Humans Learn to Use Fire: Cooking versus Cuisine
Scientists speculate that lightning started a fire by accident, but humans
figured out how to keep it going by appointing somebody keeper of the
flame day and night, perhaps the first specialized job. For the first time,
humans had a tremendous tool with which to control the environment.
It kept night terrors and animals away. It was also sacred, “the only substance which humans can kill and revive at will.”5 The god who controlled lightning was usually the most powerful god in early religions.
Most cultures have creation myths of how humans stole or were given
fire by the gods and how they were punished and suffered for this divine knowledge. Fire completely transformed food from raw to cooked,
which allowed humans to eat otherwise indigestible foods and made
food preservation possible. Control of fire gave humans control of their
food supply—a huge survival advantage.
Once humans had fire, how did cooking begin? Perhaps by accident,
although anthropologists are still arguing about this. One theory is that
an out-of-control fire burned down a hut and accidentally 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.6 In any case, now
there were more options than raw bar and tartare.
It was cooking, but was it cuisine? Historian Michael Freeman’s definition of cuisine is “a self-conscious tradition of cooking and eating . . .
with a set of attitudes about food and its place in the life of man.”7 So,
cuisine requires not just a style of cooking, but an awareness about how
the food is prepared and consumed. It must also involve a wide variety
of ingredients, more than are locally available, and cooks and diners willing to experiment, which means they are not constricted by tradition.
Since early humans were still eating to survive, and had no control over
their food supply, it was not cuisine.
We might never know exactly how people mastered fire and started
cooking their food, we only know when—between 500,000 and one million years ago. Roasting over an open fire was 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 stone tools, meat
could be cut into smaller pieces to make it cook faster. Food could be
boiled in large mollusk or turtle shells where they were available, or even
in animal skins,8 but pots were not invented until around 10,000 B.C. and
there were no sturdy clay boiling pots until about 5000 B.C.
9 Cooking
in such vessels would probably have produced bacterial contamination,
since there was no soap and no effective way to clean them. Finally, scientists believe that Homo sapiens—“wise man,” the direct ancestor of
humans—appeared between one million and 100,000 years ago.