food, people began to spend time doing other things,
culinary experimentation included.
The professionalization of cooking

In most traditional societies, the task of daily food preparation fell

primarily to women—though both men and women were heavily
involved in food procurement. Civilization allowed more people to
specialize in other occupations, and that trend eventually produced a
class of professional chefs, whose main job was cooking for others.
Tomb paintings, sculptures, and archaeological remains from more
than 5,000 years ago clearly show that ancient Egypt already had
many different food-related jobs, including butchery, baking, brewing,
and winemaking. Beer brewing may have been initiated much earlier
by the production of cereal crops, possibly 10,000 years ago. All of
those professions had their own shops and facilities, often with
multiple employees working in well-organized kitchens.

Culinary professionals generally cooked quite differently from the

women who were cooking only for their families. Baking
leavened bread, for example, was largely a professional activity,
because ovens were expensive to own and operate. Much fuel was
necessary to heat the earth, clay, or brick interior of an oven, and, once
the right temperature was reached, maximum efficiency could be
achieved only if many loaves were baked. Most people bought or
bartered for their bread.

Flatbreads, by contrast, could be cooked simply in a pan or even on a

rock. Cultures all over the world invented various forms of flatbread—
from the tortilla in Mexico to the chapati in India to lefse in Norway.
Because flatbreads did not require an oven or any elaborate
preparation, they were typically made at home as part of peasant
cuisine.

The professionalization of baking, brewing, and winemaking occurred

for three reasons: capital equipment was expensive; increasingly
complicated food products required skill and expertise to prepare; and
there was a growing number of affluent customers. Chefs and culinary
artisans were employed both for their practical uses and as status
symbols, and people willing to pay more for a better meal created a
ready market for new recipes and techniques.
Cuisines driven by class, climate, and
politics
In early civilizations, wealth was nearly always synonymous with
political or religious power, so the primary employers of professional
chefs were kings, aristocrats, or priests. Much the same phenomenon
occurred in the arts. Painters produced commissioned works for the
king or the high priest, jewelers made the king’s crown and the queen’s
jewels, and architects designed palaces and temples.

That divide between professional chefs cooking for the wealthy and

peasants cooking for themselves drove the development of
many cuisines. Each side influenced the other. Professional chefs
sought to do things differently than the masses, to create a distinct
culinary experience for their elite clientele. Commoners, in turn,
sought to adopt some of the finer things in life by copying the dishes
served at royal tables. Countries with a long history of a large and
stable aristocracy or ruling class developed the most complex, highly
refined, and elaborate cuisines. In those societies cooks and their
recipes produced a new form of one-upmanship.

France is perhaps the best example. Despite its vibrant regional

peasant cuisine, France was for centuries dominated by
aristocratic food. Early on, French nobles and other members of the
ruling class used dinners as status symbols. Most of the early French
chefs, such as François Pierre La Varenne and Marie-Antonin Carême,
climbed the career ladder by moving to serve ever more-powerful and
wealthy patrons. France is especially interesting because it achieved
renown for its cooking very early. La Varenne’s book Le Cuisinier
Francois (1651) was translated into English in 1653. Titled The French
Cook, the English edition included the following preface, which took
the form of a dedication to a wealthy patron (as was customary at the
time):
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE John, Earl of Tannet

My very good Lord. Of all Cookes in the World the French are esteem’d the best, and of all
Cookes that ever France bred up, this may very well challenge the first place, as the neatest
and compleatest that ever attend the French Court and Armies. I have taught him to speak
English, to the end that he may be able to wait in your Lordships Kitchin; and furnish your
Table with severall Sauces of haut goust, & with dainty ragousts, and sweet meats, as yet
hardly known in this Land.
Besides the quaint punctuation and spelling, this preface clearly lays
out what would be the story for the next three centuries: France had a
reputation for having the world’s best chefs.

China also produced an aristocratically driven cuisine. The enormous

variety of Chinese dishes stems from the imperial courts of
various dynasties. The same occurred with the Mughal rulers of
northern India and with the kings of Thailand. In each area, the
monarchy and its cadre of bureaucrats and aristocrats supported full-
time professional chefs, who created a rich and varied cuisine.