The origins of cooking are obscure. Primitive humans may first have savored roast meat by chance, when the flesh of a beast killed in a forest fire was found to be more palatable and easier to chew and digest than the customary raw meat. They probably did not deliberately cook food, though, until long after they had learned to use fire for light and warmth.

It has been speculated that Peking man roasted meats, but no clear evidence supports the theory. From whenever it began, however, roasting spitted meats over fires remained virtually the sole culinary technique until the Paleolithic Period, when the Aurignacian people of southern France apparently began to steam their food over hot embers by wrapping it in wet leaves.

Aside from such crude procedures as toasting wild grains on flat rocks and using shells, skulls, or hollowed stones to heat liquids, probably no further culinary advances were made until the introduction of pottery during the Neolithic Period.

The earliest compound dish was a crude paste (the prototype of the pulmentum of the Roman legions and the polenta of later Italians) made by mixing water with the cracked kernels of wild grasses. This paste, toasted to crustiness when dropped on a hot stone, made the first bread.

Advances in Cooking

Culinary techniques improved with the introduction of earthenware (and, more or less concomitantly, the development of settled communities), the domestication of livestock, and the cultivation of edible plants. A more dependable supply of foodstuffs, including milk and its derivatives, was now assured. The roasting spit was augmented by a variety of fired-clay vessels, and the cooking techniques of boiling, stewing, braising, and perhaps even incipient forms of pickling, frying, and oven baking were added. Early cooks probably had already learned to preserve meats and fish by smoking, salting, air-drying, or chilling. New utensils made it possible to prepare these foods in new ways, and such dishes as bacalao a la vizcaina ("dried cod") and finnan haddie (smoked haddock) are still eaten.